'Paranoid' Putin Mocked for Maintaining Far Distance From Audience

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday celebrated a national holiday with a patriotic speech, and his distance from the audience has resulted in a large amount of comments on social media.

"A tiny man, terrified of his people (note the distance between him and the audience), committing enormous crimes," Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, wrote on Twitter in a post that contained a video clip of Putin's appearance.

The Russian leader appeared to be many feet away from the audience at the Russia Day awards ceremony in the Kremlin. According to Reuters, Putin's speech did not address advances made by Ukraine in its recently launched counteroffensive, but he did call on his people to let their feelings for Russia "unite our society even more strongly" in order to give support for soldiers fighting on behalf of the Kremlin in what Putin calls "the special military operation" in Ukraine.

"Check the distance Putin has between himself and the audience," tweeted Markus Hankins, publisher of Sweden's Hela Hisingen news site. "Paranoid much?"

Perhaps the reason the audience was placed at such a far distance from Putin's podium is due to his reported fear of catching COVID-19.

For the past few years, Putin has frequently been pictured meeting with world leaders at the Kremlin while seated at opposite ends of a long table. Also, a former Kremlin guard said earlier this year in an interview with the investigative website Dossier Center that Putin is "a self-isolating president."

During the interview, the former Federal Guard Service (FSO) guard, Gleb Karakulov, detailed how Kremlin staff "have to observe a strict quarantine for two weeks before any event, even those lasting 15 to 20 minutes. There is a pool of employees who have been cleared—who underwent this two-week quarantine. They are [considered] 'clean' and can work in the same room as Putin."

Other social media users speculated that perhaps Putin was not at the Russia Day ceremony Monday and instead one of the body doubles he reportedly employs was used at the event.

"The distance is probably also there to help conceal the fact it's a double. I doubt the real Putin has been in any public setting in quite a while," one person tweeted in response to Gerashchenko's video.

Such speculation comes after Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine's military intelligence agency, told the news site Ukrainska Pravda last week that Putin uses decoys at official events.

"Putin uses doubles," Yusov said. "This is a fact that is based both on operative intelligence and on the assessments of physiognomists and many other specialists."

Keir Giles, a Russia expert and a senior consulting fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank, told Newsweek for a previous story in March that Putin may have used a body double in a visit to the occupied port city of Mariupol because Russia needed "to sell its people a story of success in the war."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has previously denied Putin uses body doubles, saying in April that such reports are a "lie."

Newsweek reached out to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs via email for comment.