Vladimir Putin does have early stage Parkinson’s disease and pancreatic cancer, leaked spy documents have alleged in the latest unverified claim about the tyrant’s ill health.
The Russian leader has been plagued with rumours about his illnesses for months and he has regularly appeared twitching and unsteady in public, sparking hope in Ukraine and the West the despot could soon relinquish power.
Claims have been circulating among opposition figures, fuelled by his unexplained absences and his shaky public appearances, that he is battling serious health problems but they have always been rubbished by the Kremlin.
But now emails from a Russian intelligence source appear to confirm the 70-year-old has been diagnosed with cancer and Parkinson’s, according to The Sun.
The leaked documents allegedly read: ‘I can confirm he has been diagnosed with early stage Parkinson’s disease, but it’s already progressing. This fact will be denied in every possible way and hidden.
‘Putin is regularly stuffed with all kinds of heavy steroids and innovative painkilling injections to stop the spread of pancreatic cancer he was recently diagnosed with.
‘It not only causes a lot of pain, Putin has a state of puffiness of the face and other side effects – including memory lapses.
‘In his close circle, there are rumours that in addition to pancreatic cancer, which is gradually spreading, Putin also has prostate cancer.’
The tyrant was recently spotted with apparent track marks from IV treatment on the back of his hand, adding further fuel to the fire.
Telegram channel General SVR has long been pushing the claims that Putin is suffering from cancer and Parkinson’s.
Last week, it reported that the despot’s relatives are concerned about coughing fits, constant nausea and a lack of appetite, after he allegedly underwent a medical examination.
His circle is worried that his ‘thinness and persistent cough’ is becoming noticeable and will be seen by elites in Russia as a ‘sign of the leader’s rapidly deteriorating health’.
Despite appearing considerably bloated and puffy in the face, the Russian president has lost 18lb in recent months, said the channel which purports to have sources inside the Kremlin.
Ever since Putin ordered his military forces to invade Ukraine on February 24, rumours have been swirling about the state of his health.
He has been seen uncontrollably shaking, gripping tables and chairs for support, and appeared bloated and ill-at-ease.
The president has also frequently disappeared from the public eye for weeks at a time in recent years amid rumours he is undergoing surgery.
Over the summer, the Russian president was pictured awkwardly swatting mosquitos from his face with one arm while the other hung limply by his side.
Similarly, at a huge Victory Day parade in Moscow in May, the now 70-year-old autocrat appeared to walk with a limp and had a blanket over his lap, while in April he was seen gripping a table in a televised meeting with his defence minister Sergei Shoigu.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also quashed any health rumours about Putin as ‘nothing but fakes’.
The General SVR channel has long claimed that Putin is suffering from abdominal cancer, Parkinson’s disease and a schizoaffective disorder.
Its claims cannot be verified but it was among the first to report in advance the shape of Putin’s recent mobilisation strategy.
The channel is reportedly authored by an exiled Kremlin lieutenant-general, known by the alias Viktor Mikhailovich.
Meanwhile in Ukraine today, Russia ordered the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians in Ukraine, raising fears of a massive escalation of the war.
Up to 70,000 residents in the Russian-controlled eastern bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson have been told to flee their homes because of imminent danger.
The region’s Kremlin-backed leader warned Ukraine is preparing to detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ or carry out a missile strike on the nearby hydroelectric station to deliberately flood the area.
But the dire warnings have raised fears that Russia will carry out those attacks after previous false flag threats.
Ukraine says the evacuations represent a war crime because civilians are being forcibly deported from occupied territory.
Russia, which claims to have annexed the area, says it is taking civilians to safety because of a threat Ukraine might use unconventional weapons.
Russia had previously ordered civilians out of a pocket it controls on the west bank of the river, where Ukrainian forces have been advancing to capture the city of Kherson.
But now the order has been extended to the eastern bank due to the latest threats.
