Yevgeny Selivanov, a thyroid cancer specialist at Moscow Central Clinical Hospital, made 35 trips with Mr Putin to the Black Sea resort of Sochi – reportedly his favorite place – according to Proekt, a Russian investigative journal that has been excluded from the Kremlin. In its investigation, Proekt claims that 10 doctors spent more than 1,400 days with the Russian leader in four years as part of his entourage, with Mr Selivanov spending about 166 days with Putin. “The president was regularly accompanied to Sochi by an average of five doctors,” the report said. Proekt claims that the 69-year-old leader has shown public interest in thyroid cancer, saying that in July 2020 he met with the head of the National Medical Research Center for Endocrinology, Ivan Dedov.
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He also claimed that Putin had experimented with a number of questionable alternative health procedures, including bathing in blood-sucking deer antler extracts. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reportedly took Putin to the Altai in southern Siberia for the first time in the mid-2000s, where he convinced him of the benefits of treatment, claiming it improves the cardiovascular system and rejuvenates the skin. On one trip, Putin sank into a bathtub filled with a characteristic reindeer horn broth, the report said. The method of extracting the blood involves deer being “tied or clamped to a special machine, raised so that they can be hung helplessly and the living horns still cut – often with an ordinary hacksaw,” the reports say. “Animal rights activists compare animal senses to torture – pulling out a human fingernail.” There has been widespread speculation that Mr Putin was hiding health problems from the Russian people. His face looks more puffy in recent photos, a symptom associated with some steroid treatments. Earlier this month, Nancy Pelosi, chair of the US House of Representatives, suggested that Mr Putin was suffering from some kind of illness. “Some say he has cancer and some say he has Covid brain fog,” he said. After a long period of isolation due to Covid-19, Mr. Putin met with Paralympians on September 13 in the Kremlin, but suddenly announced that he had to return to isolation, the report said. It was around this time that Proekt said that Mr. Putin had undergone a complicated procedure related to a thyroid disease, since “he did not appear in public for the whole of September.” Referring to the famous long tables at which the Russian President had meetings, the report states: “Putin went through the Covid-19 pandemic in a way that no other head of state in the world has ever done: the Russian President held most of his meetings through video connection and allowed the few visitors to see him only after a two-week quarantine and stool test. “It was obvious that the leader’s health was the number one priority.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peshkov allegedly denied the report’s allegations.
