MOSCOW – A secret Russian security force officer knew exactly what he wanted when he arrived at Olga Izronova’s company last spring.
They wanted a movable tunnel sinking into movable disinfectant clouds.
“They said it was going to happen very quickly,” Ms. Izronova recalls.
She admits the tunnel has limited efficacy in coronavirus epidemics, but for her most important client, every bit counts. Russia’s response to the Federal Protective Service, the Secret Service, President Vladimir V. Has helped create a virus-free bubble around Putin, which has outpaced the protective measures taken by many of his foreign allies.
Russian reporters covering Mr Putin have not seen him closely since March. The few people who meet him in person usually spend about two weeks in quarantine. The president still conducts his meetings with senior officials – including his cabinet and his security council – via a video link to the Spartan Room at his residence outside Moscow, which is equipped with Mrs. Izranova’s disinfection tunnel.
In the coronavirus epidemic, Mr Putin’s Russia is often compared to the United States and Brazil, the other two major countries whose leaders have put the disease at risk and taken it out of control. But while Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have banned their own movements, Mr Putin has returned to the complex cocaine of social distance, even though he has allowed life in Russia to return to normal.
The contradiction between the behavior of Mr. Putin and his people is now largely nailed, as another wave of epidemics threatens to wash over Russia. In Moscow, where people watched all summer with a few masks full of indoor bars and restaurants, the number of new cases reported every day in the last two weeks has more than tripled to more than 2,300.
As Russia lifted Russia’s lockdown last year, Mr Putin chaired a series of ceremonies aimed at dispelling a sense of generality. Behind the scenes, they were nothing but normal.
Dozens of other World War II comrades joined Mr. Putin on the Riser in Red Square in June, when he presided over a military parade on Nazi Germany to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union. But before allowing Mr Putin to breathe, veterans had to spend two weeks in quarantine in solitary confinement.
“We went for a walk, got bored, sat around and breathed air,” said Lev Litvinov, a 100-year-old p.
Logistics paid so much tax that Mr. Litvinov could not really bring it to the parade. He said that after spending two weeks apart, he fell ill on a winding drive from the countryside to Red Square, miles away. Instead he was taken to a health center, where he spent another week.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry S. “Most importantly, this is about their health, about the health of the veterans,” Peskov said in June about the decision to keep attendees separate.
Mr Putin strikes hard at defending himself because in recent months, in conversations with the Russian people, his government has largely declared the eradication of the virus.
“I want to congratulate you for our latest joint victory,” said Moscow Mayor Sergei S. Sobyani wrote a letter to the Muscovites in June announcing the end of the city’s lockdown. Indoor dining in bars and restaurants resumed after just two weeks.
Critics say Russia pushed for constitutional reforms ahead of a July 1 referendum to end its coronavirus sanctions, which opened the door for Mr Putin’s remaining presidency until 2036. When Mr Putin announced in August that Russia had registered the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, it appeared that the country was being dealt a severe blow against the epidemic.
“These general efforts and targeted and, as it turns out, very effective solutions have helped advance the epidemic and create the conditions for further action,” Mr Putin said in an interview with state television.
The families filled the Black Sea resort and the adults returned to their .fees. Across the country, on September 1, the children went back to school on schedule.
But Mr Putin remained in isolation. He continued most of his meetings with government officials via video conference from a room in his suburban Moscow estate, Novo-Ogariovo.
Residence like the Kremlin, Ms. Izranova’s industrial industrial-cleaning equipment is made from a disinfection tunnel built by the company Mizotti, located in the city of Penza. Passing through the tunnel, he says, feels and smells like passing through a cloud of stench.
Mr. Putin’s video conferencing room – unpainted; cloth chair, walls, telephone; The Dell computer screen, with the exception of a photograph of the Kremlin as a desktop background, became so familiar that state television recently aired a segment on it.
“This is the microphone on the president’s desk,” the reporter said on Sunday’s prime time show. The Kremlin. Putin. “When the indicator light is red, the sound is not transmitted.”
The exception was a state television reporter visiting and interviewing Mr. Putin in a rep gust. Otherwise, the Kremlin has cut off journalists’ ability to see Mr Putin in person since March, even for those who have been doing so regularly since March.
“The work has been very remote,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a reporter covering the Kremlin for the daily Kommersant since 2002. “I know for a fact that no text reporter, including me, could see the president of the Coronavirus.” Days. ”
Mr Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, did not respond to requests for comment from the president about coronavirus precautions. But Mr Kolesnikov said he understood that Mr Putin’s agenda gave governors, business leaders and senior officials a choice: meet by video link or pass a two-week quarantine for a personal confrontation.
“He misses real-life interactions with people, so later you’ll have a chance to have tea with him,” said Mr. Kolesnikov, in a personally met case. “I think they, of course, prefer quarantine in that situation.”
Mr. Putin’s extreme caution is not only his age – he is 67 years old, he has a relatively high risk of serious illness from coronavirus, but also shows that during his previous career as a KBG spy, critics took pride in being a paranoia. After he got out of his mug at the Group 20F20 summit in Japan last year, other assembly leaders around the world also drank from glasses.
According to the Kremlin’s website, only one person has met with Mr Putin since April: Igor Sachin, a former KGB official and a close ally of Mr Putin since the 1990s. He now runs the Russian state oil giant Rosneft and met with the president in August and May.
Authorities set up two large health resorts in the Black Sea city of Sochi for calming people before meeting Mr Putin, Russian investigative news outlet Proct reported on Wednesday. According to Proctena, in September, 30 nuclear industry workers who had been quarantined in Sochi were brought to Moscow to meet with the president at the Kremlin.
“Some people quarantine for two weeks, some people quarantine for a few days and some people just quit for a couple of days. Participating in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries in different countries.
Mr Putin’s European Union counterparts have resumed invasion of the continent, including individual summit meetings in Brussels. Mr Putin, by contrast, has not been abroad since January.
Mr Peskov indicated this week that the president would only start traveling abroad after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine. But he advised that Mr Putin was not yet ready to get those shots, despite all the state-media bombings about the world’s leading achievement in Russia’s development.
“It is natural that when it comes to the head of state, special precautionary measures are in place,” Mr Peskov told reporters.
Oleg Matsnev and Sophia Kishkovsky contributed to the research.
