10 September 2023 , 13:58
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A paranoid Vladimir Putin does not trust his own security advisors and lives in constant fear he will be assassinated, says the man who was once in charge of guard dogs at his palace in annexed Crimea.
Vitaly Brizhatiy fled Russia and revealed how the dictator and his cronies built seaside palaces next to each other after grabbing the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. He told Dozhd independent TV channel that Putin was a "war criminal" over his invasion of Ukraine. The former officer in Putin’s Federal Protective Service pointed to the "ginormous territory" of Putin’s illegal palace with its own helicopter pad and support buildings amounting to "a whole city."
He says the home of the deputy head of his security council Dmitry Medvedev, who formerly held the posts of Russian president and prime minister, is nearby. Another neighbour is the FSB security service chief Alexander Bortnikov, whose spies wrongly assured Putin he would grab Kyiv within three days when the war began 18 months ago.
Vitaly Brizhatiy, former officer of Putin’s Federal Protective Service (Dozhd TV)Brizhatiy, now living in exile in Ecuador, said: "After Crimea was occupied, the sea by their [homes] was cordoned off. Now local people don’t have access to the sea." The chief guard dog handler told how [Putin’s] presence in the sprawling palace "is hidden even from his own staff, they are told that he is there, but he might not be… He does not trust his own people. He trusts only a select circle of close people…. People checking the site he is about to visit, or who stay close to him, are sent to quarantine [for as long as 3 weeks]. This is happening on a constant basis, until this very day."
When he arrives false information is routinely given out about the airport he will travel to and he may even end up coming by sea, Brizhatiy claimed, saying: "This is how a person fears for his life." These lavish homes have been hidden from ordinary Russians yet it is unlikely they are now used by Putin and his cronies since they are within range of Ukrainian drones and missiles. The dictator is now believed to favour his bunker-equipped palaces deeper into Russia.
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Putin's Crimean bolthole is in Olyva - south of Sevastopol, which is regularly attacked by Ukraine - along a coastline favoured by the Russian imperial tsars. Brizhatiy’s wife is also from Crimea and they fled abroad after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.