The quarantine before the meeting with Putin was reduced to five days

The quarantine, which all participants in meetings with the President of Russia Vladimir Putin are required to complete, has been reduced to five days. Farida Rustamova’s Faridaily project writes about this.

Participants of meetings with Putin have been quarantined since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Initially, the period of isolation was two weeks, but in the summer of this year it was shortened to one.

One of Faridaily’s interlocutors specified that isolation with testing for COVID-19, influenza and ARVI must be observed if a face-to-face meeting with Putin is being prepared or it is planned that a person will contact the president at a close distance, for example, sit next to him or shake hands hand If there is no direct contact, it is enough to pass the tests, the source assures.

Neither the invasion of Ukraine, nor the vaccination of the president against COVID-19, nor the weakening of the pandemic have lifted the quarantine for those who are in contact with Vladimir Putin.

This is clearly visible from photos and videos of public meetings of the President of Russia, Faridaily notes. For example, all of Putin’s meetings with the government take place via video link, since the isolation of all members of the government, even for a few days, simultaneously paralyzes his work.

So that Putin does not get sick, the security specially increases the distance between the first row of chairs where the event participants sit and the stage where Putin is speaking. This was the case, for example, at the recent Valdai forum and at the forum “Russia is a sports nation”. At yesterday’s meeting in the Kremlin, the topic of which was the anti-Semitic action in Dagestan, members of the Security Council and the government, judging by the video on the Kremlin website, were sitting a few meters away from Putin.

At the end of June, after the meeting in Derbent, Putin went outside and approached a group of several dozen people, mostly women and children. He shook hands with some of them, and kissed one girl on the cheek. After that, there were versions that it was not the president, but his double.

The easing of the Kremlin quarantine, according to Faridaily, may be connected with the informal start of Putin’s presidential campaign.

• The election of the President of Russia should take place in March 2024. Their date has not yet been set. Putin has not yet confirmed whether he will run for the next term. Other possible candidates have not announced their intentions either.