New video shows Vladimir Putin looking bloated and awkwardly gripping a table for support — heightening suspicions that the warmongering president is seriously ill.
The footage released by the Kremlin Thursday shows Putin, 69, tightly gripping the 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 regularly 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.
Shoigu is also rumored to be suffering health woes.
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.
The Kremlin has denied reports that Putin is ill.
Other reports have suggested that Putin has recently had 35 secret meetings with a cancer doctor — and been bathing in the blood of deer antlers. The Kremlin has denied he has the disease.
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 told the outlet.
“An able-bodied 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 the strongman’s vigor, including claims he has been seen by a cancer doctor 35 times in recent years — and has become so paranoid about his health he has even 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” — which the Russian president was reportedly introduced to by Shoigu — are an alternative therapy in the Altai region of Russia, which borders Khazakstan and Mongolia.
Believers say the baths improve the cardiovascular system and rejuvenate the skin, The Project explained.
Meanwhile, an oncologist, identified by the outlet as Evgeny Selivanov, has reportedly made dozens of secret visits to Putin’s Sochi getaway home over just four years.
The report also suggested the Russian leader secretly underwent a mysterious surgery last autumn, adding that he “did not appear in public for the entire month of September.”
“In medical circles, it is believed that the president was undergoing a complicated procedure related to some kind of thyroid disease during this period,” the report states.
The Kremlin has denied any allegations that Putin is in poor health.
