Kremlin Denial As Putin Sickness Rumours Swirl

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Kremlin officials have denied reports that Vladimir Putin is ill amid mounting speculation about the Russian president's health.

Two state events have been cancelled in recent days and Mr Putin has not been seen in public since a meeting with Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi in Moscow on 5 March.

A planned trip to Kazakhstan was postponed on Wednesday, with an unnamed Kazakh government official telling the Reuters news agency: "It looks like he [Putin] has fallen ill."

The second engagement – a ceremony to formalise the controversial annexation of South Ossetia – was reportedly cancelled at such short notice that the South Ossetian delegation had already arrived in Moscow.

The Russian leader was also not present at a meeting of the Federal Security Service on Thursday, which he has often attended in the past.

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Gallery: Vladimir Putin - Man Of Action

Vladimir Putin has earned a reputation as something of an action man. Here in 2013 he is seen shaking hands with a walrus on a visit to the under-construction Primorsky Aquarium.

Seemingly always keen to be seen with members of the animal kingdom, he was also pictured touching a dolphin during his trip to the new attraction on the Russky Island, in the far eastern city of Vladivostok.

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Here, at a Moscow sports complex in St Petersburg, he shows off his judo skills.

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He joined a group of scientists in the Arctic to help tag endangered polar bears.

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In the Siberian mountains, he rode bare-chested on a horse.

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"There's no need to worry, he's absolutely healthy," Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Echo of Moscow radio station.

He said the agreement with South Ossetia would be signed next week and insisted the president had not planned to attend the security service meeting.

"Yes, he's usually there," Mr Peskov said. "But this year he was not planning to be."

Asked whether Putin's handshake was still firm, Mr Peskov laughed and said: "It breaks your hand."

However, he declined to say when the president would next make a public appearance.

"He has meetings all the time," Mr Peskov told Reuters.

"He has meetings today, tomorrow. I don't know which ones we will make public."

The Kremlin press service released an image on Wednesday purporting to show Vladimir Putin meeting the regional governor of Karelia, but several news agencies said the meeting had actually taken place on 4 March.

Adding to the speculation, Russian business newspaper RBK said footage of the president congratulating women on International Women's Day, posted on the Kremlin website on March 8, had been pre-recorded on 5 March.

The 62-year-old rarely takes time off, and it is unusual for him to miss state events through illness.

Mr Putin has cultivated an image as a physically-fit, strongman president, posing for photographs while hunting, swimming and riding a horse bare-chested, flying a fighter jet, and supposedly saving a TV crew from a tiger attack.

It makes a stark and presumably deliberate contrast to the failing health of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, and to the succession of ailing, elderly leaders of the early 1980s, whose decline seemed to mirror that of the Soviet Union.

Rumours about Mr Putin's health last surfaced in 2012 when the Russian president cancelled several trips and appeared to have developed a limp, but the Kremlin said that was due to a sports injury.

In October Mr Putin's spokesman told journalists to "shut their trap" after an article suggested the president might have pancreatic cancer.

Mr Peskov appeared to be trying to laugh off the latest speculation, accusing reporters on Thursday of "spring madness".

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