A Russian officer who worked closely with Vladimir Putin as a captain in the Federal Guard Service has fled the country and defected to the West, warning the world that the Russian leader is no longer “sane” and has become a “war criminal.”
Gleb Karakulov, who made his escape last October while on a trip with Putin to the capital of Kazakhstan, is now calling on both his former colleagues and Russian citizens to “break the silence” and help end the “criminal war” against Ukraine.
In a lengthy interview with The Dossier Center—which says it was able to verify his account of his time providing secure communications for Putin—Karakulov warns that today’s Putin is not the same man he’d first encountered back in 2009.
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“Now he has shut himself off from the world with all kinds of barriers, the quarantine, the information vacuum. His take on reality has become distorted. A sane person in the twenty-first century, who looks objectively at everything happening in the world, let alone who can predict developments, at least in the medium term, would not have allowed this war to happen,” Karakulov is quoted saying.
He says that his years working inside the Russian leader’s inner circle helped him see firsthand the scale of lies being told to the country’s people: “It opened my eyes.”
“Thanks to my work in the FGS, I have seen how information is distorted… Sometime around 2014 I saw everything that fundamentally changed my perception. I flew to Crimea in March 2014. I had a chance to talk to people who live there. The referendum had already been held there, and I had the opportunity to ask people if they supported the annexation,” he said, adding that he didn’t see the unanimous support the Kremlin had boasted of.
“That’s when I had my first alarm bells ringing,” he said.
Karakulov also appeared to confirm that Putin experienced some kind of health scare just a couple months into his war against Ukraine, when the three-day blitzkrieg the Kremlin had counted on instead had turned into a series of battlefield humiliations for the Russian military.
“He has annual medical checkups,” Karakulov said, explaining that the comms team is usually given a heads up that they will need to install equipment for Putin at the Central Clinical Hospital well in advance.
But in spring of 2022, he said, “it was somehow unexpected and not at the time when it usually is.”
On May 9, 2022, he said, he was supposed to go into quarantine for work the next day, but was suddenly told that plans had changed: “This is urgent, you are not going anywhere,” he recalled being told.
As he pleaded to at least be allowed to take care of matters at home first, he said, supervisors told him, “No, you won’t go, you will go right now to the Central Clinical Hospital.”
He said he suspects Putin likely does have some health issues simply due to his age, though he’d never heard anything about him being terminally ill.
But the Russian leader is obsessively worried about his health, according to Karakulov.
“Everyone is a little perplexed as to why [a strict lockdown] is still going on. Because everyone has been forced to get vaccinated. Everyone undergoes health screenings, monitors their health, and takes regular tests. I know that all of the President’s aides take PCR tests several times a day. I have no idea why; he’s probably just worried about his health,” he said.
As for his former colleagues, Karakulov has one scathing bit of advice: “You mustn’t follow criminal orders and serve this war criminal, Vladimir Putin.”
“It is up to you to stop this madness very quickly. I wish you would do that because it would save many lives,” he said.
He went on to urge ordinary Russian citizens to stop buying into Kremlin propaganda about the war.
“Our President has lost touch with the world. He has been living in an information cocoon for the past couple of years, spending most of his time in his residences, which the media very fittingly call bunkers. He is pathologically afraid for his life. He surrounds himself with an impenetrable barrier of quarantines and an information vacuum,” Karakulov said. “He only values his own life and the lives of his family and friends. The lives of your family and friends are of no interest to him.”
