Cancer docs’ visits to Putin

VLADIMIR Putin has been visited by surgeons specialising in thyroid cancer on many occasions, investigative journalists have claimed.

Project Media, a group blocked in Russia, saysYevgeny Selivanov, of Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, flew out to the Black Sea resort of Sochi to meet Putin 35 times, spending 166 days with him.

He was also seen by surgeon Alexey Shcheglov, who is said to follow Putin, inset, “so relentlessly that during public events he allegedly gets into joint photographs with the head of state”. He visited 59 times over 282 days.

Another is Dr Igor Esakov, 38 trips over 152 days.

The report said apart from geopolitics “there is at least one other issue that Putin is hardly less worried about – his own health”.

In July 2020, he met the head of the National Medical Research Center for Endocrinology, Ivan Dedov – the boss of Putin’s eldest daughter, paediatric endocrinologist MariaVorontsova.

Project Media said: “Dedov told the president about the high prevalence of thyroid cancer and spoke about the new hormonal drug Tyrogin, which fights metastases after surgery.”

The report added: “There is indeed talk in medical circles about the president’s health problems.”

Putin was rarely seen in public in the pandemic, and only made visits to hospitals in a full biohazard suit. The report said when he met Paralympians last September “he suddenly announced that he had to go into isolation, because there were too many people around who were sick with the coronavirus”. Project Media added: “Whether the president was then undergoing some kind of medical manipulation is unknown, but after that he began to communicate with people at a very great distance – sitting on opposite sides of huge tables.”

Thyroid cancer symptoms include the appearance of a thick nodule in the thyroid area, hoarseness, problems with swallowing, neck and throat pain, enlarged lymph nodes in the neck, a dry cough and a scratchy feeling in the throat or behind the sternum.