The bizarre montage with Putin walking around Moscow by car, after the information that he is in bunkers for fear of assassination. Who did he take out to dinner?
The Kremlin released a video of Vladimir Putin driving a car through Moscow and meeting an elderly teacher in a hotel lobby, after Western media cited a European intelligence report that the Russian president spends weeks hiding in bunkers, Reuters wrote on Tuesday.
The information, which emerged in the run-up to Putin's annual May 9 appearance in Red Square to mark victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, and whose origin has been questioned by the Kremlin, suggested that security around the Russian president had been drastically tightened and that he had spent weeks directing the war in Ukraine from underground bunkers amid fears of an assassination attempt or coup. state.
Russian officials have dismissed such scenarios as absurd, and the video montage of Putin, which aired Monday night, appears to be a way to counter those accusations and claims — long made by some of his critics — that he is increasingly alienated from his own people.
The images show a relaxed-looking Putin pulling up outside a hotel in central Moscow behind the wheel of a Russian-made SUV, accompanied by a security guard. The Russian leader is seen entering the hotel lobby with a large bouquet of flowers to meet one of his former teachers.
Dressed casually in jeans and a light jacket, Putin, 73, is shown hugging his former teacher, Vera Gurevich, who kisses him repeatedly on the cheeks and whispers something in his ear.
Putin, who started school in 1960 in the city then called Leningrad, is then caught discussing the weather with a seemingly random passerby who walks into the hotel lobby with his family, only for Putin to help his former teacher into his car and drive her to a Kremlin dinner.
#WATCH : Russian President Vladimir Putin drove himself to a hotel in Moscow, quietly picked up his 89-year-old former schoolteacher, and escorted her to a private dinner at the Kremlin. pic.twitter.com/JOj6Cy5MKz
— upuknews (@upuknews1) May 12, 2026
Putin invited Gurevich to the annual Red Square parade and then to spend several days in Moscow enjoying a cultural program, the Kremlin said in a statement earlier.
In power as either president or prime minister since 1999, Putin – whose popularity has dipped in recent months but remains high, according to state opinion polls – is in the second year of his current term, which expires in 2030.
Russia's State Duma, the lower house of parliament, will be up for re-election in September, at a time when economic growth forecasts for this year have been cut sharply amid signs people are unhappy with a growing crackdown on the internet.
Putin said on Saturday that he believed the war in Ukraine was coming to an end, comments that came just hours after he vowed victory in Ukraine at Moscow's narrowest Victory Day parade in years.
