A new set of wild claims say that '"sickly" Vladimir Putin has been hit with a new nightmare after his “main” body double went down with “chronic kidney disease”.
This meant that on doctors’ orders his favourite Doppelgänger could not stand in for Putin - as he allegedly did in 2021 - for the president’s annual dip in an ice hole to mark Orthodox Epiphany.
Instead, the Kremlin pretended Putin had undertaken the ritual, while admitting there were no pictures or video, alleged General SVR Telegram channel.
Putin, aged 70 and terminally ill with cancer, according to the channel, desperately needs his army of several doubles to remain fit and pretend to be him to fool Russian people, it is alleged.
So it is a concern to Kremlin minders that the favourite understudy suffered an “exacerbation of chronic kidney disease”.
“Nowadays Putin simply needs a double,” said a post.
“It is the understudy - in view of the poor health of the president - that holds more than half of his face-to-face meetings, and attends events on behalf of the head of state.”
The channel earlier claimed that recent appearances by Putin on the Crimean bridge and at a funeral of a regional dictator in oil-rich Ufa were also by stand-in actors.
Yet it was the real Putin this week at a commemoration in St Petersburg when he appeared a “lonely old man”.
The extraordinary claim comes the day after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky questioned whether Putin was still alive and capable of taking decisions.
"I do not fully understand whether he is alive,” he told an audience in Davos.
“Is he the one who makes the decisions, or someone else, a certain group of people.
“I have no information. I don't quite understand how you can promise European leaders one thing and the next day start a full-scale invasion of another country.
“I don't quite understand who we are dealing with.”
Putin is struggling to get Iran to release new missiles and drones that he needs for the war, alleged the channel, which claimed that tensions among his entourage are growing due to the war’s disastrous impact on Russia.
He was even challenged in a private virtual meeting by his own ideologue, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of his security council, over his blundering war decisions, and failure to make Europe freeze this winter by slashing gas exports, it was claimed.
This included his move to double down on a new offensive in the war even as the West is sending unprecedented military support to Ukraine.
Putin’s “ultimatums” were followed by Russian “defeats”, claimed Patrushev, according to the account only reported by General SVR.
“After Patrushev's speech, the president made a short speech turning into a [shouting match] with accusations against the military leadership [before Putin] closed the meeting,” stated the channel, not explaining its sources.
“Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, contacted Patrushev after the meeting and expressed his support for everything….
“There is no global split in Putin's circle yet, but the system is bursting at the seams from internal stress and any sudden movement can become a trigger for its collapse.”
Putin allegedly suffers “bouts of coughing, dizziness, sleep disturbances, abdominal pain [and] constant nausea” as well as “the manifestation of symptoms of Parkinson's disease and schizoaffective disorder”, the channel claimed earlier.
Body doubles have been routinely used by former Kremlin leaders, for example longtime Soviet supremos Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev.
Putin three years ago admitted that officials urged him to use doubles, but he claimed the idea was rejected.
"I discarded the idea of any doubles,” he said, referring to the early days of his rule.
He was advised in the early 2000s when Russia was hit by terrorist attacks that a lookalike should take his place at events where the head of state might be at risk, he said.
“This was during the toughest time of our war against terrorism,” he said.
