Behind his strongman image, Putin's world is shrinking

There are few who can claim to know Vladimir Putin. As Russians go to the polls this weekend, those who have experienced the president at close range describe his power, and growing paranoia.

The area around Valdai is straight out of a fairytale.

Tucked deep in a national park between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, hills bursting with birch and pine rise to one side of the town.

On the other, a vast network of glacial lakes extends as far as the eye can see. Crisp summer days here often begin with mist lingering over the water. In winter, the dense green forest turns white as branches bow under the weight of fresh snow.

It's easy to see why Vladimir Putin loves this place, although the locals don't really talk about that. Politics is a taboo subject for Russians and in Valdai — home to around 14,000 people, if the country's notoriously unreliable population stats are to be believed — that's absolutely the case.

"I have no idea," one woman, who has lived in the area her whole life, says when asked whether she knew the Russian president had a pad nearby.

Really?

One of the wealthiest and most identifiable people in the world has a lavish "dacha", or holiday home, just across the water. Yet no one knew that the man who has towered over Russia's public affairs for decades, and changed the course of Russia's history, could be having a mud therapy treatment a few kilometres away? (Yes, the president's compound has its own spa complex, but more on that later.)

"You must remember that discretion is one of the main security measures around Putin," says Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert and honorary professor at University College London. "Take his train, for example." 

Putin has a special armoured train, Galeotti says, made to look just like an ordinary one. 

"If you're in the know, you'll realise the track has been cleared and the unexpected bump on its roof is actually a radio. But if you're just a normal person, when you see this thing pass you're not going to say, 'Aha, Putin's on the move'.

"In that context, it's by no means impossible people don't know what's going on [in Valdai]."

For someone who is among the most powerful figures of his generation, there remains a lot of mystique about Vladimir Putin. 

In the information gap, speculation swirls. 

Beneath that strongman image sit claims today's Putin is far less impressive: an ailing, isolated philanderer who relies on a team of body doubles to keep up public propaganda appearances.

Putin doesn't spend as much time as he used to in Valdai, once believed to be his favourite residence among the 20-odd he has access to. These days his dacha is within range of Ukraine's drones. Despite aerial defences and protective nets set up around the property, staying there appears to have been deemed more risky than relaxing.

American political scientist Jason Smart says it seems that instead Putin has spent most of the past 10 months in a bunker.

"I assume this bunker is very, very large — an underground mansion — but it's still a bomb shelter," says Smart, who was kicked out of Russia in 2010 after working with the democratic opposition.

Putin is not only scared of Ukrainian drones, Smart believes. "He's also scared of his people on the inside."

Smart is referring to Putin's inner sanctum of ultra-wealthy confidants and henchmen whom he keeps onside by lining their pockets with public money. Smart argues these influential "gangsters" could soon turn on their leader — a prediction not everyone agrees with.

But as Russians head to the polls this weekend to vote in parliamentary elections that analysts contend will be neither free nor fair, there is evidence to suggest the country's 73-year-old leader is under more pressure than ever.

Strategic genius or parasitic despot?

Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in its fifth year, has backfired spectacularly. Credible estimates suggest 30,000 men a month are being killed, injured or deemed missing yet Putin is expected to launch a second forced mobilisation of more than 500,000 civilians into the military to continue fighting. Putin denies this and there is no doubt doing so would be wildly unpopular. But the president reportedly believes if he does not achieve his objectives in Ukraine, he could "be hanged".

In a televised address this week, Putin cast the election as a barometer of support for the war. 

"Your choice and your will will once again demonstrate that millions of people stand behind our soldiers, that we are a united people bound together by shared values, historical memory, and love for our homeland," he declared, having already excluded most anti-war candidates from the ballot.

European leaders have warned Putin could launch "hybrid attacks" on NATO countries. On Thursday, Polish PM Donald Tusk went further, telling his country's parliament that drone and missile strikes were not out of the question. Putin has denied it.

