Kyrylo Boudanov said in an interview with the American broadcaster ABC that he gets his information from “human sources” without saying more. Many rumors of illness surrounding Putin have previously been denied, especially by the CIA chief.
Rumors about the health of the Russian President continue. In an interview broadcast by American television network ABC on Wednesday, Kyrylo Budanov, the director of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, assured Vladimir Putin that he was “dying”.
“He’s going to die very quickly, I think, I hope,” he adds.
“We think it’s cancer,” says Budanov, who says he gets his information from “human sources.” “This war should end before he dies,” he said, however.
This senior officer, who took over as head of Ukraine’s intelligence service in 2020, was recently accused by the FSB of being one of the men behind the Crimean Bridge attack that took place last October.
If there has never been any official communication about a possible illness of the Russian president, rumors about his state of health are circulating. Rumors that cannot be verified, all the more so in connection with the conflict in Ukraine, which is leading to a veritable communications war between Kyiv and Moscow.
In April, after examining his state of health, the independent Russian medium Proekt put forward the hypothesis that the Russian head of state was suffering from thyroid cancer.
“I would say that our examination does not confirm that he has thyroid cancer, but he has been surrounded by doctors for five or seven years. They follow him in large numbers,” Roman Badanin, Proekt’s founder and editor-in-chief, said on BFMTV in April.
He says there are a number of nurses who have “only grown” in recent years, including an oncologist.
Rumors so far denied
However, CIA Director William Burns claimed so in July Vladimir Putin is “completely too healthy” and dismisses rumors of his deteriorating condition.
“What we can say is that he is completely too healthy,” he replied after being asked about the Russian President’s health.
The Russian foreign minister himself denied these rumors in a press release in May: “I don’t think anyone with all their senses can recognize the signs of illness or disease in this person (Putin).”