Putin was supposed to encounter a “random” tourist in the empty lobby of one of the Moscow hotels. The man in the video tells the president that he came to the Russian capital from the Black Sea resort of Sochi. A short conversation about the weather follows.
“Was it warm in there?” asks the Russian president. “When we left, it was cold, and it was cold when we arrived here,” the man answers him with a laugh. Then the two shake hands and Putin gets into his car.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov presented it as a chance meeting between Putin and an ordinary Russian, but the reality was clearly different. “The person in question was Alexander Bazarny, who previously worked for the company managing the villas of Putin and the mother of his girlfriend Alina Kabaeva,” wrote the opposition website Agency, stating that these companies have ties to the Russian secret services and the energy concern Gazprom, and Bazarny apparently worked for them as a bodyguard and driver.
On Monday, the Kremlin also published footage from another Putin meeting in the same hotel. The head of the Kremlin was supposed to pick up his former teacher there, 92-year-old Věra Gurevičová.
“Is that you?” the senior woman says incredulously in the video. This later fueled speculation among some that it could be a double.
“Yes, it’s me,” Putin, dressed in jeans and a checkered shirt, assures the woman with a bouquet in her hand. The woman then covers him with kisses.