The front lines have been largely frozen for three years, but attacks between Russia and Ukraine elsewhere are escalating. And there are indications they are becoming more desperate. Last weekend, Ukraine's railway operator Ukrzaliznytsia claimed the Kremlin had unsuccessfully attempted to blow up a train carrying former British prime minister Boris Johnson, who was travelling to Poland with other high-profile dignitaries after visiting Kyiv.

Russia's economy is also struggling as a result of Western sanctions and Ukrainian drone strikes on energy infrastructure, which have disrupted the Kremlin's critical wartime financial lifelines. Fuel has been a sore point, with long queues a common sight at petrol stations. Russia was once among the world's largest exporters of oil, but last month Moscow confirmed it had restricted sales of the commodity abroad and even begun importing it.

"The economic situation is deteriorating. People are feeling the effects of the war. But more importantly, there is an elite in Russia that realises Putin has led the country to the verge of the abyss," says Smart. 

Putin has navigated his way out of crisis many times over more than 25 years in power. But many experts argue his current predicament represents a tipping point.

"Even now, with his forces having been bogged down in Ukraine for years, there is still this whole idea some people have that Putin is playing three-dimensional chess," says Galeotti. "He's not. He's not a grand strategic genius. He's an opportunist. He's often very able, but he's often very incapable."

In mainstream Western discourse, Russia's president is typically cast as a merciless, parasitic despot who exerts complete control over his country by any means necessary. Friends who fall out of favour are stripped of their assets. Political opponents are poisoned. Low-level protesters are imprisoned. 

So, how accurate is this depiction?

'A sense of his soul'

Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott met Putin multiple times. Their interactions were defined by the 2014 MH17 disaster in which 298 people, including 38 Australians, were killed when Russian-backed separatists shot down a passenger flight over south-eastern Ukraine. Incensed, Abbott did away with diplomatic language and promised to "shirtfront" Putin at a looming summit in China.

Here, he shared with me new details of that meeting.

"After my 'shirtfront' conversation with him at APEC in Beijing in 2014 he turned to me and berated me in these terms: 'You are not a native Australian, but I AM A NATIVE RUSSIAN!!'," Abbott recalls. "I'm sure this was his way of telling me that Ukraine was part of Russia's blood and soil, but what would the leader of an immigrant nation know."

Abbott says Putin went on to claim that Ukrainians were "all fascists", that Ukraine was "not a real country" and that Ukrainians had themselves shot down MH17 as a "provocation", despite Western intelligence confirming otherwise.

"It was obvious to me in mid-2014 that Putin was trying to destroy Ukraine as an independent country," Abbott says. "The world has been far too slow to wake up to him and even now is failing to help Ukraine enough and failing to rearm quickly enough in the face of aggressive dictatorships."

While overwhelmingly scathing of Putin — Abbott described him as a "dictator" in our exchange — the former PM says his Russian counterpart did have "a certain charisma".

It's not the first time that description has come up. Former US president George W Bush Junior developed a famously friendly relationship with Putin when both men were new to their jobs.

"I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy — I was able to get a sense of his soul," Bush said in June 2001, when asked about the Russian leader after their first in-person meeting.

Bush had taken office earlier that year, while Putin ascended to the presidency in his country 18 months prior. As their tenures went on, cordiality — on the American side at least — gave way to concern. Bush's administration began criticising the democratic backsliding in Moscow, which hit new levels in 2008 when Putin engineered a way to retain significant authority over Russian affairs despite reaching the limit of his constitutional term.

When he could no longer legally be president, Putin shifted sideways to become prime minister, where he continued to pull the strings. By 2012, the path had been cleared for him to reclaim his old job. He has kept it ever since.

Putin's game

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is one of very few people who have dared tell Vladimir Putin the Kremlin's corruption must stop. He says this conversation landed him in prison for a decade.

When Putin's reign was in its infancy, Khodorkovsky was among Russia's original oligarchs and the country's richest person. Much of his fortune of many, many billions of US dollars was amassed during the chaotic dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the cash-strapped government began privatising state assets after 70-plus years of communism.

