President Trump’s Air Force One subterfuge was a stunning episode of official deception.
But it pales in comparison to the secrecy surrounding President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose activity is shrouded in so much mystery that journalists have tried to track it by assessing the wilting of his office plants.
That is the method some reporters resorted to this year as they worked to ascertain whether the Russian leader’s televised meetings took place when the Kremlin said they did. The apparent reversal of the leaf decay seen in Mr. Putin’s plants suggested that the meetings actually took place in a different order and on different days.
For Mr. Putin, such deceit is par for the course. The White House, by contrast, has been criticized for not revealing Mr. Trump’s secret plane switch on a Turkish tarmac last month until The Washington Post broke the story this week.
“Compared to Russia,” said Mikhail Rubin, a Russian investigative reporter, “this is child’s play.”
Mr. Rubin and other reporters have found that Mr. Putin has outfitted his residences with nearly identical offices so that video footage of meetings does not reveal his location. His security apparatus has developed a presidential train, along with special railroad spurs and secret stations near at least three of his country residences, according to news reports and satellite images.
Government officials are forced to play along, keeping their meetings with Mr. Putin a secret until they are televised — sometimes weeks later — and then pretending they happened on that day.
In Russia, official falsehoods about the president’s whereabouts “are just a regular Tuesday,” said Farida Rustamova, a Russian journalist who covers the Kremlin from exile in Berlin. She has reported that Mr. Putin’s interlocutors in his televised meetings sometimes speak of outdated events, in at least one case in clothes and a haircut incongruous with other public appearances.
There is even a term of art for those delayed-release Putin meetings among Russian journalists: konservy, or canned goods.
The Kremlin has previously denied deceiving the public about Mr. Putin’s location and did not respond to a request for comment.
Covering Mr. Putin as a New York Times correspondent based in Moscow, I got a sense of the lengths the Russian president goes to in order to hide his movements when I visited Lake Valdai, where he has a country residence, in 2021. Residents told me about a mysterious new railroad line that had been built toward his compound. Satellite imagery showed a new station, with a helipad, that did not appear on timetables or railway maps.
In 2023, a defector from the Russian version of the Secret Service, the F.S.O., asserted that Mr. Putin was using train travel to avoid being tracked. Leaked documents indicated that a secret armored train outfitted for the office of the president, painted like a regular passenger train but complete with a gym, spa and special communications equipment, was used by Mr. Putin himself.
Mr. Putin’s preoccupation with secrecy and security appeared to increase during the pandemic, when he forced officials to quarantine for two weeks to see him and when his isolation made it easier to hide his whereabouts. And it has reached new heights since his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, especially as that country’s drones flew deeper into Russia, helping precipitate mobile internet shutdowns and reportedly curtailing his travel.
In Moscow, there is now speculation that the enormous motorcades racing down city streets that are presumed to be carrying Mr. Putin are actually sometimes decoys, according to Ms. Rustamova. One of my Kremlin-connected contacts in Moscow told me the same.
Mr. Rubin, the investigative journalist, first reported in 2020 that Mr. Putin worked from identical-looking offices in his residences in the Moscow suburbs and in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, allowing the Kremlin to lie about his location. A report last year by Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe uncovered more details about that deception effort, highlighting tiny differences between those otherwise identical offices — like the placement of door handles and wall seams — that indicated they were in different places.
Mr. Rubin, who is now based in North Carolina and is deputy editor of the news outlet Proekt, first got a sense of Mr. Putin’s secrecy when he covered the Kremlin for a Russian business newspaper a decade ago. Mr. Rubin once happened to see members of Mr. Putin’s Security Council arriving for a meeting, but his office only announced the gathering days later, as though it was a new occurrence. He came to realize, he said, “that Putin’s public image is made up, it’s an absolute lie from beginning to end.”
For Mr. Putin, the deception is not only about security, but about projecting an air of constant activity and control. The intensity of U.S. press coverage of the president, on the other hand, would have been unimaginable in Russia even before the Ukraine war and the pandemic.
But the Trump administration’s restrictions on the news media and its misdirection surrounding the president’s flight last month still look familiar in some Russian eyes.
“Putin in this sense is a caricature of a figure who has taken everything happening around him to the point of absurdity,” Mr. Rubin said. “Trump, it seems to me, is only starting to move in this direction.”
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