Four days after Wagner’s attempted armed mutiny, Russian President Vladimir Putin left Moscow for the first time for a trip to the Caucasus republic of Dagestan.
In the videos released by the Kremlin, President Putin can be seen in the crowd shaking hands and taking selfies.
Unusual images for a leader who is usually filmed and photographed at a safe distance from his interlocutors, even at official meetings.
That’s why many people on the Internet are expressing their doubts: there are those who claim that the film filmed in Dagestan is not about Putin at all, but about his double.
Several observers do not go so far as to question the identity of the video’s protagonist, instead focusing on the different behaviors of Putin.
“Because Putin was so different from Putin in Dagestan – that is: so close to the crowd and so ‘personal’,” asks the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg, for example. And Max Seddon, correspondent for the Financial Times, notes that “Putin’s appearance before an enthusiastic crowd” appears to be a reaction “to the way Wagner was received in Rostov”.