‘Putin Has Cancer’: The Headline That Just Won’t Go Away

Almost four years ago to the day, a Russian oligarch was recorded on an audio tape as saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin was deathly ill with blood cancer. For years, these kinds of predictions have been stoking what has become a cottage industry of speculation about the former KGB Lt. Col’s health.

The Cancer Chatter for Putin Just Won’t Go Away 

These “heard somewhere” statements also seem to magnify each other’s questionable accuracy.

Putin Back in 2020. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Putin in 2019. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Around the same time as the oligarch’s audio tape, a Telegram channel labeled “General SVR” added more fuel to the fire.

For the uninitiated, the initials SVR stand for “Foreign Intelligence Service”, the former First Chief Directorate of the KGB that is headquartered in the Moscow suburb of Yasenovo.

The individual providing the news feed for this channel is supposedly a one-time senior officer from that branch of Russia’s intelligence community.

The input from General SVR was that Putin was set to undergo surgery for an unspecified form of cancer.

At the time, the diagnosis of blood cancer was probably the 20th or more form of the disease that I had been told over the previous two decades that Putin was supposedly suffering from and which could cause him to keel over at any moment.

No small number of those reports came from people supposedly in the know or from inside the intelligence community who purported to have special insight into the issue.

Putin in August 2025. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Thankfully for me, if you spend enough time in Washington, you begin to learn that intelligence personnel are like athletes: some of them are at the top of their game, and some of them are destined to ride the bench for their career and never given much of any importance to handle.

Most of the predictions of Putin’s imminent demise naturally came from those in that latter category.

Is This a Disinformation Campaign? 

At the time of the General SVR-circulated and other rumors, an investigative reporter published an article to put all the stories and whispers about the Russian dictator’s health into perspective. “Is Putin Sick – Or Are We Meant to Think He Is?” asked the article’s headline.

The author, Michael Weiss, is no stranger to the beat of covering Russia’s constantly expanding spy organizations.

Two years later, he released the first ever comprehensive history of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service and the long-time rival to the SVR and the FSB. The second of the two is the counterintelligence service that Putin himself briefly headed before becoming Russia’s Prime Minister, and then later President, when Boris Yeltsin resigned on the eve of the New Year 2000.

This is the big riddle that remains to be solved.

Is the story that Putin’s days are numbered the stuff of supermarket checkout kiosk publications, is it another example of the Russian penchant for byzantine conspiracy theories, is it a purposeful disinformation campaign being shopped around by one or more constituencies within the Russian elites, or is the answer “all of the above”

Putin Back in 2023 Speaking. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

President Putin of Russia in 2018.

“The whole issue of what is the truth of Putin’s physical state becomes one that makes many of those who understand how the Russian intelligence service works a bit nervous,” said one former US intelligence official. “And there are some concrete reasons for that nervousness.”

“Leaving aside that working on an issue that all the tabloids are buzzing about hardly seems like dignified and legitimate activity, there is the other factor that the Russians have a long history of ‘planting’ stories about their leaders – or starting rumors for specific operational reasons,” he explained.

Here are some examples from May 2022, when this issue broke into public discourse. There were reports in the English-language Moscow Times quoting Proekt Media. That claimed that Putin was accompanied by doctors, including a thyroid cancer surgeon, on trips to his residence in Sochi from 2016 to 2019, and that doctors “may have performed surgery” on him in November 2016.

But again, no confirmation was forthcoming as to the veracity of these reports.

“This kind of [disinformation] practice goes way back,” he continued. “Remember how we were all told that Yuri Andropov was the picture of health – a fable conjured up to contrast him with an ailing and increasingly infirmed Leonid Brezhnev. So, you always have to ask which person or group of persons’ agendas are served by us believing in the fable.”

That lack of enthusiasm for engaging in what some in the intelligence world would call “chasing ghosts” probably explains the BBC news report that appeared two months after the Weiss story. “CIA chief says no intelligence that Putin is in bad health,” was the headline and quoted then-CIA Director William Burns, who had spoken at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

“There are lots of rumors about President Putin’s health, and as far as we can tell, he’s entirely too healthy,” Burns told the gathering.

Physical or Mental? 

There have been endless examples of Putin’s public appearances creating a picture of a leader with physical health ailments.

He has exhibited inexplicable behavior during televised events, seemingly unable to control the abrupt, jerking flexing of his lower legs.

In an April 2022 meeting with his then-defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, Putin was clinging desperately to the edge of a small table as if he was trying to mask uncontrollable tremors in his hands or symptoms of vertigo.

Russia’s President Putin Sitting at a Desk. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Putin Reading a Statement. Image Credit: Russian Government.

These are all potential signs of Parkinson’s or some other nervous system disorder.

During the pandemic, he was famous for refusing to meet with anyone who had not taken a PCR test and spent some requisite time in quarantine.

Even when he met with foreign visitors, they were seated at opposite ends of a comically long, banquet-sized table where the two would almost be out of each other’s earshot.

But more recent appearances by Putin have given rise to the suggestion that it is his mental state that may be deteriorating.

Again, judging by his public utterances, he has exhibited some signs of dementia-type deterioration in his mental processes since 2023.

One event prompted some observers to late post comments about him “looking at the ceiling” while “slowly muttering about the search for a place in the country” and acting “abnormally.” Another witness to one of his appearances wrote, “He can’t hear people at all.”

In the weeks leading up to the 9 May Victory in WWII Day celebration and parade, Putin has made statements about the history of the war that have raised even more questions. During a 21 April 2026 appearance, he once again presented disjointed parallels to the existential threat presented by Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and his invasion of Ukraine.

He then added that the reason that the USSR was victorious was that “during the hardest months of the Great Patriotic War, children, grandmothers, and women knitted socks and sent parcels and gifts to the front,” he said. “And why didn’t they do this in Germany? Their soldiers froze to death near Moscow. And no socks came from Germany.”

How Putin was recalling this improbable fact seemed so bizarre to those who witnessed it that the pro-Ukrainian/anti-Putin individual who posted the video on Instagram felt compelled to break in and assure viewers that it was actually the Russian President speaking.

In the category of “you can’t make this up,” he told viewers this was Putin himself spouting another one of his barking mad versions of history, and that it was not a computer-generated video clip.

Another more recent example is Putin’s response to complaints about the skyrocketing rates now being charged to Russians for utilities and other residential services. He appeared rambling and incoherent and left many puzzled as to what it was he actually said.

Last week, the former KGB officer explained why there have been more frequent, complete internet blackouts in Russia. “Criminals, after all, hear everything and see everything. If some information reaches them, they will undoubtedly adjust their criminal behavior and their criminal plans,” Putin said to a meeting of cabinet members.

This also led Russian-language commentators who posted the video to say they find his explanation absurd. “Shutting off the internet is how you catch criminals?” asked incredulously. “Do they shut down the internet in America to catch criminals?”

“We do not know what is going on in the Kremlin – we never do – said a Ukrainian political commentator who spoke to 19FortyFive. “But there is clearly something wrong with this man’s mind if he truly believes what he is saying these days.”

About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson 

Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.