“He has a few months left to live”, “he has thyroid cancer”, “he is diabetic”, “he has early stage Parkinson’s disease”, “he has undergone numerous secret operations abroad”. Rumors, rumors, conjectures, hypotheses: the news on the health of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin has been covering newspapers and websites around the world for months, and has created a real ‘yellow’ around the figure, already mysterious and cryptic , of the head of Russia.
The large ‘staff’ of doctors. The media around the world have noted that, in recent years, Putin has often been accompanied on his travels abroad by a large team of doctors. No.
In 2016-2017, the trips outside Russia would have seen him surrounded by 5 doctors, who later became, in some circumstances, even 13 at the same time. Among them resuscitators, neurosurgeons, general practitioners, oncologists. Since one of them was known for his studies on thyroid cancer, and Putin – according to media reports – visited him 35 times in Sochi, a city in southern Russia famous for the Olympics, this remains one of the most popular theses at the moment. accredited. Never confirmed by the Kremlin.
The different diseases according to the media. In addition to the one according to which Putin is suffering from a serious thyroid cancer, denied on several occasions by the Kremlin spokesman Dmytry Peskov, there are many hypotheses that run after each other. From the one that sees him suffering from a severe form of diabetes, due to the swollen face shown on several occasions, to the one according to which the Russian president has Parkinson’s at an early stage that would create a principle of dementia, up to problems with his spine. spinal cord caused by a fall from a horse, worsened after an injury while playing hockey. There is no shortage of conjectures on a ‘runaway leukemia’, and on ‘Asperger’s syndrome’. None of these conjectures have ever found any official confirmation.
The suspects after meeting with Shoigu. Analysts, doctors and scholars were ‘unleashed’ in particular after Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The posture of the president, his ‘hunching’ of the shoulders, the “strange movement of the right foot” and the tremor of some fingers and the hand that grabs the table without ever moving, combined with Putin’s voice according to some ‘monotonous’ made even the most skeptical suspicious, leading many to hypothesize physical difficulties related to Parkinson’s.
The cure. The rumors concerning the treatments that Putin would be followed to get rid of this ‘mysterious evil’ are also imaginative and varied. From the more classic ones, which see him surrounded by neurosurgeons, oncologists, haematologists and neurologists, to the secret operations carried out outside Russia, which are – according to rumors – now very numerous. There are also those who speak of more particular therapies, such as ‘alternative treatments’ and ‘homeopathic methods’, up to the ‘packs with deer blood’ which, according to some experts interviewed by the media, would have “effects bordering on the miraculous” .
Missed official appointments. To fuel the rumors about the precarious conditions of the Russian leader, in recent days there is also the absence of Putin at the annual ‘live-TV’ ‘Direct Line to Vladimir Putin’, during which the president answers questions from citizens. While some analysts have observed that the defection may be due to fears of being targeted by “hostile” questions about the war in Ukraine, for others it is linked to the President’s staff concerns about his health. According to the tabloid ‘Sun’, for example, the 69-year-old president of Russia would have a hard time ‘holding up’ the more than three hours in a row of the broadcast.