Vladimir Putin is consolidating support in Russia following last week's short-lived rebellion by Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in a rare met and greet that saw him mobbed by a crowd as he posed for selfies with young girls.
Incredible footage from the event - a presidential appearance during a trip to the city of Derbent in the Dagestan region of southern Russia, revealed how he drove into a nighttime crowd like a Hollywood celebrity at a red carpet event.
Clearly infused with fresh energy after averting a small-scale civil war last week, the normally stoic and isolated Vladimir Putin was uncharacteristically personable, shaking hands and planting kisses on the head of a young teenage girl who gushed over him and begged her mother to snap a picture of her with the president.
In another odd moment, he shakes hands with and appears to adjust something on the livery of an officer holding what may be his nuclear briefcase.
He's not greeted his security apparatchiks in such a way previously.
The scene was in marked variance to the drastic measures of the last few years which have enforced stringent quarantines for anyone outside of Vladimir Putin's close circle before meeting with him.
His transformative behaviour has led many, including senior Russian figures, to fuel speculation that Vladimir Putin greeting adoring fans in Dagestan was in fact a body double.
It comes as a recent photo of Vladimir Putin with Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov showed the president appearing puffy with blotchy skin.
A longtime Moscow diplomat said that it's getting impossible to believe that there is only one Vladimir Putin.
The diplomat said there were several, very good lookalikes, yet they behave somewhere differently, and that this one diving into the crowd in Dagestan behaved differently to the traditional Vladimir Putin.
Commentator Viktor Alksnis, a Soviet military tactician and politician who is now a Western-based analyst known as the Black Colonel, asked why was Vladimir Putin meeting with visitors in the Kremlin after their two-week quarantine and at a great distance, while in Derbent was calmly into the crowd and even hugs and kisses some citizens?
And how could the physical security of the president be ensured under such conditions?
He said that something was not right and that it looked like a theatrical production in which Vladimir Putin was not really Putin.
Anything that's reported on this war is generally lies on both sides. The news can't even report what's going on in France, so how can they report on what's going on in Russia? And many have become millionaires overnight - just follow the money.
Was it really Vladimir Putin because he seems extremely popular at the moment, but then there's propaganda on both sides? That clouds what's real and what isn't. Perhaps this is his farewell tour.
Could he really mingle with the masses in these times, particularly when he's been hiding away for most of the war, but then he does appear to have numerous supporters, or was it all rehearsed beforehand? And if it wasn't rehearsed then don't the people of Russia realise that Vladimir Putin will bring the country to its knees at the expense of innocent people?
And it's absolutely ludicrous how this evil critter has been allowed to get this far.
Are we actually meant to believe that a man who won't even sit near his own generals is out, pressing the flesh with the great unwashed?
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