‘Due to the possibility of the use of prohibited methods of war by the Ukrainian regime, as well as information that Kyiv is preparing a massive missile strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, there is an immediate danger of the Kherson region being flooded,’ Vladimir Saldo, Russian-installed head of occupied Kherson province, said in a video message.
‘Given the situation, I have decided to expand the evacuation zone by 15 km from the Dnipro,’ he said.
‘The decision will make it possible to create a layered defence in order to repel Ukrainian attacks and protect civilians.’
Kyiv has denied it plans to attack the Kakhovka dam, a 100 ft high, two-mile-long facility and unleash a reservoir the size of the Great Salt Lake across southern Ukraine, flooding towns and villages, several of which Russian forces seized at the start of the war.
Ukraine said repeated Russian claims that Ukraine is preparing an attack on the dam, which regulates water supplies to the annexed Crimean peninsula and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, were a sign that Russia itself was considering staging an attack and blaming it on Kyiv and its Western supporters.
Moscow has also accused Kyiv of planning to use a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ to spread radiation, or to blow up a dam to flood towns and villages in Kherson province.
Kyiv says accusations it would use such tactics on its own territory are absurd, but that Russia might be planning such actions itself to blame Ukraine.
In similar brazen claims today, Moscow accused Britain of coordinating attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipes.
Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin‘s spokesman, said Kremlin intelligence agents ‘have data indicating British military specialists were directing and coordinating the attack’ which destroyed two gas lines running from Russia to Germany in September.
It comes after Kim Dotcom, who ran site Megaupload before he was convicted of fraud, began circulating a conspiracy theory that Liz Truss had texted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately after the attack saying ‘it’s done’.
Kim claimed to have learned of the message from Truss’s iCloud, after it was revealed that Russia hacked her phone while she was foreign secretary.
Neither Kim nor Peskov have released the evidence they claim to have seen.
But the accusation represents a new line of attack from Russia at the US and Britain, which have led support for Ukraine in resisting Putin’s invasion. London has rejected the claims.
Experts from the United Nations’ nuclear power agency inspected two sites in Ukraine on Tuesday that Russia identified in unfounded claims that Ukrainian authorities planned to set off the dirty bombs.
International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi said the inspections for evidence of a so-called dirty bomb, requested by Kyiv in the wake of the unsubstantiated Russian allegations, would be completed soon.
In the wake of battlefield setbacks for Russia in its war in Ukraine, top Russian officials including Putin, made unsubstantiated accusations that Ukraine was manufacturing such an explosive device, which scatters radioactive waste.
The Russians, without providing evidence, alleged the Ukrainians planned to make the purported bomb look like Russia’s doing.
Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, alleged in a letter to Security Council members last week that Ukraine’s nuclear research facility and mining company ‘received direct orders from Zelensky’s regime to develop such a dirty bomb.’
Western nations have called Moscow’s repeated claim ‘transparently false.’
Ukrainian authorities dismissed it as an attempt to distract attention from Moscow’s own alleged plans to detonate a dirty bomb as a way to justify a further escalation of hostilities.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has said the investigated sites ‘are under IAEA safeguards and have been visited regularly by IAEA inspectors,’ whose mission is detecting undeclared nuclear activities and materials related to the development of dirty bombs.
‘The IAEA inspected one of the two locations a month ago and no undeclared nuclear activities or materials were found there,’ the agency said in a statement Monday.
The U.N.’s atomic energy watchdog also has had on-site monitors at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
Fighting around near Europe’s largest nuclear power station has created worries of a possibly catastrophic leak there.
The mouth of the wide Dnipro River has also become one of the most consequential frontlines in the war in recent weeks, with Ukrainian forces advancing to expel Russian troops from their only pocket on the west bank.
Russia has thousands of troops there and has been trying to reinforce the area.
Ukraine’s advance has slowed in recent days, with commanders citing weather and tougher terrain.
Saldo, the Russian-imposed occupation leader for the province, identified seven towns on the east bank that would now be evacuated, comprising the main populated settlements along that stretch of the river.
