Video of Putin 'Clinging to the Chair' During Event Viewed 800k Times 

Vladimir Putin was not just trying to get to grips with presidential election campaign issues when he spoke to people in Russia's most eastern region in video that has gone viral.

The Ukrainian internal affairs adviser, Anton Gerashchenko, tweeted a video of the Russian president addressing residents in Chukotka noting that he did not just pull up a chair but appeared to be holding on to it for dear life.

"Clinging to the chair, Putin described his career and special training in 'illegal intelligence;'" Gerashchenko wrote next to the video which as of Thursday morning had been viewed more than 835,000 times.

On Wednesday, Putin spoke with residents in Anadyr, the administrative center of the autonomous district which shares a maritime border on the Bering Strait with Alaska.

Gerashchenko noted the body language as he spoke—that the Russian president's right hand held tightly onto the chair leg as he spoke about his career, which in its early days saw him work in the Siberian region of Komi, where "everything was very simple."

"My biography is well known—school, university, law, Leningrad State University (today St. Petersburg State University), then a special school of the KGB of the USSR, then special training in illegal intelligence, then legal intelligence."

Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and during his time at Moscow's main intelligence agency, he served in Dresden, East Germany. He was there when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 that preceded the collapse of the USSR, a development he later called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

Putin's trip to Chukotka was his first presidential visit to the region, which is nine time zones from Moscow and was once governed by sanctioned oligarch and former Chelsea soccer club owner, Roman Abramovich.

Russian state news agency Tass said that Putin drove around in an all-terrain vehicle in temperatures of -25 C (-13 F) and visited a greenhouse. During his conversation with local residents, Putin announced state support for policies aimed at encouraging people to have more children.

Putin is on a tour of Russia's far east after he announced he would run for president again in March in an election he is widely expected to win in the carefully controlled political environment.

On Thursday, he told business leaders in the city of Khabarovsk, in the southeast, that a spike in egg prices, which was raised during his televised Q&A with the nation in December, was due to a miscalculation by his government.

He also said that Russia's GDP growth for 2023 could exceed 4 percent, more than his previous estimate of 3.5 percent.