According to the SVR General Channel on Telegram on September 7:
Russian President Vladimir Putin is "old, weak, and stupid."
According to the SVR General Channel on Telegram on September 8:
Russian President Vladimir Putin "has very little time left...very little."
According to the SVR General Channel on Telegram on September 11:
Russian President Vladimir Putin "ate practically nothing, and only in the evening the doctors convinced him to take some food, which is prepared for Putin according to special recipes and served in a ground form."
According to the SVR General Channel on Telegram on September 12:
"Kim Jong-un does not know that he will have to communicate not with the real Putin, but with his double."
According to the SVR General Channel on Telegram on September 13:
"With the deterioration of Putin's health, the understudy is increasingly taking on not only the image of the president, but is practically becoming him."
Like a detective with extreme OCD, I have stared at this picture from August, at least, a hundred times.
Beacon of Speech officially declares "That is not Putin."
Now I'm not as hard on Putin as the General SVR Channel, but I really do think that Putin stays mostly in seclusion and sends out his body double for public interactions. Now when world leaders go to the Kremlin, I disagree with the SVR and I believe that is Putin meeting with other heads of state inside of Moscow's Walls.
But before Covid, whether good or bad, Putin was everywhere. Now Putin rules as an out-of-touch monarch, more interested in laying in his piles of gold instead of actually moving outside of his walled fortress inside of the Kremlin or his private residence in the suburbs.
Everyone is afraid to speak out against Putin, they don't want to end up like Alexei Navalny or the nation's Anti-War Protestors. Even Yevgeny Prigozhin's Plane Crash seemed to arrive at the world's international news desk with a collective shrug.
Again, I think the SVR Channel is on to something when they say that Russia is irreparably broken at the top. They may not be exactly right all the time, but I think they are closer to accurate than the Western Media who watches the situation in Russia from Europe.