Alleged doubles of Vladimir Putin

A conspiracy theory about Russian President Vladimir Putin's body doubles   is based on the alleged instability in the politician's appearance. Supporters of the conspiracy theory believe that the "body doubles" have had surgery to resemble the "original" and point to facial features such as the chin, earlobes  and wrinkles on Putin's forehead as evidence, and claim that the body doubles were used because of Putin's allegedly declining health or that they were sent to areas deemed too dangerous for Putin.

The theory of Vladimir Putin's body doubles acts as a tool used by Putin's opponents. Amid rumors of the Putin's deteriorating health, Ukraine has repeatedly claimed that Putin uses body doubles. Russia has denied these unproven allegations.

The conspiracy theory was supported by British tabloids, Ukrainian media and officials. However, no credible evidence of Vladimir Putin having body doubles has emerged in all the years of his leadership.

History
Allegations of the existence of Putin's body doubles began to appear at the beginning of his presidency. In December 2004, Russian daily newspaper knows as Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on an offer to purchase the president's "ancestral home" from an alleged body double from the village of Pominovo in Tver Oblast, where Putin's parents come from. Over time, the topic of Putin's body doubles has remained a hot topic in the media environment, also sparking discussion on social media, for example, when pre-prepared news stories were published on Kremlin.ru at times of the president's temporary disappearance. Some Internet users speculated that Putin was relying on body doubles to hide his deteriorating health. Others believed that the doubles were being sent to dangerous and risky places for the "original" to publicly display Putin. A third version says that Putin is supposedly already dead and the country is being run by his body doubles.

In the 2010s, a meme with a table of the "original" Putin and six of his "body doubles" ("Babbler", "Udmurt", "Banquet", "Kuchma", "Bruise" and "Diplomat") with photos and descriptions of each became popular. According to the meme, each of the "body doubles" performs certain duties; for example, Babbler is deployed for Direct Lines, Diplomat participates in negotiations, Banquet is used "for interviews, handshakes, and photos with the public", and Udmurt is "basically the worst double ever", used when Babbler "needs a vacation". On 5 September 2016, Russian journalist Oleg Kashin posted this meme on his Facebook page, making it more popular.

In 2018, International Business Times called the allegations "one of the more unusual conspiracy theories" when a Twitter user quoted three photos of Putin taken on different dates and suggested that the politician was actually three different people.

In 2020, due to fears of COVID-19 contamination, Vladimir Putin began taking precautions in meetings, which increased rumors of alleged Putin's body doubles.

Since 2022
Conspiracy rumors about Putin's use of body doubles have further intensified amid 2022 Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian claims
Unsubstantiated rumors about Putin's doppelgangers are regularly published by Ukrainian media and discussed by high-ranking Ukrainian politicians.

In August 2022, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov suggested on Ukrainian TV channel 1+1 that Putin's ears looked different in several of his public appearances: "The image of each person's ear is unique. It cannot be repeated." In the same month, Ukrainian Major General Vadym Skibitsky said Putin was using body doubles to hide his allegedly deteriorating health.

A photo of Putin taken during his visit to Moscow State University on Russian Students Day in January 2023 has intensified the spread of conspiracy theories. For example, Jason J. Smart, a correspondent for the Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Post, shared a photo from the Putin's visit, claiming that he "wears high heels" and that "most public events feature a lookalike - not the real Putin. The changes in his height, ears and weight are otherwise inexplicable."

For more than a year and a half, the president has mostly remained in Russia. However, since February 2023, Putin has become more active in close encounters (e.g., a rally in Luzhniki in February, a trip to occupied Mariupol in March, a meeting in Derbent in July 2023 shortly after the Prigozhin rebellion. Some of the Putin's unusual trips and actions in 2023 have sparked public attention and raised questions about the possible use of double bodies. As Business Insider notes, a trip to occupied Mariupol, where Putin interacted with locals, renewed rumors that Putin uses doubles for public appearances. The version of The Washington Post article about Putin's trip to Mariupol removed the mention of the Putin using a double from the original article.

In March 2023, Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, tried to find evidence of Putin's body doubles by publishing three photos of Putin's chin and questioning whether the images showed the same person. Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's GUR press service, also claimed that Putin didn't visit Mariupol and sent a body double there; this can allegedly be seen by the different chin in the photos. Factcheck of Reuters and fact-checking sites such as Snopes and Italian openFactChecking noted that the first image offered for comparison was published in 2020, not 2023; the second photo, like the third, was taken in Mariupol, not Sevastopol. Snopes concluded that the allegations were false.

In May 2023, Kyrylo Budanov noted: "There are at least three people [body doubles] who periodically appear." In June 2023, the Security Service of Ukraine compiled a guide on how to distinguish "body doubles" from each other.

In the spring of 2023, on the channel "Visiting Gordon," former KGB officer Sergei Zhirnov spoke about Putin's doubles who allegedly "live in a bunker" and "no one lets them out anywhere."

