A former speechwriter for Russian President Vladimir Putin says the Russian dictator has a plan to save himself should his country’s war against Ukraine take a disastrous turn.
Former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov claimed the plan includes an escape to South America. The comments came in a Wednesday Telegram message posted in Russian, according to Newsweek.
“I usually don’t retell insider stories, but today I will make an exception. Firstly, I trust the source too much, and secondly, the information is very juicy,” Gallyamov wrote, according to Newsweek.
The escape plan — supposedly called “Noah’s Ark” — would entail Putin escaping, with Argentina and Venezuela among the most likely destinations, Gallyamov wrote, according to Newsweek. Gallyamov wrote that China had also been considered, Newsweek reported.
“The leader’s entourage does not exclude that he will lose the war, lose power and he will have to urgently evacuate somewhere,” Gallyamov wrote, according to Newsweek.
Yury Kurilin, a former executive for Russian energy company Rosneft, is Putin’s “man on the ground” in charge of the potential evacuation operation, according to Gallyamov.
The former Kremlin speechwriter’s claims of Putin’s grand escape plan cannot be independently verified.
Gallyamov lives in exile from Russia in Israel, according to Newsweek.
Putin has served successively as Russia’s president and prime minister since 1999.
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Gallyamov has previously claimed in a CNN interview that the authoritarian leader was becoming unstable and emotional.
In a Wednesday news conference, Putin appeared to admit that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was taking longer than expected, according to The Associated Press.
Russia has taken significant casualties in a war that Putin initially expected to decisively win in a timeline of weeks, according to American intelligence findings.
In November, Russia lost Kherson, the only provincial capital of Ukraine it had captured. It was the latest in a series of defeats that have exposed the Russian military as a paper tiger in the eyes of some military observers.
Gallyamov’s claims of a South American escape bear resemblance to similar theories involving another widely loathed dictator.
Proponents of alternative history have claimed that Adolf Hitler himself escaped the crumbling ruins of Nazi Germany in 1945 and lived the rest of his life in Argentina.
However, these claims are uncorroborated, and all evidence indicates that the brutal dictator met his end in his own bunker weeks before the war’s conclusion.
