Photo: ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO / AFP / Getty Images
A former US National Security Council official described a strange encounter over dinner with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who smelled “almost as if he had just come out of a special prep bath.”
Fiona Hill, who served as an adviser on Russia under then-President Donald Trump, spoke about the Russian president during a recent meeting with the BBC Sounds program “Desert Island Discs”.
“Now, this sounds really strange, but I could smell that it was freshly washed”, he said. “I wasn’t wearing cologne, but it was almost like I came out of a special prep bath or something, at the time.
“He was totally in control of himself projecting this image, I thought, ‘Wow, look at this !’” Hill recalled.
“’This was all staged, every little element of this was staged, it was a performance’.
Hill also noted the tightly controlled appearance of the Kremlin leader.
“I looked at the suits, one of them finely tailored, the way that little vein pulses on the left side of her face,” she told host Lauren Laverne.
“I realized right away that like the rest of us, I really could have done it with glasses because I had these giant cards. He could read them all, cards that told him who was who and what to say and stuff like this.”
The former national security official also recalled how the Russian leader did not eat or drink anything.
“I noticed that he did not eat or drink anything. I saw the watch on her wrist, very expensive,” she said, adding that Putin “was not very talkative” and hardly looked at her during the meal.
It is not clear when exactly the dinner took place, although Hill told “Desert Island Discs” that it happened while he was working as a national intelligence officer between 2006 to 2022 as an analyst for Russia and Eurasia.
Hill’s remarks come amid a flurry of reports on the health of Putin.
The anti-Kremlin Telegram account “General SVR” claimed that he recently underwent surgery to remove fluid from his abdomen.
He also claims that Putin’s surgery and subsequent recovery were covered up using “deepfake” technology to simulate his presence in videos of a scheduled council meeting security of Russia.
Affirms them Media reports have not been verified.
Last week, the mystery channel also claimed that Putin had pre-recorded footage in an attempt to cover up future surgeries and planned to use body doubles if necessary.
In April, Russian investigative outlet The Project reported that the leader has been regularly visited by an oncologist and speculated that he had thyroid cancer. Speculation about Putin’s health has continued, as he has been videotaped looking restless, keeping his distance from subordinates or acting strangely in public.
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