Vladimir Putin's declining health is bringing growing chaos to the Kremlin, a top former British spy believes.
Former government intelligence official Christopher Steele claims that the Russian President is now constantly surrounded by doctors.
He believes the mysterious illness that has plagued Putin, 69, has left Moscow in turmoil as they balance dealing with his health and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Mr Steele, who ran the Russia desk at MI6 in London between 2006 and 2009, said that the "exact details" of his condition were still not known, even to his high-ranking colleagues, The Mirror reports.
However, Putin is in need of constant medical care, he claimed.
"He's constantly accompanied around the place by a team of doctors," he told LBC's Eddie Mair earlier today.
"Meetings of the security council that are shown to supposedly last for a whole hour are actually broken up into several sections, he goes out and receives some kind of medical treatment between those sections.
"So, clearly, he is seriously ill - how terminal or incurable it is is not clear, we can't be entirely sure.
"But it's certainly having a very serious impact on the governance of Russia at the moment."
There has been a string of claims about the health of the Kremlin leader, with some reports suggesting he is suffering from cancer, undergoing chemotherapy and steroid treatment among other ailments.
Other reports suggest Putin is suffering from Parkinson's or early-stage dementia.
Steele's comments come after Ukrainian Major General Kyrylo Budanov also said the Russian leader is seriously ill with cancer and that an operation to remove him is underway in Russia.
He added on LBC: "There's increasing disarray in the Kremlin and chaos in fact, that there's no clear political leadership coming from Putin who is increasingly ill, and that in the military's terms the structures of command and so on are not functioning as they should."
Mair then bluntly asks: "Do you think the wheels are coming off?"
The ex-spy then replied: "I do, yes."
New Lines say a "top-secret memo" was sent out by the FSB, Russia’s domestic security agency, to all its regional directors instructing them not to trust rumours about the President's terminal condition.
Christo Grozev, the head of investigations at Bellingcat, said: "The directors were further instructed to dispel any rumours to this effect that may spread within the local FSB units.
"According to a source at one of the regional units who saw the memo, this unprecedented instruction had the opposite effect, with most FSB officers suddenly coming to believe that Putin indeed suffers from a serious medical condition."
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