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Putin meeting his old teacher (Image: E2W)
Vladimir Putin’s former schoolteacher appeared to question whether she was meeting the Russian dictator or his double.
In a carefully stage-managed meeting, the Kremlin president arrived at Vera Gurevich’s Moscow hotel to take her out for dinner.
Unusually, Putin, 73, drove the Aurus off-road himself, apparently to show he is still at Russia’s wheel after rumours of a coup plot and security paranoia.
As they met, his former class teacher, aged 92, peered uncertainly at his face and asked him doubtfully: “Is that you?”
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Putin replied: “Yes, it’s me. It’s me.”
Finally satisfied this was Putin, who he last met two years ago, she repeatedly kissed him as he handed her a large bouquet of flowers before he greeted a “tourist” from Sochi entering the hotel.
Putin made small talk with the “random passerby” about Sochi — but instead the exchange only highlighted the current obsession with the despot’s security, because it was revealed this was no ordinary holidaymaker.
In fact, this “tourist,” Alexander Bazarny, worked in a company managing lavish villas in Sochi linked to Putin and the mother of his lover, gymnast Alina Kabaeva, 42, revealed in an independent news outlet Agentsvo.
Putin meeting his old teacher (Image: E2W)
The company has links to the Russian intelligence services.
Putin’s retired teacher – who also taught him German – was bundled into the back of the Aurus and driven away for dinner in the Kremlin, escorted by security vehicles.
Gurevich has previously revealed how, aged 16, he slaughtered a duck on a school trip before it was cooked for dinner.
She said: “He pulled a blanket over himself, covering his head completely. He said: ‘Bring in the unfortunate one, lay her head so that, without seeing her, I can sever her head with a single blow.’”
The retired teacher also revealed that as a schoolboy Putin “wasn’t particularly interested in girls at all.”
She said: ‘Honestly, I could never imagine that it’d be Vladimir Putin who’d become president, head of our great state.
“He’s a talented man but I’ve always thought he’d make a lawyer.”