The European Union accused Moscow on Tuesday of launching a new programme to illegally conscript men in Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014, to fight in its forces.
The EU statement said Moscow was disproportionately conscripting members of Crimea’s indigenous Tatar minority to fight in its war.
Russia, which launched its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine in February, has announced it has completed a mobilisation drive ordered in September by President Vladimir Putin, saying it had called up 300,000 reservists and more were not needed.
But Putin has not issued a decree ending the mobilisation, raising concern he could restart it without notice.
A senior Russian ruling party senator said on Tuesday a decree formally ending the mobilisation was not needed.
Thousands of Russian men have fled abroad to escape conscription to a conflict which has killed thousands, displaced millions, shaken the global economy and reopened Cold War-era divisions.
Just north of Kherson, Russia fired four missiles into the Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv overnight, demolishing half an apartment building.
Reuters saw rescue workers recover the body of an elderly woman from the rubble.
As rush hour was under way, passersby walked past a two-storey school, the front of which had been torn off by the force of the blast that left a massive crater.
‘This is what the barbarian horde does,’ said Irena Siden, 48, the school’s deputy director, standing in front of the gutted building as workers began sweeping up the rubble.
‘They (the Russians) are the descendants of the barbarian horde. They stole our history and how they are trying to steal our culture.’
Russia fired a huge volley of missiles at Ukrainian cities on Monday in what Putin called retaliation for an attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet at the weekend.
Ukraine said it shot most of those missiles down, but some had hit power stations, knocking out electricity and water supplies.
Kyiv forces also shot down two Russian attack helicopters in just three minutes in another blow to Putin‘s botched invasion.
Anti-aircraft gunners hit the Ka-52 Alligators in the southern Kherson region yesterday evening, Ukraine’s Air Force said.
The £12million single-seat attack helicopter is nicknamed the Black Shark and has been described as Russia‘s ‘deadliest helicopter’.
Its battlefield management system allows it to share data with other aircraft to coordinate attack operations.
It came weeks after Ukrainian troops shot down four Russian helicopters in 18 minutes.
Ukraine also blew up a Mi-8 helicopter gunship in Donetsk after a surface-to-air missile picked it out of the sky yesterday.
Footage shows the Russian attack helicopter flying low across a field before it is hit by a missile which explodes on impact – but the chopper continues to fly for some time with flames gushing out of its left side.
The helicopter begins emitting black smoke and then comes crashing down in a fireball in a field, rolling on to its roof as its rotor breaks off.
The images were obtained from the 54th Separate Mechanised Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Monday, along with statement saying that the images were filmed on the ‘administrative borders of Luhansk and Donetsk regions’.
They added: ‘Somehow a Russian helicopter flew in to bring death to Ukrainian families, but the sky is tightly controlled by the glorious soldiers of the anti-aircraft missile division of the 54th Separate Mechanised Brigade.
‘The soldiers saw a foreign “bird” in the sky and did what had to be done – they “destroyed the harmful fly” together with its crew.’
They signed off with ‘Glory to Ukraine!’
Last month Ukraine carried off a similar rampage, downing four helicopters in 18 minutes in the country’s south.
The helicopters – presumed to be Soviet-era KA-52 models – were taken down by Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile units.
During his evening address, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the country’s forces had shot down 45 of 55 cruise missiles on Monday, and a Ka-52 alligator was downed.
‘Today our air forces and everyone involved in protecting the skies did a great job,’ said Zelensky. ‘Most of the objects that the terrorists identified as targets were saved.’
Ukraine claims Russia has now lost about 72,470 personnel, 2,698 tanks, 5,501 armoured combat vehicles, 1,730 artillery units, 383 multiple launch rocket systems, 197 air defence systems, 276 warplanes, 257 helicopters, 1,415 drones, 397 cruise missiles, 16 warships, 4,143 motor vehicles and fuel tankers, and 154 units of special equipment.
Russia has claimed that its casualties have been much lower but provides infrequent updates on its latest figures.
Source: Daily Mail
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