Khodorkovsky was never in Putin's purple circle. The president considered him a threat. In 2001, Khodorkovsky founded Open Russia, a not-for-profit that advocated for democracy. While the organisation's mission was altruistic, Khodorkovsky and others in Moscow's corporate elite also stood to benefit financially from cleaning up Russia's relentless graft. They were keen to access international capital markets and grow their business empires. Before that could happen, however, anti-corruption measures would need to be legislated. 

In February 2003, Khodorkovsky asked Putin to help.

"I went in there and showed Putin an example of a totally corrupt transaction, in which around $400 million was stolen from the national budget," Khodorkovsky says.

But what he did not know until a few years later was the corrupt transaction "went straight into Vladimir Putin's pocket".

"The president had already decided for himself that corruption would be the backbone of his regime," Khodorkovsky told me. "Basically, if you are not corrupt, you cannot be part of his system."

Less than a year after that conversation with Putin, Khodorkovsky was arrested on trumped-up fraud charges. 

The government froze shares in his biggest company, the oil giant Yukos. Staff were harassed by authorities and much of Khodorkovsky's wealth evaporated. The corporation's assets were snapped up at bargain prices by the Kremlin and divided among Putin loyalists. By making an example of the country's richest man, the president's message was clear.

"I thought I would spend a maximum of four years in prison, since that's how long an innocent person can be held until the court's verdict. And then I would be released with an acquittal," Khodorkovsky says. "The fact there would be this absolutely shameless trial, of course, I could not have predicted."

Khodorkovsky spent almost 10 years behind bars. 

In 2013 Putin granted him a surprise pardon on "humanitarian" grounds. Most experts agree the president was hoping to improve Russia's global image as it prepared to host the Winter Olympics a couple of months later.

"Even when I was in prison, I did not consider Putin an enemy," Khodorkovsky says. "To me he was a political opponent, albeit one who used unscrupulous methods."

But Khodorkovsky describes the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as "unbearable". 

It was then, he says, "I reflected that my whole family was from there". 

"I had always perceived myself as a Russian, but after that, things switched in my head and I started thinking of [Putin] as an enemy."

One of the informal conditions of Khodorkovsky's release was that he leave Russia. He did that, but his advocacy for democratic change has continued. He has founded or is associated with multiple anti-Kremlin opposition networks, human rights groups, media enterprises and think tanks. 

Despite having billions of dollars taken from him in the 2000s he remains wealthy, and a logical target. 

Khodorkovsky knows that once upon a time, that equalled prison. Today it may mean the Russian regime's trademark method: poison.

"I understand the risks are quite large," he says. "But you either accept it and live your life normally, or you go and hide somewhere and hope everyone forgets about you."

You never really know if the Russian regime will forget, Khodorkovsky says. "Putin is a gangster. He believes that if you are hiding, then you must be up to something."

Khodorkovsky admits to sometimes wondering what his life could have been like, had he played Putin's game.

"In a way, my family and I are grateful," the father-of-four says. "I would have ended up like a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water, and I'm not sure I would have had the courage to jump out if I was too deep in the system."

He reflects on how he might have acted if he was inside the Russian government as family and friends were bombed in Ukraine.

"They would have asked me, 'How dare you?' and I would have to try and justify it somehow. I don't know how I would have looked them in the eye," he says. "In a way Putin spared me from having to do that. For this, at least, I thank him."

Body doubles, secret children, strange shakes

The Dossier Centre — an investigative media unit that exposes criminal activity linked to the Kremlin — is one of Khodorkovsky's pet projects. 

It has also uncovered details of Putin's personal life that are at odds with his public image. 

Putin fathered two daughters, now adults, with his first wife Lyudmila, who he married in 1983, although he refers to them only as "the women". 

