As Russian president Vladimir Putin celebrated a nationwide vacation with a patriotic speech, his distance from the viewers resulted in a considerable amount of feedback on social media.

“A tiny man, terrified of his people (note the distance between him and the audience), committing enormous crimes,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of inner affairs, wrote on Twitter.

The Russian chief gave the impression to be many ft away from the viewers on the Russia Day awards ceremony within the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin speech didn’t handle advances made by Ukraine in its not too long ago launched counteroffensive, however he referred to as on Russians to let their emotions “unite our society even more strongly” so as to give help for troopers.

“Check the distance Putin has between himself and the audience,” Markus Hankins, writer of Sweden’s Hela Hisingen information website tweeted, including, “Paranoid much?”

The purpose for the gap may very well be the Russian president’s reported worry of catching Covid-19 as for the previous few years, Vladimir Putin has continuously been pictured assembly with world leaders on the Kremlin whereas seated at reverse ends of an extended desk. Earlier, a former Kremlin guard stated in an interview with the investigative web site Dossier Center that Vladimir Putin is “a self-isolating president.”

The former Federal Guard Service (FSO) guard Gleb Karakulov detailed how Kremlin employees “have to observe a strict quarantine for two weeks before any event, even those lasting 15 to 20 minutes. There is a pool of employees who have been cleared—who underwent this two-week quarantine. They are [considered] ‘clean’ and can work in the same room as Putin.”

Other customers speculated that maybe Vladimir Putin was not on the Russia Day ceremony Monday and as a substitute his physique double was.

“The distance is probably also there to help conceal the fact it’s a double. I doubt the real Putin has been in any public setting in quite a while,” one consumer tweeted. Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s navy intelligence company, instructed the information website Ukrainska Pravda final week that Putin makes use of decoys at official occasions.

“Putin uses doubles. This is a fact that is based both on operative intelligence and on the assessments of physiognomists and many other specialists,” he stated.