Alleged doubles of Vladimir Putin

[10][3] In December 2004, the Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on an offer to purchase Putin's "ancestral home" from an alleged body double from the village of Pominovo in Tver Oblast, where his parents were from.

[5] 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.

[14] A photo of Putin taken during his visit to Moscow State University on Russian Students Day in January 2023 intensified the spread of conspiracy theories.

Smart, a correspondent for the Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Post, shared a photo from the visit, claiming that he "wears high heels" and that "most public events feature a lookalike - not the real Putin.

[5] 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.

Fact-checking by Reuters,[15] Snopes[9] and Italian openFactChecking subsequently noted that the first image offered for comparison was published in 2020, not 2023;[4] the second photo, like the third, was taken in Mariupol, not Sevastopol.

[10] 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.

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.

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.

[7] 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.

[19][2] Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov has repeatedly refuted this conspiracy theory, claiming that Putin doesn't have any body doubles.

"[27] 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.

[2] 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 December 2023, Proekt concluded that 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.