The president and first lady separated around 2014 but for years before that there were rumours Putin had been having an affair with Olympic gymnast Alina Kabaeva — something that has always been officially denied. After the newspaper Moskovsky Korrespondent published a report about their relationship in 2008, it was shut down. 

Putin and Kabaeva, 43, have two sons. He rarely sees them and, like his daughters, has never publicly acknowledged their existence. According to a Dossier Centre expose, one was born in Switzerland in 2015, the other in Moscow four years later. They are believed to spend their days surrounded by nannies, tutors and federal security staff. A 2024 advertisement for an English teacher to home school them claimed the children live "in isolation".

It has also been widely reported Putin conceived another secret baby born in 2003 with a third woman — real estate mogul Svetlana Krivonogikh. Putin's third daughter lives in Paris and openly flaunted her glittering lifestyle on social media until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, even performing the occasional DJ set. She uses several different names and was confronted by a Ukrainian journalist in December last year where she did not deny being the Russian president's love child. These days, she keeps a much lower profile. People who know her told the ABC she is "a little bit skittish".

Gossip is not confined to the president's multiple families.

"The body doubles rumour is very persistent. It's almost like a game. How many are there? Some say it's seven. Some say it's six," says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who lives in exile in London.

Internet sleuths have attempted to prove for years the Putin seen in public is not actually him. Even a Japanese TV network concluded in 2023 after an AI analysis that there were several different versions of the Russian president. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has described the idea as "absurd". 

"Whatever Peskov says, always believe the opposite. That's my motto," says Stephen Hall, an assistant professor in Russian politics at the University of Bath.

American political scientist Jason Smart, meanwhile, has lived in Kyiv since being kicked out of Russia. He has reviewed pictures and audio from some of Putin's recent public appearances in attempt to work out if the president was actually there. 

"These days the Kremlin releases an hour of video and you see the back of Putin's head for almost the entire thing," he says. "Sometimes the only audio is of him saying 'spasibo' [thank you]. "It was never enough to do anything useful. That can't be a coincidence."

There is also conjecture about Putin's health.

"He's tried to stay in shape throughout his life, eating well and swimming daily, but he was born in 1952. He's getting older," says Smart. "We don't know about the conditions in his bunker but we do know that when he's been seen publicly, he shows signs of his legs shaking uncontrollably. There are, of course, a lot of theories about what that could be."

Kremlin officials have consistently denied there is anything wrong with the president.

Travelling abroad has become difficult for Putin since international arrest warrants were issued in 2023. But he has plenty of options inside Russia with both official palaces and other private residences in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and three beach houses on the Black Sea. The list goes on.

The dacha at Valdai is particularly well equipped with multiple buildings to house the family's extensive security team, chefs, tutors and other staff, a dental clinic, sprawling health spa (including mud therapy room), helipads and yacht moorings. There's even an ice hockey rink. 

When matches were organised there the Putin boys always played on the same team as their father and competed against federal security officers. Kabaeva sometimes watched from an area behind frosted glass.

Until recently, Kabaeva, Putin and the children spent significant time at the Valdai compound. According to The Dossier Centre, any visitors had to quarantine for two weeks before being allowed in.

Putin's Ponzi scheme

Russia's presidential election results are often ridiculed in the West. Putin supposedly won 88 per cent of the vote when the last one was held in 2024. Notwithstanding that, most analysts concede he remains popular, particularly among older generations.

The early years of his presidency — up until the global financial crisis — were defined by an economic boom in which Russia became a major global market. Growth was driven by high oil and gas prices, as well as sweeping tax reforms that increased compliance. Despite rampant corruption among the elite, GDP surged and many ordinary citizens benefited. Wages and living standards rose, particularly in the largest cities. State-run services improved. A middle class emerged, earning stable salaries and no longer worrying about their pay being delayed (something common in the 90s).

