MOSCOW: The Kremlin on Tuesday rejected speculation about President Vladimir Putin’s health, saying he was fit and well.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in a regular call with reporters, also denied suggestions that the president was using body doubles, calling that an “absurd hoax”.
Reporters asked Peskov about Putin’s health following an unsourced report by a Russian Telegram channel, picked up by some Western media, that the president had suffered a serious health episode on Sunday evening.
Putin, a judo enthusiast who has long cultivated an “action man” image, turned 71 on Oct. 7. He maintains an intensive schedule of meetings and public appearances, many of them televised.
His recent programme included a visit to China last week, with stop-offs in two Russian cities on the way back.
In a 2020 interview, Putin denied longstanding rumours that he uses body doubles, although he said he had been offered the chance to use one in the past for security reasons.
In April this year, Peskov said talk of body doubles was “yet another lie” and that Putin was in enviable health.
New World order doesn’t include US
The Kremlin said on Monday that it agreed with U.S. President Joe Biden on the need to build a “new world order”, but that it disagreed that the United States was capable of building it.
In a call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the U.S. was talking about an “American-centric” world order that would not exist in future.
The exchange was emblematic of a contest, playing out against the background of the Ukraine and Gaza wars, in which Russia is trying to persuade developing countries to join it in building a new world free of U.S. “hegemony”.
In a speech on Friday, Biden said the order that had worked well for 50 years after World War Two had “sort of run out of steam” and a new one was needed. He said Americans had “an opportunity to do things, if we’re bold enough and have enough confidence in ourselves, to unite the world in ways that it never has been”.
Peskov said Moscow was in rare agreement with Biden about the need for a new order that, in his words, would be “free from the concentration of all mechanisms of world governance in the hands of one state”.
But he said Russia disagreed with Biden about the capacity of the United States to build such a system.
“In this part we disagree because the United States… no matter what world order they talk about, they mean an American-centric world order, that is, a world that revolves around the United States. It won’t be that way any more.”
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