The Kremlin has rejected what it said were lies that President Vladimir Putin had lookalike body doubles who stood in for the 70-year-old leader and that he spent much of his time shielding in a nuclear bunker.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov listed what he said were fabrications about Russia in a speech that touched on the country’s history since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, the causes of the Ukraine war and the alleged perfidy of Western society.
“You have probably heard that he (Putin) has very many doubles who work instead of him while he sits in a bunker,” Mr Peskov said at a Moscow conference, before chuckling: “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,” he said.
“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.”
It is not the first time he has been accused of using a body double – in 2020 he acknowledged he was offered the chance to use one to make a public appearance but said he declined the offer and said he never used one.
The Kremlin has also repeatedly dismissed speculation that Mr Putin, Russia’s paramount leader since 1999, is ill.
During a state visit to Moscow last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping told Mr Putin he was convinced voters would support the Russian leader again in a presidential election due in 2024.
Mr Putin has not yet said whether he will seek another term.
When he first came to power, he vowed to end the chaos that gripped post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s, but the invasion of Ukraine is the most serious military crisis any Kremlin chief has faced since the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979-89.
The conflict in Ukraine has ushered in the gravest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, while Mr Putin has vowed to pivot away from the West towards China.
Russian strike on museum kills two: Ukraine
As the in Ukraine rolls into its second year, the state emergency service said a Russian missile struck a museum in the centre of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kupiansk on Tuesday, killing two women and wounding 10 other people.
Rescue workers dug through mounds of rubble to retrieve the bodies after the local history museum was hit by what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff and the regional governor said was a Russian S-300 missile.
Mr Zelenskyy posted a video of a devastated building that had spewed out rubble and debris into the street.
Its windows were smashed and a section of the wall and roof was destroyed.
“The terrorist country is doing everything to destroy us completely,” he wrote in a Telegram post.
“Our history, our culture, our people.”
Russia did not immediately comment on the attack.
The country has previously denied deliberately targeting civilians in its full-scale invasion that has killed thousands of people, uprooted millions and flattened buildings in cities, towns and villages across Ukraine.
Kupiansk, which had a pre-war population of 26,000, lies in Kharkiv region.
It is an important rail hub that was occupied by Russian forces for months after they invaded Ukraine in February, 2022.
Ukrainian forces chased them out of Kupiansk in a lightning counteroffensive in September that also recaptured the cities of Izyum and Balakliia.
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