He is in “better health than many people his age,” but he “pathologically fears” for his life. He does not use the internet, he informs himself through state television. His fear of a Covid infection is still “paranoid” and for this reason he expects the staff in his service to continue to undergo long quarantines.
To tell these such intimate details of the life of Vladimir Putin she is someone who has stood by him for years. Until, a few months ago, he decided to flee the Kremlin and Russia.
Gleb Karakulov served Putin for thirteen years. As FSO communications team engineer followed the Tsar on over 180 journeys, always ready to guarantee him and his immediate subordinates secure lines of communication under any circumstances.
The last away match in chronological order, in Astana, in mid-October. Then fleeing with his familyafter months of planning: first Turkey, now a safe (and secret) place.
When it was still traceable, the confession to the site Dossier Centerfunded by billionaire exile Mikhail Khodorkovsky: one hour of questions, one hour of answers, for enter the “cocoon” that Putin has built around himself and in which he has been living for years now.
A “cocoon, isolated by a series of barriers” in which reality is distorted by the only sources of information that the Tsar consults: no internet, no smartphone. State channels only, which must also be available when abroad. The contacts are also highly selected. After three years of pandemic, Putin still has a terrible fear of being infected, and fourteen days of quarantine are required to be admitted to his presence. And to think that, according to Karakulov, Putin is quite fit: “He doesn’t suffer from any pathology, he has no clinical secrets”. A few words that deconstruct dozens of theories on more or less serious illnesses afflicting the head of the Kremlin. However, good health does not reassure him: “His pathology is that he constantly fears for his life”.
Life that passes in the numerous residences (including the pharaonic palace on the shores of the Black Sea whose existence was revealed by Aleksej Navalny): in each of them Putin allegedly had replicas of the Moscow office built, so as to be able to pretend to always be connected from the capital. To keep him company in every buen retiro are family members, another “little secret” of the Tsar who would have children and lovers more or less known in the narrow circles of the Kremlin.
The last question Karakulov answers is: why? Why leave a high-profile role – second Dossieris the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect in Russia’s recent history – to escape?
«I consider Putin a war criminal», he explains, «and it would have been an even worse crime than defection to remain at work as if nothing had happened». He too fears for his life. “They’re not looking for me with the Novychok yet, but they’ve gone to visit more than one of my family members.”