Hundreds of thousands of Russians searched for answers surrounding President Vladimir Putin’s health in October, via Russia’s most popular search engine Yandex, as an unfounded rumor that he had suffered a cardiac arrest made headlines around the globe.
Agentstvo, a Russian investigative site launched in 2021, found that the search terms “dead Putin,” “dying Putin” and “Putin died” had more than 417,000 impressions, with the queries about his alleged death appearing in the top 12 queries with the word “Putin.”
The rumor, which the Kremlin has called a “hoax,” emerged after a Telegram post by Russian gossip channel General SVR on October 26 stated that Putin died at his residence in Valdai at “20:42 p.m. Moscow time,” sparking “a coup d’état in Russia.”
“Now the doctors are blocked in the room with Putin’s corpse, they are being held by employees of the presidential security service on the personal order of [Federal Protective Service Director] Dmitry Kochnev, who is in touch and receives instructions from the secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Nikolai Patrushev,” the post said.
“The security of the president’s double has been strengthened. Active negotiations are underway. Any attempt to pass off a double as president after Putin’s death is a coup d’état.”
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Another post on October 23 stated that officers had found the president “convulsively arched while lying on the floor, rolling his eyes” and “was moved to a specially equipped room in his residence, where the necessary medical equipment for resuscitation had already been installed.”
General SVR said that while the “president’s condition has been stabilized and is under constant medical supervision,” the incident “seriously alarmed the president’s inner circle, despite the fact that the attending doctors had already warned that Putin was very ill and was unlikely to live until the end of autumn.”
The Telegram account, which has nearly half a million subscribers, claims to have insider information from the Kremlin, but it has published misinformation on multiple occasions. The channel’s author is anonymous.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters the claim that Putin suffered a cardiac arrest and died was “just another hoax,” and that “everything is fine.”
The Russian president has also been seen in public, attending government meetings, since the Telegram posts were published.
Newsweek has contacted Russia’s Foreign Ministry for comment via email for additional comment.
Agentstvo reported that the majority of searches about Putin’s “death” via Yandex were made between October 23 to October 29, coinciding with the posts published by General SVR. There were 6.3 million searches with the word “Putin” in October, the publication noted.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.