U.S. Magazine Records Russian Oligarch Saying Putin Has Blood Cancer

President Putin is “very ill with blood cancer,” an oligarch close to the Kremlin is reported to have said, George Grylls wrote for The Times of UK.

Photo Insert: A caricature of Russian President Vladimir Putin

The unnamed oligarch was recorded discussing Putin’s health with a Western venture capitalist in mid-March in a recording obtained by Michael Weiss of New Lines, a US magazine that specializes in developments in the Middle East and beyond.

The Russian says in the recording that Putin had surgery on his back linked to his blood cancer shortly before ordering the invasion of Ukraine. He complains that the president has gone “crazy.”

He says there is dissatisfaction in Moscow about the state of the economy and, appearing to speak on behalf of other oligarchs, says “we all hope” that Putin dies.

“He absolutely ruined Russia’s economy, Ukraine’s economy, and many other economies — ruined [them] absolutely.”

Weiss referred to the oligarch as “Yuri.” As of 2021, his net worth was high enough to qualify him as one of Russian Forbes’ 200 richest businessmen. Yuri also denounced the war, trashing the Kremlin’s initial pretext of “trying to find Nazis and fascists.”

Yuri then goes on to say that “we all hope” Putin dies from his cancer or possibly from some internal intervention in Moscow such as a coup to spare Russia from further misfortune — either an accidental switch of pronoun or one reflective of shared oligarchic opinion.

Furthermore, Yuri personally blames Putin for killing “more than 15,000 Russian soldiers and 4,000 or 5,000 civilians in Ukraine. It’s unbelievable. For what? He killed more people than in 10 years in the [Soviet] Afghan war.”

Yuri’s bona fides were easily established through open source verification methods and consultations with past and present intelligence officials. One former European security chief described him as belonging to a “close circle of 20 to 30 people” with whom Putin met in 2014 in advance of his stealthy seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.

“The goal was to explain the motivations of his military actions, why this was the only way,” the ex-official told New Lines of that conclave, indicating that Yuri is — or was at that time — one of Putin’s confidants and plenipotentiaries.

Another associate of the oligarch added that he is still in a position to provide “concrete information” about the inner workings of the Presidential Administration of Russia (the formal name of the leader’s executive office).

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic