Putin had 'cheeks plumped with filler' for pageantry fifth inauguration, security expert says

Vladimir Putin wore thick make-up with his eyebrows darkened and used cheek filler when he was sworn in for a fifth term, says a security expert.

At the ceremony in the gilded Grand Kremlin Palace, Putin placed his hand on the Russian Constitution and vowed to defend it as a crowd of hand-picked dignitaries looked on. Already in office for nearly a quarter-century and the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin, Putin's new term doesn't expire until 2030, when he will be constitutionally eligible to run again.

And Prof Anthony Glees, from the University of Buckingham, told The Mirror that Putin was “heavily made up” for the event including user filler. It comes with the Russian leader having typically tried to give a macho image of himself whether it is riding shirtless on horseback or doing judo.

“The doors open and Putin ambles in, greeted by an adoring audience. He is followed by a goose-stepping presidential guard of in uniforms,” said Prof Glees, describing the scene. “Putin himself is heavily made up, his eyebrows darkened, his cheeks plumped up with filler, each strand of his thinning hair carefully combed. His weak receding chin makes his cold calculating eyes seem even more menacing than usual.

“Yet Putin himself acts the modest little man off the street, almost as if he's come to the wrong place. This is all part of shtick. He and Russia are the victims. This is the typical stance of a psychopath killer: they are the one who have been wronged, those they kill are to blame. All this is deliberate and intended to underscore the political message that he makes.”

In a heavily choreographed performance, Putin was pictured in his office looking at his papers before walking along the Kremlin's long corridors, pausing at one point to look at a painting, on the way to his inauguration. His guard of honour waited in the sleet and rain for hours, in temperatures hovering just above freezing, while Putin made the brief journey to the Grand Kremlin Palace in his Auras limousine.

Putin used the the first moments of his fifth term to thank the "heroes" of his war in Ukraine and to rail against the West. Russia "does not refuse dialogue with Western states," he said. Rather, he said, "the choice is theirs: do they intend to continue trying to contain Russia, continue the policy of aggression, continuous pressure on our country for years, or look for a path to cooperation and peace."

He was greeted with applause when he entered the hall with more than 2,500 invited guests. They included senior members of the Russian government as well as celebrities including American actor Steven Seagal.

“Putin's inauguration as president for the fifth time is just a glitter-and-gold piece of fluff. He uses the occasion to spew out the same old mixture of vile threats, empty offers to the West and give his people a totally distorted view of the reality that faces Russia,” said Prof Glees.

"Putin believes he has the West by the short and curlys. He believes that we will ultimately allow him to do whatever he wants to do in Ukraine because if we allow Ukraine to appear to be winning he will launch a nuclear strike and so always have the final word in any contest. He is already using poison gas in Ukraine.

"Yet this apparent strength is also Putin's weakness. If the bottom line for him is the use of nukes, we know and he knows this would be suicidal. In other words, Putin does concede that if we allow Ukraine to win with conventional forces, Ukraine will indeed have won."

Prof Glees said Putin basically was saying that he wants the West to accept his wish of re-establishing a state like the USSR or face conflict. "Putin wants to frighten us off supporting Ukraine so that it cannot lose and so that it is able to stop the Russians advancing," he said.

"His inauguration speech alluded to this time and time again. He accused the West of 'halting the development of Russia', insisting that we are using Ukraine 'to defeat and dismember Russia' in their 'policy of aggression'.

"But he was ready, he said, to talk to the West, even about nuclear weapons, to be an 'honest partner' to any nation that was 'willing to engage with him and accept that Russia will determine its own destiny' and pursue 'its common historical goals in Russia's interest'. He demanded the West 'choose between confrontation and cooperation', in other words we must either accept his wish to re-establish the geopolitical entity that was the USSR or risk being in a forever conflict with him. He wants us to know that he, Putin, is the one calling the shots."

The aim was to pull the wool over the eyes of the Russian people with a Louis XlV spectacle, continued Prof Glees. "None of this is worth a row of beans," he said. "It is a cynical attempt to hide the stark facts from the Russian people - that Russia's attack on Crimea in 2014 and on Ukraine two years ago was his personal decision, that he is therefore responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Ukrainians whose only offence was that he wanted to be free. And that 450,000 Russians have now been killed or maimed in the war he started and almost one million Russians have fled from their country, and its increasingly fragile economy (the 'halting of Russian development' is Putin's way of describing the West's sanctions).

"There was only one nod towards reality in his speech when he said 'this is a difficult time for us'. Yes, indeed it is. The inauguration is of course the culmination of an artfully rigged election, fought against total nonentities - his only serious opponent, Alexei Navalny, had been conveniently murdered in February.

"Whilst it may convince the nomenklatura and those watching the Louis XIV spectacle on their tv's at home, we in the West are not taken in by it, not even for a moment. The US and its most powerful allies including ourselves stayed away from the tasteless spectacle in the Gilded Hall of the Kremlin, with its chocolate-box toy soldiers, guarding those massive golden doors, craning their necks (painfully) to pay homage to the Russian dictator, who today wields absolute power for longer than Stalin."