The depths of Vladimir Putin’s paranoia have been laid bare by hackers who leaked secret messages from one of the Russian dictator’s top mouthpieces.
The leaked texts appear to show longtime Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in a tense exchange with fellow Kremlin official Mikhail Babich over the humiliating scrapping of Russia’s Navy Day parade in July and the embarrassing event that replaced it, the independent news site Agentstvo reports, citing messages leaked by Black8Mirror.
Instead of the usual sprawling parade featuring 200 warships on the Neva River in St. Petersburg, Putin, 73, posed in front of a giant poster of a submarine and sat for an awkward televised meeting with Navy personnel, drawing widespread mockery.
In his texts to Peskov, Babich tore into the event’s organization and demanded to know who decided to stage the ceremony in such a sorry-looking format.
Peskov replied that it was “safer,” prompting Babich to question if the event was even worth it at all with “such a threat level.” In a separate exchange, Babich demanded answers over another humiliating scene in July, when the president of Kazakhstan ambushed Putin in a televised meeting and called on him to end his war against Ukraine.
After asking Peskov if the reprimand had been scripted by Moscow or “impromptu,” Babich seemed infuriated when he was told it had not, in fact, been part of the script, complaining that the remarks should never have been allowed to be made publicly.
The tense exchanges appear to reflect Putin’s own inner circle struggling to keep a lid on both his diminishing status and growing paranoia. Beneath the ironclad image of Putin that the Kremlin seeks to project, the Russian dictator was apparently so fearful of potential drone strikes that he sacrificed his annual showcase of Russian naval might.
It was previously reported that Putin was hunting for a scapegoat to blame for his Navy Day flop, and that Peskov was one of the people under scrutiny.
Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter turned critic, wrote on Telegram in July that while Peskov was in the hot seat, lower-level press staffers were likely to pay the price.
The revelation of just how tightly Putin’s world is wrapped in security fears comes as President Donald Trump invited the Russian dictator to attend the G20 summit later this year at his golf club near Miami, Florida.
Putin has not attended the summit in person since 2019, with the dictator increasingly isolated on the world stage since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
But Putin is also retreating further into his own fortress at home, increasingly consumed by fears for his safety as Ukrainian strikes reach deeper into Russia and domestic problems pile up on his doorstep as his war drags on.
Last month, Putin increased the number of staff at the central headquarters of Russia’s Federal Protective Service—responsible for protecting him and other top Kremlin officials—amid a string of humiliating killings of high-ranking military officers.
Sources have also told the Financial Times that Putin spends more and more time hunkering down in underground bunkers, often hiding in them for several weeks while orchestrating the war.
