A former officer with President Vladimir Putin’s elite security unit has defected and labeled the Russian leader a paranoid “war criminal” who has lost his grip on reality.
Gleb Karakulov said he served as captain and engineer in a field unit of the presidential communications department, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Okhrany (FSO) or Federal Protective Service, one of the most secretive branches of Russia’s security services.
In a sweeping interview released Tuesday, he said that the Russian president has become increasingly paranoid, he prefers to avoid airplanes and travels on a train that looks like a regular train but has been adapted for Putin’s needs.
Karakulov, the first official of his rank – and depth of knowledge about Putin’s life – to speak on record, told the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative group funded by former Russian oligarch-turned-opposition-figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, that he fled his homeland in October because of his objections to the war in Ukraine.
The group released on its website a transcript of his interview in Russian, which NBC News has translated.
“I consider this man a war criminal,” Karakulov said about Putin. “It’s time to end this war and it’s time to stop being silent,” he added, before explaining that he was sharing his story in the hope that other Russians would speak out, too.
Putin had become “very closed off,” shielding himself from the rest of the world and “his perception of reality is distorted,” he said, adding that his former boss was living in a “kind of information vacuum,” because he does not use the Internet or a cellphone and receives information only from people who are directly close to him.
He added that the Russian leader had become increasingly “paranoid” about his personal security and used a train that cannot be easily tracked to get around.
Putin, Karakulov said, was still shielding from Covid and made people working with him quarantine and take frequent…
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