For almost a quarter of a century in power, Putin has hardly ever been officially ill (with the exception of a few cases of colds). As the Project publication wrote, in the early days Putin was rarely examined and paid little attention to problems like elevated temperature. “It was so important for the Kremlin to create the image of an “alpha male” president that they decided not to say anything bad about his health at all. The authorities tried not to acknowledge even the simplest fever, not to mention injuries from sports,” a former official who worked with Putin told The Project.
Putin received one of these injuries in the early 2000s when he fell from a horse. “I was training, and it so happened that the horse stood up in front of the barrier, and I did a somersault, just a real somersault – boom,” Putin described his fall in 2021 (the Project’s source stated that after one of the falls, Putin “couldn’t even get to his feet” for some time).
Then Putin disappeared for some time, and the Kremlin mastered such a tool as “canned food” – the publication of pre-filmed meetings between Putin and his subordinates. “This allowed him to quietly disappear for a while from the sight of journalists and the entire country. Over time, such disappearances became more and more numerous, as well as health problems,” wrote the Project.
During such “disappearances,” the publication found out, the Russian “president” was often accompanied by an impressive team of doctors: ENT specialists, anesthesiologists, dermatovenerologists, infectious disease specialists and a surgeon specializing in thyroid cancer. The fact that the President of the Russian Federation may have thyroid cancer can also be indicated by the presence of an ENT specialist in the team of doctors: it is he who can detect the first symptoms of the disease.
In general, cancer is one of Putin’s most popular diagnoses. Putin’s classmate, former KGB intelligence officer of the USSR Yuri Shvets, spoke about Putin’s serious health problems, requiring the use of chemotherapy, in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the GORDON publication Alesya Batsman in 2020. In 2022, the British tabloid The Sun wrote about this, and the Russian media reported back in 2008 (perhaps the diagnosis of “cancer” in relation to Putin was first mentioned back in 2004).
The American magazine The New York Post wrote in 2015 that Putin has pancreatic cancer. However, it should be remembered that pancreatic cancer is an extremely aggressive form of cancer, and if the insider information were correct, Putin would most likely be dead by now (in 2020, the fatality rate for this form of cancer was almost 94%).
The former head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, the current head of the Office of the President, Kirill Budanov, has repeatedly stated that Putin may have cancer.
“Back in 2021, there was a statement, I think it was mine, that Putin was seriously ill with cancer. Two years have passed since then, and now everyone is starting to say that something might be wrong with him. Time will tell who was right,” he said in an interview with Yahoo News in the spring of 2023. The head of the Main Intelligence Directorate did not provide any details at the time, and the publication’s journalist assessed his words as “part of psychological warfare.” At the same time, the then director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Bill Burns, a year earlier, commenting on rumors about the failing health of the Russian dictator, said that Putin was “too healthy.”
Putin is also “suspected” of psychopathy and narcissism. A Pentagon think tank study claimed that Putin may have Asperger's syndrome, “an autism spectrum disorder that affects all of his decisions” (the report stresses that this diagnosis cannot be confirmed without a brain scan).
American neuroscientist, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, James Fallon, expressed confidence in 2022 that Putin is a typical psychopath who loses control over himself.
“In Putin’s behavior, one can discern features of a serious clouding of reason. It is pointless to guess what exactly led to them, it could be anything – from tertiary syphilis and a tumor to neurodegenerative diseases. But judging by the fact that Putin moved from pompous narcissism to paranoia, to openly hostile, compulsive, unbalanced behavior, some degenerative processes in his brain, for example, in the lower parts of the prefrontal cortex and the anterior temporal lobe are probably already going,” he argued.
The Kremlin consistently denies any of Putin’s health problems: both with his back and with cancer (Peskov once even denied his boss’s words that he would go into self-isolation due to COVID).
