New sick man of Europe
Putin appears bloated, stiff in vid
New video shows Vladimir Putin looking bloated and awkwardly gripping a table for support — heightening suspicions that the warmongering president is seriously ill.
Footage released by the Kremlin Thursday shows Putin, 69, tightly gripping a table with his right hand as soon as he sits down — then keeping it there throughout the nearly 12-minute clip.
Putin sits with hunched shoulders and fidgets and taps his toes during a meeting with his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, to discuss the fate of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
The clip shows Putin and his key adviser “both depressed & seemingly in bad health,” tweeted Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who was previously an adviser to Russia.
Former UK politician Louise Mensch said the footage appeared to back earlier reports that “Vladimir Putin has Parkinson’s disease.”
“Here you can see him gripping the table so that his shaking hand is not visible but he cannot stop his foot from tapping,” she wrote.
Professor Erik Bucy, a body language expert from Texas Tech University, noted to The Sun that Putin’s face looked clearly bloated, saying it “reinforces an unhealthy appearance.”
“It’s an astonishingly weakened Putin compared to the man we observed even a few years ago,” Bucy said. “An ablebodied president would not need to keep himself propped up with a hand held out for leverage and would not be concerned about keeping both feet planted on the ground.”
The video comes just weeks after Russian investigative outlet The Project dropped a sizeable report on Putin’s vigor, including claims he has been seen by a cancer doctor 35 times in recent years — and has become so para
noid about his health he has turned to unconventional, and barbaric, therapies.
Putin is said to bathe in the blood extracted from deer antlers, which are hacked off while they are growing and still full of fresh blood, the outlet said. The sickening “antler baths” are an alternative therapy in the Altai region of Russia, which borders Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
The Kremlin denies allegations that Putin is in poor health.