How to Spot Putin's Body Doubles, According to Ukraine's Secret Service

Vladimir Putin has body doubles who stand in for the 70-year-old Russian president at certain events, according to a Ukrainian intelligence official.

Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine's military intelligence agency, GUR, made the remarks in a wide-ranging interview Thursday with online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda.

Amid rumors that the president's health is deteriorating, Ukrainian officials have repeatedly said that Putin has been using body doubles. The Kremlin has rejected the allegations, which have not been substantiated.

"Putin uses doubles," said Yusov. "This is a fact that is based both on operative intelligence and on the assessments of physiognomists and many other specialists.

He cited an unannounced visit Putin made to Ukraine's occupied regions in March—his first since he launched a full-scale invasion of the neighboring country in February 2022—and the southern Kherson region in April.

"His visits to the occupied south are a total fake, one organized rather poorly and hastily. There was a considerable difference both in 'Putin's' behavior and his looks," Yusov said.

Yusov continued: "He would never sit in that car and would never dress like that. He would never talk to alleged local residents, as we know that access to the real Putin in the Kremlin is restricted even for his own entourage—a meters-long table that becomes longer and longer, mandatory quarantines people undergo before meeting him."

Keir Giles, a Russia expert and a senior consulting fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank, told Newsweek in March that Putin may have used a body double in a visit to the occupied Ukrainian port city of Mariupol because Russia needed "to sell its people a story of success in the war."

"That includes letting them cling on to the idea that Russia is a force for good in the cities it has destroyed," Giles said. "That's why a visit by Putin or one of his doubles to Mariupol had to take [place] in the same new block of flats that Russian state television has featured multiple times, rather than the scenes of devastation surrounding them."

In August 2022, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Major General Kyrylo Budanov suggested that Putin's ears looked different in several of his public appearances. Budanov said on 1+1, a Ukrainian TV channel, that Putin's habits, appearance and even height had changed.

"The picture, let's say, of the ears, is different. And it's like a fingerprint, each person's ear picture is unique. It cannot be repeated," Budanov said, without offering concrete evidence to back up his allegations.

TSN, a daily news program on 1+1, reported in August that Budanov said he believes that Putin is seriously ill and that this is no big secret. He suggested that the Russian president is using body doubles to avoid making public appearances.

"They [Putin's body doubles] have different habits, different mannerisms, different gaits, sometimes even different heights if you look closely," Budanov said.

The Kremlin has said such allegations are fabrications.

"You have probably heard that [Putin] has very many doubles who work instead of him while he sits in a bunker," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in April. "Yet another lie."

He continued: "You see yourselves what our president is like. He always was, and is now, mega-active. Those who work next to him can hardly keep up with him. His energy can only be envied. His health can, God willing, only be wished for. Of course, he doesn't sit in any bunkers. This is also a lie."

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