Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s state of health has often come to the fore. He is said to be weakened and seriously ill. This week, there are several new elements that come to revive these rumors.
First of all, it was a public coughing fit that made people talk. A simple cold according to Interfax, the Russian public news agency, which he caught on Tuesday during a meeting in Iran with Presidents Ebrahim Raïsi and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Then the head of the Kremlin was also expected this week in Kazakhstan to meet the government. This trip has been cancelled.
Finally, a meeting with a delegation from South Ossetia-Alania, a secessionist republic of Georgia, was also planned for Wednesday but the latter would not have “taken off”, confides an Al Jazeera journalist: “It was already in drive to the airport, but was told the meeting had been postponed”.
On the Russian side, we obviously deny any weakness of the leader: “Everything is fine with his health,” said his spokesman Dmitri Peskov. “Ukraine, the Americans and the British have been spreading false information regarding the president’s health for months,” he said.
