Vladimir Putin accused of faking visit to military hospital
Russian President Vladimir Putin may have recently staged a visit to a military hospital in Moscow to meet with wounded soldiers, according to eagle-eyed online users who claimed to have recognized one of the “patients” from an earlier event.
Wearing a white lab coat, Putin could be seen on video and stills speaking to pajama-clad soldiers at Mandryk Military Hospital in what was his first such visit since the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
Putin was accompanied on the visit by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. He asked one of the soldiers standing at attention by their beds about his little son and said, “He’ll be proud of his father.”
After the hospital visit, Putin hailed the troops as “heroes” during a televised meeting with government officials.
But a day later, Adam Rang, a self-proclaimed “counter-propaganda” activist living in Estonia, tweeted that one of the soldiers at the hospital looks eerily familiar.
“Putin met with a wounded soldier who, by a strange coincidence, was also a factory worker he had previously met,” Rang said.
Rang shared a photo of the alleged soldier in the hospital room and another image allegedly showing the same man with a receding hairline and prominent widow’s head in a crowd who met with Putin on another occasion.
rang and Ukrainian racing driver Igor Shushko also shared a compilation of photos showing a number of recurring characters meeting with Putin years apart.
“In case you were wondering how #Putin could possibly risk being in the presence of regular #Russians. He never does,” Shushko tweeted.
The claim that the hospital photo-op was fake was further substantiated by the mysterious author behind the General SVR Telegram channel, who is said to be a former KGB spy with ties to the Kremlin.
In a Thursday post, the Telegram author argued that Putin did not visit the military hospital and that video of his meeting with Russia’s wounded warriors was pre-recorded or “canned.”
“Putin and the FPS (Federal Protection Service) are certainly magician illusionists, but they are still a long way from David Copperfield,” the post sarcastically concluded.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/vladimir-putin-accused-of-faking-visit-to-military-hospital/ Vladimir Putin accused of faking visit to military hospital
