Ukraine’s president said he wasn’t sure that Russia’s President Putin was still alive.
Speaking at Davos, Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested Russia was altering media purporting to show Putin.
Zelenskyy was talking about the possibility of a peace deal, and said Putin appeared absent from decision-making.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday that he wasn’t sure if Russia’s President Vladmir Putin was even still alive.
Asked at the World Economic Forum in Davos for his response to people who were asking for peace negotations to take place, Zelenskyy said that he wasn’t sure who in Russia would be part of that conversation, or even if the Russian president was still alive.
He also suggested that Russia may have manipulated media of Putin.
“I don’t quite understand that he is the guy,” Zelenskyy said of Putin. “I don’t quite understand that he is still alive, or that it is him particularly making decisions, or who is taking decisions there, who is the the circle of people making the decisions,” he said, according to his translator.
Zelenskyy also said that: “I don’t quite understand who to talk to and about what. I’m not sure that Russia’s president, who sometimes appears against the chroma key is really him,” according to the Kyiv Independent.
A chroma key is a video technique that can change parts of a video, including the background. The technique can be used to make someone appear as if they were in or speaking from a different location.
It’s not clear if Zelenskyy was genuinely suggesting that Putin was dead, or was exaggerating in order to suggest that he no longer appeared to be involved in key decision-making.
Putin had been photographed in a number of public appearances over the last days, including at least four events on Wednesday. Photos from those events were shared by the Kremlin.
Zelenskyy and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly said that they don’t trust Russia to strike a peace deal in good faith, and that there could be no peace deal that didn’t involve Ukraine getting all of its territory back.
Zelenskyy said on Thursday that Ukraine had been trying to negotiate with Russia even before it launched its full-scale invasion in February, after Russia annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014.
Russian and Ukrainian officials also met multiple times near the start of the war, but made no meaningful progress before those meetings were stopped.
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