The Kremlin has released a video of Vladimir Putin driving in Moscow and meeting an old school teacher in a hotel lobby, after Western media outlets cited a European intelligence report as saying the Russian president spent weeks holed up in bunkers.
The reports, which appeared in the run-up to Putin's annual May 9 appearance on Red Square to mark victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two, and whose origin the Kremlin queried, suggested security around him had been sharply tightened and that he spent weeks on end directing the war in Ukraine from underground bunkers because of fears of an attempted assassination or coup.
Russian officials have dismissed such scenarios as nonsense and the Putin video, which was released late on Monday, appeared to be a visual rebuttal of those accusations and of assertions - which have long been levelled at him by some of his critics - that he is increasingly out of touch with his own people.
It showed a relaxed-looking Putin pulling up to a hotel in central Moscow behind the wheel of a Russian-made SUV with a security guard. He is then seen going into the lobby with a big bouquet of flowers to meet one of his old school teachers.
Dressed casually in jeans and a light jacket, Putin, 73, is shown hugging his former teacher, Vera Gurevich, who repeatedly kisses him on the cheeks and whispers something in his ear.
Putin, who started school in what was then Leningrad in 1960, is then seen making small talk about the weather with an apparently random passer-by who walks into the hotel lobby with his family before Putin helps his former teacher into his vehicle and drives her off for dinner in the Kremlin.
Putin had invited Gurevich to the annual Red Square parade and to then spend a few days in Moscow enjoying a cultural program, the Kremlin said in a statement.
In power as either president or prime minister since 1999, Putin - whose ratings have dipped in recent months but remain high, according to state pollsters - is two years into his current term which is due to expire in 2030.
Russia's State Duma, the lower house of parliament, is up for re-election in September at a time when growth forecasts for this year have been sharply cut back amid signs that people are unhappy about a growing Internet crackdown.
Putin said on Saturday that he thought the war in Ukraine was coming to an end, remarks that came just hours after he had vowed victory in Ukraine at Moscow's most scaled-back Victory Day parade in years.
