Putin’s legs twitch in public for second time in a week as he sits awkwardly during rambling speech about how ‘you have to live for something to die for’
- Russian leader was visiting the Kamchatka peninsula in the far east of Russia
- He could not keep his feet still and gripped on to an armchair for support
- President has been plagued by health rumours in recent months
Vladimir Putin’s shaky legs have made another appearance as he appeared ill at ease while giving a rambling speech in front of young Russians today.
The leader, 69, has been at the centre of multiple health rumours in recent months and has regularly appeared twitching and unsteady while in public.
Today, he flew across nine time zones towards Kamchatka, a glaciers-and-volcanoes peninsula in the Pacific, in the east of Russia.
He repeatedly tapped both of his feet on the floor and held on to his armrest for support as he told the children: ‘You have to live for something to die for.’
It comes just days after a similar appearance where he spoke to schoolchildren while twitching his legs manically and firmly gripping an armrest.
Vladimir Putin’s shaky legs have made another appearance as he appeared ill at ease while giving a rambling speech in front of young Russians today
While lecturing the youngsters, he repeatedly tapped both of his feet on the floor and held on to his armrest for support
Putin meets with volunteer ornithologists of the ‘Kamchatka’ falcon centre in the far eastern city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskyi
What’s wrong with Putin?
Rumours have been circling for years that Vladimir Putin is suffering from health problems, and they have intensified since he launched his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Critics and Kremlin sources have indicated he may be suffering from cancer of Parkinson’s, supported by footage showing the leader shaking uncontrollably and gripping a table for support.
He has also disappeared from the public eye for weeks at a time, with suggestions he is undergoing surgery.
Valery Solovey, professor at Moscow State Institute of Foreign Affairs first hinted at Putin’s health problems, said in 2020 that Putin had undergone surgery for cancer.
Another unnamed source suggested the operation was on Putin’s abdomen.
He said: ‘One is of a psycho-neurological nature, the other is a cancer problem.
‘If anyone is interested in the exact diagnosis, I’m not a doctor, and I have no ethical right to reveal these problems.
‘The second diagnosis is a lot, lot more dangerous than the first named diagnosis as Parkinson’s does not threaten physical state, but just limits public appearances.
‘Based on this information people will be able to make a conclusion about his life horizon, which wouldn’t even require specialist medical education.’
The Kremlin has consistently denied that there is anything wrong with Putin’s health.
Others have previously noted his ‘gunslinger’s gait’ – a clearly reduced right arm swing compared to his left, giving him a lilting swagger.
An asymmetrically reduced arm swing is a classic feature of Parkinson’s and can manifest in ‘clinically intact subjects with a predisposition to later develop’ the disease, according to the British Medical Journal.
In February, Putin was seen with a shaking hand as he firmly gripped the side of his chair for support.
The clip, which was taken on February 18, just before the onset of his invasion of Ukraine, shows him welcoming fellow strongman Alexander Lukashenko at the Kremlin.
He pulls his trembling hand into his body in an attempt to quell the shakes, but then he almost stumbles as he unsteadily walks towards Lukashenko.
Later, Putin sits on a chair but is unable to remain still, constantly fidgeting and tapping his feet while he grips onto the arm for support.
In a meeting with defence minister Sergei Shoigu, Putin’s poor posture and his apparently bloated face and neck fuelled the speculation.
Video showed Putin speaking to Shoigu whilst gripping the edge of the table with his right hand – so hard that it appears white – and tapping his foot consistently.
He has since been seen limping and shaking his hands and legs, further bolstering the rumours.
Questions about Putin’s health have been circulating for some time in Russia with some suggesting he has cancer or Parkinson’s and he has regularly disappeared for days at a time amid claims he is undergoing surgery.
But the rumours have grown stronger since he launched his barbaric invasion of Ukraine, with the leader often appearing to be not in full control of his limbs.
In recent months, he has been seen hobbling off a plane in Iran with a limp arm and twisting his foot in a meeting with Belarus dictator Lukashenko in May.
On Friday, he was seen squirming in his chair and looked ill at ease as he gripped an armrest with one hand before gesticulating with a tightly clenched fist, while the other hand clutched firm to the microphone.
Such are his health fears, Putin had ordered each of the children to quarantine from Covid for two weeks before the meeting in Kaliningrad.
During today’s speech, he declared that Russia was the true Land of the Rising Sun.
Slouching in his chair, he said croakily: ‘Our neighbour Japan is called the Country of the Rising Sun.
‘But further east from Japan is Kamchatka, or Sakhalin [Russia’s largest island]. Even further east is New Zealand.
‘And further east from New Zealand is Chukotka [a Russian province almost touching Alaska].
‘And then there is only a 60-kilometre-wide strait to America.
‘In this sense the Country of the Rising Sun is Russia.’
He also told the audience in the regional capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky: ‘There is an expression, and whoever told me about it, I promised I would reproduce it out loud in public sometime.
‘You have to live for something to die for.
‘As strange as it may seem in your humanitarian field, this is something worth living for.’
During a rare eastern trip he will also oversee the culmination of the week-long Vostok-2022 military drills with a visit to Russia’s eastern capital Vladivostok.
The warmonger visited volunteer ornithologists from the Kamchatka falconry centre, working to preserve rare species of birds of prey.
The gyrfalcon was seen flying from its trainer to Putin to find foot in his glove, but at first it disobeyed the trainer.
‘It doesn’t want to go,’ said a man next to Putin.
The Kremlin president smiled then said: ‘Likes me!’
The centre aims to organise the reproduction of the rare gyrfalcon in captivity.
In Ukraine today, Russia continues to be pushed back by Kyiv’s forces after launching a counter offensive last week.