Reports of the conspiracy theory have also intensified amid Putin's trip to Dagestan in June 2023. Experts say that while it's impossible to confirm the use of a doppelganger during that trip, the Russian president likely used a different approach to bolster his public image and demonstrate his willingness to relax his caution. Putin's appearance in Dagestan was also meant to demonstrate his popularity after Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion. The conspiracy theory was again actualized against the backdrop of the Russian president's visit to China in October 2023.

"General SVR"
The Telegram channel "General SVR", allegedly closely linked to Russian political scientist and conspiracy theorist Valery Solovei, has actively promoted this conspiracy theory. According to it, the real Putin spends most of his time in a bunker and receives guests at a long table, while meetings with the public are supposedly attended by body doubles. In March 2023, "General SVR" noted that Putin had allegedly not been to Crimea or Mariupol and that a presidential body double had gone there "for a short visit and only for a video photo shoot."

Another unsubstantiated claim has also received widespread international publicity. It was published in October 2023, claiming that Putin's heart allegedly stopped on October 26 at 20:42 Moscow time, after which his corpse was placed in a "freezer" at his residence in Valdai Discussion Club, with Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev actually running the country, using Putin's "double" as a puppet. In the same month, Solovei claimed that Putin's double, nicknamed "Vasilich," had allegedly visited China.

Solovei has been talking about Putin's serious illness since 2016, when he predicted Putin's imminent resignation due to "force majeure circumstances." The story about Putin's corpse in the refrigerator caused mostly only ridicule on the Internet.

Reaction of Russian authorities
In August 2000, Yevgeny Murov, head of the Russian Federal Security Service, said that Putin had no doubles. In 2001, Vladimir Putin denied rumors about his doubles.

In 2015, after a press conference, a journalist showed Putin a photo of a very similar person to him, to which he replied, "What double? I don't have doubles. Why do I need them?". In an interview with TASS published in February 2020, Putin admitted that he had been asked to use doppelgangers in the early 2000s "in the most difficult times of the fight against terrorism." However, he allegedly refused such a practice.

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov has repeatedly refuted this conspiracy theory, claiming that Putin doesn't have any body doubles. In December 2021, he noted that Putin "smiles and laughs" when he is told about body doubles. On 20 April 2023, Peskov called the claims of a "Putin body double" traveling to Putin's headquarters strange, and on April 24, the issue of doubles "another lie." In October 2023, Peskov called the rumors "information hoaxes": “This belongs to the category of absurd information hoaxes that a whole series of media discuss with enviable tenacity. This evokes nothing but a smile.” On November 4, the spokesman said that information about Putin's body doubles sometimes appears in Telegram channels and that "experts" are even interested in their number. He also noted: "We have only one Putin."

On December 14, 2023, during the "Direct Line with Vladimir Putin", when asked about body doubles, Putin said that he "thought about it and decided that only one person should resemble myself and speak in my voice, and that person will be me."

Analysis
The analysis of Russian-Latvian independent media Meduza using Amazon Rekognition, a neural network for face recognition and comparison, showed that the similarity of "body doubles" is from 99.6 to 99.9%, which contradicts the conspiracy theory itself.

Clinical psychologist Matvey Sokolovskiy notes that the peculiarity of the literary image of the double is its ability to reflect the dark aspects of the hero's personality, thus suggesting evil intentions, cruel and unjust actions. Thus, adherents of the conspiracy theory about Putin's doppelgangers may view the "real Russian president" as a kind and caring grandpa who refuses repression and military conflicts with neighboring states. In such a case, decision-making by the "fake" president signals that everything around him is also "fake," which Sokolovskiy believes may have a calming effect.

In June of 2023, Japanese researchers in the field of facial recognition and voice identification concluded that the Vladimir Putin probably has at least one body double. Putin, who participated in the Red Square parade in May 2023, was chosen as a baseline comparison. When analyzing facial features, the researchers found that the president who drove a Mercedes car across the Crimean Bridge in December 2022 matched Putin at the parade by only 53%, while the latter's resemblance to Putin who visited Mariupol in March 2023 was 40%. An analysis of the word "thank you" from Putin's speech at the Eurasian Economic Forum in May 2023 revealed "strong differences" in the pronunciation of some sounds, highlighting potential differences in the president's voice at different events.

Russian independent media Proekt examined Putin's participation in public events between November 2022 and November 2023. In December 2023, Proekt concluded that the Putin's unexpected periodic violations of his strictly enforced coronavirus-related restrictions, which had led a number of "Kremlin pool" journalists interviewed on condition of anonymity to believe in the doppelganger theory, could be explained by the presidential campaign.

People who look like Putin
A number of Russian and Russian-language media mentioned people look like Vladimir Putin. They participate in various events, such as weddings and corporate parties, movies, humorous programs, and offer to take pictures with them for money. Anatoliy Gorbunov, Vasiliy Khorokhordin, Vladimir Belousov, Dmitriy Grachyov were mentioned among them. As The Washington Post reports, Polish Slawomir Sobala is also globally known as “fake Putin” for "being one of the most famous, if not the most famous, professional look-alike of the Russian president".