Vladimir Putin’s ‘gunslinger gait’ may come from KGB training
Weapons training may be why the Russian President walks with a reduced swing in his right arm, a study says.
Russian President Vladimir Putin walks with a curious “gunslinger’s gait” — a reduced swing in his right arm which he may have acquired through KGB weapons training, says an unusual study published yesterday.
The research, published in the British medical journal The BMJ, was by neurologists in Portugal, Italy and The Netherlands.
Specialists in analysing postures and movements that are potential signs of health disorders, they say they were struck by Mr Putin’s “distinct” way of walking. Video footage shows when the President walks, his left arm swings normally but his right arm barely moves. Asymmetrical movement like this is often a telltale sign of Parkinson’s disease.
But the doctors found no other symptoms of this disease in Mr Putin, such as tremor, rigidity or poor co-ordination. They found he had “excellent motor skills” as a judo black belt, weightlifter and swimmer, and his handwriting is fast and signature tremble-free.
But they turned up an alternative explanation from a training manual used by the former Soviet intelligence service, the KGB. The manual, which they had translated into Dutch, instructs operatives to keep their weapon in their right hand close to their chest and move forward with one side — usually the left — “turned somewhat in the direction of movement”.
The idea behind this approach is to let the agent draw a gun as quickly as possible when confronted with a foe.
Wondering whether intensive training in this method could explain Mr Putin’s gait, as he was a KGB operative in the Cold War, the team carried out a trawl on YouTube for videos of other Russian officials.
The researchers were “stunned” by what they saw, said Bastiaan Bloem, a professor of movement disorder neurology at Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, who led the study.
They also found the characteristic walk in Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, in two former defence ministers — Anatoly Serdyukov and Sergei Ivanov — and in Anatoly Sidorov, a senior military commander.
Mr Medvedev is the only one of those with no clear links to the military or the KGB. “Substantial evidence suggests that Medvedev is being coached to sound, look and, importantly, walk like the President,” the study concludes.
AFP