Putin body doubles: Czech experts check hundreds of photos

Czech experts have once again tested the theory that body doubles appear in public in place of Vladimir Putin, and found no evidence for it. The largest analysis came from the machine learning group at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University (ČVUT): according to the group, photographs from 1999–2026 show the same person.

The outlet returned to the subject because of a new scientific paper that, using one method of comparing photos of Putin before and after 2015, found a statistically significant difference after a period when the Kremlin leader did not appear in public for some time. Britain's Guardian, among others, reported on it at the time. The outlet also ran a check last year, when independent experts from several fields did not confirm the theory that the pictures show different people.

What the ČVUT analysis showed

The scientists first examined nine selected agency photos of Putin from 2013–2026 using four different face-recognition models. All the systems reached the same conclusion: every photo shows the same person.

The team then assembled a much larger set — 292 verified photos from 1999–2026 — and looked in it for a sharp jump around 2015 (or in any other year) that might point to a change of identity. Nothing of the kind turned up. The similarity of Putin's face declines smoothly over the years, as expected with aging, and 2015 does not stand out. As a control, the same method was applied to photos of other politicians, including Sergei Lavrov, Alexander Lukashenko and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The view of an anthropologist and biometrics specialists

Forensic anthropologist Petra Urbanová of Masaryk University, who also examined Putin's photos in the earlier check, reached a similar conclusion. She saw nothing in the new photo to suggest a different person either. “I see exactly the same features as in the earlier ones,” she said. In her words, a noticeable change in appearance during some period is not necessarily unusual: aging is never perfectly smooth, and a face can change fairly quickly because of weight loss or gain, illness or a change of lifestyle.

The company Scanlock ran the latest photo through its SAFR system and got a 100% match. Ondřej Linduška, the firm's head, stresses, however, that even such a result cannot be treated as a final exclusion of a very similar look-alike: face-recognition systems are designed above all for fast identification and deliberately tolerate some changes in appearance. He recalled a case in which a system, even at very strict settings, took male twins for the same person.

What prompted the new check

The impetus was a study by an American-Romanian group of statisticians from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, Florida State University and the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, published in the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz