Russian President Vladimir Putin is so terrified of being assassinated he has installed identical offices in his residences around the nation to confuse his enemies, according to a high-ranking Kremlin defector.

Gleb Karakulov, 35, formerly an officer in Putin’s elite personal security service, fled Russia via Turkey in October with his wife and daughter because he said he is morally opposed the invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war which has cost thousands of lives on both sides.

Six months after his dramatic escape, Karakulov — who was in charge of the Russian leader’s secure communications as part of the shadowy Federal Protective Service — is sharing intimate details of the private life of his former boss, whom he now openly calls a “war criminal.”

In bombshells interviews with the Associated Press and the anti-Kremlin investigative unit the Dossier Center, Karakulov shed light on Putin’s elaborate arrangements aimed at keeping him safe, including setting up the replicas of his Kremlin office in multiple locations throughout Russia, with matching details down to the desk and wall hangings.

Karakulov told the Dossier Center Putin’s offices at his residence in St. Petersburg, in Sochi on the Black Sea and in Novo-Ogaryovo on the outskirts of Moscow are completely identical.  

In a bid to reinforce the ruse, officially issued reports would sometimes claim the president is in one place when he was actually somewhere else.

When Putin was in Sochi, security officials would deliberately pretend he was leaving, bringing in a plane and sending off a motorcade, when he was in fact staying, Karakulov said.

“There were times when I knew he was in Sochi,” Karakulov recalled. “The TV is on in the background; the news is on, and they show him conducting a meeting in Novo-Ogaryovo. So, I ask a colleague in Sochi, ‘Has he left already?’ ‘No, he says, ‘he’s still here.’”

Karakulov said his colleagues would laugh amongst themselves about their fretful boss’ office replicas.

“I think that this is an attempt to confuse, first, [foreign] intelligence and second so that there are no assassination attempts,” the defector said.

Asked by the Dossier Center if Karakulov was aware of any attempts on Putin’s life, the former Federal Protective Service officer said he was not.

“But that doesn’t stop him from being afraid,” Karakulov added. “Why else would he need such a smoke screen?”

According to the Russian whistleblower, Putin, who portrays himself in public as a larger-than-life, macho leader in the mold of Peter the Great, is privately afraid of many things — feelings surely heightened now that his country is engaged in a full-scale war.

Karakulov said he has never seen Putin use a cellphone or the Internet, leaving him to rely on his confidants for information.

He avoids flying and instead travels by armored train because he’s worried his plane might be shot down by a missile.

Putin is also said to be terrified of catching COVID.

“We still have a self-isolating president,” Karakulov said. “We have to observe a strict quarantine for two weeks before any event, even those lasting 15 to 20 minutes.”

Karakulov said everyone in Putin’s circle is “a little perplexed” by his obsession with COVID safety protocols, given that all his staffers have been vaccinated and are forced to take PCR tests several times a day.

Karakulov, who worked for Putin for 13 years and has taken more than 180 trips with him, said the leader he first met in 2009 is not the same man who invaded Ukraine last year.

“Now he has shut himself off from the world with all kinds of barriers, the quarantine, the information vacuum,” he said. “His take on reality has become distorted.”