Putin restored a sense of national pride, too. Many people credit him with pulling Russia out of the poverty, inflation mayhem and general sense of humiliation synonymous with the post-Soviet years. Boris Yeltsin, who preceded Putin as president, was known for heavy drinking and public dancing. By the end of his tenure he was considered a geopolitical liability. During a 1995 visit to Washington DC Yeltsin was found on a street near the White House in his underwear, drunk, trying to order a pizza.

Standing up to the West has kept Putin popular. He has regularly accused countries like Britain, the United States and their allies of mistreating Russia. He built a powerful military and is not afraid to use it. Putin suppressed separatism in Chechnya during the mid-2000s and annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. The latter may have dismayed much of the international community, but in Russia it was celebrated with commemorative fridge magnets.

Putin's authoritarianism, so alarming to people elsewhere, is not necessarily perceived that way by those living under it. Some Russians argue the country needs a strong leader and that Putin fits the bill.

But while many of Putin's subjects were rallying around the flag after Crimea was captured, fiscally things were less jubilant than the early years of his presidency. Western sanctions, imposed in response to the military intervention, started to bite. In the years leading up to the COVID pandemic, Russia's real GDP growth averaged around 1.5 per cent per annum. 

Extreme economic inequality deepened and these divides persist today. Government data suggests around 20 per cent of people in the country still do not have access to plumbing at home and two thirds of those who live in rural areas do not have indoor toilets.

The president's ability to corral Russia's ruthless, opportunistic and kleptocratic elite is also cited as a reason he remains popular. But doing so comes at a cost.

"The system he created is sort of like a Ponzi scheme. Everybody has been able to take from the government through corruption," Smart argues. "The most important thing to understand about Russia, and the Putin regime specifically, is that this is not a normal government. It really is just a consolidation of different mafias that were existing in the country in the 1990s, under one person. Vladimir Putin should be thought of as a mafia godfather, rather than a president."

Hall agrees. "Putin plays these different factions off against one another. It's basically Game of Thrones," he says. "These groups and factions within factions fight and stab each other in the back. It's very strange. In that sense, Putin is a firefighter."

'You will live with cockroaches'

Lower down the rungs of Russian society, Putin has also become adept at controlling large parts of the general population over the course of his presidency. Media censorship has tightened. Propaganda has increased. Today, many Western websites and social media platforms are blocked. Laws banning association with groups or ideas the Kremlin disagrees with have ensured there is a legal framework for Putin to prosecute his enemies.

While working for Khodorkovsky's Open Russia in early 2019, Anastasia Shevchenko became the first person to have a criminal case brought against them for participating in an "undesirable" organisation. The mother-of-three and long-time anti-government activist was detained, strip searched and taken to prison.

"The authorities try to break you. You are told you will live with cockroaches, that you'll live without water. You sleep on dirty mattresses," she says. "They tell you that they will take your children to an orphanage, that you will never know your children."

Shevchenko says Russian authorities placed a secret camera above her bed and monitored her conversations in the six months before her arrest. She believes there is no limit to what the country's government will do to surveil people it perceives as a threat.

"Your own mother doesn't know as much about you as the state does," she says, recounting a story from 2018 when she was on a date with a man from Denmark. "I showed him the city, and it turned out a spy had taken a photo of us. They detained my date, interrogated him, photographed his documents and made up this story that I could have given him sensitive information in a cup of coffee, because I had a coffee in my hand."

By the time Shevchenko was convicted and sentenced February 2021, she had found a way to slip out of Russia with her two children. She now lives in exile abroad. Her pursuit of democracy, however, goes on, enraging the Kremlin. 

In June this year, a court sentenced her to 17 years prison in absentia for a video she posted on social media featuring a Ukrainian prisoner of war.

"I thanked the lawyer who was representing me in Russia, and he told me it was the first time someone had thanked him for getting 17 years in jail," Shevchenko jokes.

It is impossible to track the number of activists and journalists prosecuted since Putin came to power. Courts do not have to provide public records of the cases they hear. Human rights organisations estimate the figure is in the tens of thousands. 

But prison is not the only way authorities in Russia threaten those who they see as enemies.

