What happened to the face?

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What happened to the face

Updated 00.53 | Published 00.05

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It’s Putin.

Or?

– What has happened? asks the Ukrainian top.

Quick version

  • Ukraine’s adviser, Anton Gerashchenko, shared a video on social media showing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face looking unusually swollen, fueling speculation about his health and the possible use of doppelgangers.
  • Rumors of Putin’s various health problems have circulated since Russia’s 2020 invasion of Ukraine, including speculation of serious illness and mental illness. The Kremlin has often denied these claims.
  • Ukraine’s military intelligence service recently reported that it has “credible information” that Putin is using lookalikes, which the Kremlin has denied.

    • ⓘ The summary is made with the support of AI tools from OpenAI and quality assured by Aftonbladet. Read our AI policy here.

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    The video is four seconds short.

    But long enough to set off a new tidal wave of speculation.

    The clip is posted on X by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian government, and is said to have been recorded before Putin’s state visit to Astana in Kazakhstan on Thursday.

    Swollen

    “What happened to Putin’s cheeks?” he asks his followers.

    In the video, the president’s face is strangely swollen.

    President Putin’s state of health and possible doppelgangers have been a topic of conversation on social media and in the international press since Russia invaded Ukraine last February.

    It has been speculated that he is seriously ill with cancer.

    That he has incipient Parkinson’s.

    That he suffered from severe mental illness and fear of death during the pandemic.

    Not dead

    At the end of October, it went so far that Kremlin spokesman Dimitriy Peskov came out and denied that Putin had died.

    – Everything is fine with him, said Peskov and called the information that circulated that the president suffered a cardiac arrest “an absurd newspaper duck”.

    full screen On the left: Putin in the new video, on the right a picture from June this year.

    In fact, only once during all the rumors about the boss’s various ailments and mysterious absences in public did Peskov admit that there is actually something behind it, writes Politico.

    It was 2018 after Putin had been missing for two days before the presidential election.

    Then Peskov said that the president “had a cold”, something he meant because it “was winter”.

    Influenced by the new look?

    In Gerashchenko’s follow-up post on X, he shared another video. This time when Putin greeted Kazakh President Qasym-Zjomart Toqayev.

    “It is not the first time he has difficulty saying the name of a head of state correctly. Is it a lack of respect or is it his new cheeks that affect the pronunciation?” writes the Ukrainian top.

    The clip of Putin’s “new cheeks” quickly went viral and gave rise to a series of theories about what was behind it.

    “Considering the small bruises over the cheek, they are new fillers. One wonders what he really looks like without all the treatments,” writes one follower.

    “He has had injections to lift and fill them out. Or it’s an actor,” claims another.

    full screen This week Putin has visited Kazakhstan this week, this picture was taken yesterday Thursday. Photo: Konstantin Zavrazhin / AP

    Another nose

    That Putin uses doppelgangers is a widely held theory.

    The Ukrainian military intelligence service stated a few days ago that it has “credible information” that indicates just this.

    The Kremlin has denied the information.

    But that hasn’t stopped the speculation.

    One of the people who saw the clip writes on X that a comparison of the viral clip and other images of Putin show differences in “his head shape, the contour and shape of his ears and the slope of his nose”.

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