Putin’s awkward wristwatch mishap fuels “body double” conspiracy claims

The conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin uses body doubles resurfaced on Tuesday after a video appeared to show the Russian president forgetting on which wrist he wears his watch.

“Putin forgot he wears his watch on his right hand. Or that isn’t Putin? What’s going on?” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. He shared the video that shows Putin during a meeting of the Council for Strategic Development and National Projects on Tuesday. The Russian leader appears to be attempting to look at the time on his watch, but confuses his left hand with his right.

Putin has been quoted by state media as saying that he wears his watches on his right hand, not because he is left-handed, but out of habit. The Russian president said in 2008 that he likes dangling his watch on his wrist, and the “crown” of the watch, if worn on his left hand, rubs. “It hurts,” Putin added.

“With ‘Putin’s’ appearances at the same time in different places, evident differences in movements, & now missing where ‘Putin’ has his watch, it is time for mainstream media to call Putin out: He uses one or two doubles,” Anders Åslund, an economist and adjunct professor at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, posted on X.

Newsweek has contacted Russia’s Foreign Ministry via email for comment. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly said that Putin has been using body doubles. The Kremlin has rejected the allegations, and Newsweek has not been able to substantiate them.

Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, GUR, said in June that Putin has body doubles who stand in for him at certain events.

“Putin uses doubles,” said Yusov. “This is a fact that is based both on operative intelligence and on the assessments of physiognomists and many other specialists.”

And in August 2022, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Major General Kyrylo Budanov added that Putin’s ears looked different in several of his public appearances. Budanov said on 1+1, a Ukrainian TV channel, that Putin’s habits, appearance and even height had changed.

Keir Giles is a Russia expert and senior consulting fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank. He told Newsweek in March that Putin may have used a body double in a visit to the occupied Ukrainian port city of Mariupol because Russia needed “to sell its people a story of success in the war.”

“That includes letting them cling on to the idea that Russia is a force for good in the cities it has destroyed,” Giles said. “That’s why a visit by Putin or one of his doubles to Mariupol had to take [place] in the same new block of flats that Russian state television has featured multiple times, rather than the scenes of devastation surrounding them.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has repeatedly brushed off the allegations.

“You have probably heard that [Putin] has very many doubles who work instead of him while he sits in a bunker,” Peskov said during a press briefing in April. “Yet another lie.

“You see yourselves what our president is like. He always was, and is now, mega-active. Those who work next to him can hardly keep up with him. His energy can only be envied. His health can, God willing, only be wished for. Of course, he doesn’t sit in any bunkers. This is also a lie,” Peskov added.

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