Roman Dobrokhotov, a Russian investigative journalist, was targeted after reporting the Kremlin's role in high-profile poisonings, like the attempted murder with neurotoxin Novichok of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in 2018. An unsuccessful attempt was also made on opposition figure Alexei Navalny's life in 2020 when Novichok was smeared on his underpants. When officials confiscated Dobrokhotov's passport in 2021, he knew he had to get out of Russia immediately.

"I left Moscow to somewhere near a border and the next day I snuck out of Russian territory on foot, through a forest, with no documents," Dobrokhotov says. "That was a very dangerous moment, because if I hadn't been able to cross the border — and it was a miracle I was able to find the right path — I don't think I ever would have gotten out of prison."

He now lives in exile, but just because he is no longer in Russia does not mean he is safe. Last year, six Bulgarian men were convicted in a British court of running a spy cell taking orders from the Kremlin. Some of the men tracked Dobrokhotov across Europe, and had even discussed kidnapping and killing him and a colleague.

"I have no doubt these orders to kill us came from Vladimir Putin," the journalist says. "We have information from sources who are well-informed in Russian security and intelligence agencies, and they specifically said Putin was asking his special services about when this particular order will be carried out."

'Spook fanboy' in a shrinking world

As the amount of independent information available to Russians decreases, there is evidence to suggest the president's own world has shrunk, too.

Analysts say Putin became particularly isolated during the COVID-19 pandemic and slashed the number of in-person meetings he held. Most people who wanted to be in the same room as him had to first quarantine for at least two weeks. 

Today, from his bunker, this separation persists. 

When Putin first rose to power, he was renowned for being curious, educating himself, and fastidiously analysing information that came across his desk. These days, Western governments are concerned the Russian president is not being given an accurate picture of his country's problems and the battlefield realities his military is facing in Ukraine.

Russia expert Mark Galeotti recounts the words of a retired Russian spy about Putin: "He said, 'Look, we've learned, you do not bring bad news to the Czar's table'. In other words, the price of being in the room is to say the right thing."

Some experts are increasingly sceptical of Putin's current information ecosystem.

"We don't know how often he uses the internet," says the University of Bath's Stephen Hall. "There are rumours he doesn't even know how to use a computer. There are videos of him voting online, and the way he held the mouse was as if he was touching a nuclear bomb or something."

Last month, CIA boss John Ratcliffe made a secret trip to Moscow to meet Aleksandr Bortnikov, the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB). It has been reported Ratcliffe delivered a dire assessment of what the future could hold for Putin's military in Ukraine. Putin, who once worked as a Soviet spy in Germany, has a reputation for being a "spook fanboy", according to Galeotti — more inclined to believe information from intelligence agencies than his own foreign office.

Ratcliffe's visit had the hallmarks of a last-ditch attempt to make Putin understand how bad things really are in his war before launching yet another escalation. Ratcliffe has claimed the life expectancy of a Russian soldier is around 30 minutes after arriving in some combat zones in Ukraine. Yes, you're reading that right.

"With Ukraine, we're not just talking about some flashpoint crisis that Putin has dealt with in the past," Galeotti says. "This is the sort of slow, sustained, heavy pressure that buckles systems, and it's coming at a time when Putin himself has less energy and less ideas. 

People on the street refer to Putin as "starik", the old man, says Galeotti. "He is not the vigorous, macho leader of his heyday. I think there's a sense that his system has played out and reached its natural conclusion. But he can't allow it to go."

Shevchenko knows people who have met Putin. They say the president's gaze can have a hypnotic effect. 

"He paralyses you, and you say only what he wants to hear," Shevchenko says. "When people constantly lie to you, you lose touch with reality. Today's Putin is getting older and living in his own closed world. He is hiding more and more in bunkers. He is afraid, and it shows."

After almost three decades in power, the shirtless, horse-riding Putin who energised his country and its economy is a distant memory. These days, from his bunker, the president clings to power with more problems, and paranoia, than ever.