After days of declining to give details about their new offensive, Ukrainian officials posted an image online of three soldiers raising a flag over a town in Kherson province, a southern region occupied by Russia since the war’s early days.
The image of the flag being fixed to a pole on a rooftop, purportedly in Vysokopyllya in the north of Kherson, was released as President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukrainian forces had captured two towns in the south and one in the east. In an overnight address, he did not identify the locations.
APRIL 21: Putin is seen gripping his desk with his right hand while meeting with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu in the early stages of the war. The footage from the meeting raised questions about Putin’s health
JULY 26: Putin, left, listens to Yuri Borisov, the CEO of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, while he grips his desk with his right hand
AUGUST 25: Vladimir Putin is seen gripping the same desk with his right hand during a meeting with Head of the Federal Taxation Service Daniil Yegorov
JULY 19: Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen hobbling from his presidential plane during the welcoming ceremony in Tehran
Vladimir Putin’s five medically-related disappearances
November 2012: Business trips and long-distance flights of the president are canceled, some of Putin’s meetings shown by the Kremlin turn out to be ‘canned food’
March 5 – 15, 2015: Putin does not appear in public, all meetings are ‘canned’ – in other words pre-recorded events were shown with the pretense they were in real time
August 9-16, 2017: The President, with journalists, visits Abkhazia and Sochi, and then for a week the Kremlin publishes only ‘canned food’
February 2018: In the midst of an election campaign, the president cancels public events. Peskov admits that the head of state ‘had a cold’
September 13-29, 2021: Putin goes into ‘self-isolation’, all events are held via video link
After months of enduring punishing Russian artillery assaults in the east, Ukraine has at last begun its long-awaited counter-attack, its biggest since it drove Russian forces away from the outskirts of Kyiv in March.
Ukraine had kept most details of its new campaign under wraps, banning journalists from the frontline and offering little public commentary in order to preserve tactical surprise. Russia has said it has repelled assaults in Kherson.
In a rare acknowledgment from the Russian side that the Ukrainian counter-offensive was spoiling Moscow’s plans for territory it has seized, TASS news agency quoted a Moscow-installed official in Kherson as saying plans for a referendum to annex the region to Russia had been put on hold due to the security situation.
Mark Hertling, a retired former commander of U.S. ground forces in Europe, said Kyiv’s aim appeared to be to trap thousands of Russian troops on the east bank of the vast Dnipro River, destroying bridges the Russians now use for supplies and would need to escape.
Russia had left ‘a force in Kherson, with a river at their back & limited supply lines’, and Ukraine was hitting them with ‘precision weapons, confusing a RU force that already has very low morale and poor leadership,’ Hertling tweeted.
Zelensky’s announcement that a town had been captured in the east was also notable, a suggestion Ukraine was taking advantage of pressure in the south to try to reverse some of the gains Russia made elsewhere in recent months.
In his evening address on Sunday, Zelensky tempered his announcements of success with a warning to European countries that they could face a cold winter.
Moscow blames Western sanctions it says have interfered with repairs of equipment for forcing it to halt the flow of gas through Nord Stream 1, its main pipeline to Germany.
Russia was due to reopen the pipeline on Saturday but has said it will stay shut indefinitely.
On Friday, Putin showed further signs of his allegedly failing health as his legs twitched manically while giving a brainwashing history lesson to Russian children
‘Problems with gas supply arose because of the sanctions imposed on our country by Western states, including Germany and Britain,’ Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
European countries call the gas cut-off blackmail. They say they are finding alternative sources of gas and are already ahead of targets in filling up storage tanks for winter.
Countries led by Germany have rolled out multi-billion euro packages of support for consumers and businesses, which last week helped drive European gas prices back down sharply from record highs.
But the weekend news about Nord Stream’s extended shutdown sent prices soaring once again on Monday, with the main European benchmark up by as much as 35%, bringing fears of a bleak winter for consumers and businesses across the continent.
Germany’s DAX share index was down well over 2%, the Euro sank below 99 U.S. cents for the first time in decades, and the pound was not far off mid-1980s lows against the dollar as Liz Truss was announced as Britain’s next prime minister.
The warmonger visited volunteer ornithologists from the Kamchatka falconry center, working to preserve rare species of birds of prey
The gyrfalcon was seen flying from its trainer to Putin to find foot in his glove, but at first it disobeyed the trainer
Speaking shortly beforehand, Kremlin spokesman Peskov was scathing about Truss, saying it was hard to imagine relations getting any worse, but that a worsening could not be ruled out, given what he called anti-Russian rhetoric from Britain.
‘I don’t think that we can hope for anything positive,’ he said.
Peskov also said Moscow planned to retaliate for the latest Western move: a proposed cap on the price of Russian oil exports from December designed to reduce Moscow’s main source of income.
In Russia, which has effectively banned independent media since President Vladimir Putin launched his ‘special military operation’ in February, a judge revoked the license of liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, one of the last unofficial voices.
The ruling was ‘a political hit job, without the slightest legal basis’, said its editor, Dmitry Muratov, who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for the paper’s fight for free speech.
Novaya Gazeta was founded 30 years ago with Nobel Peace Prize money won by the previous Russian laureate – former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was buried at the weekend. Putin did not attend his funeral, a final symbolic snub of the man who presided over the breakup of the Soviet Union, when Ukraine was the most populous of 14 states to gain independence from Moscow.
With fighting shifting to southern Ukraine, international attention has focused in recent weeks on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, captured by Russia but still operated by Ukrainian engineers and hooked to Ukraine’s power grid.
Both sides accuse each other of risking nuclear catastrophe by shelling near the plant. Ukraine’s state nuclear company Energoatom said the final working reactor block of the Zaporizhzhia plant disconnected from Ukraine’s grid on Monday after Russian shelling disrupted power lines. There was no immediate comment from the Russian side.
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