There's a June 2023 article on how to spot Putin's body doubles. Ukranian official, Yusov says: "Putin uses doubles," "This is a fact that is based both on operative intelligence and on the assessments of physiognomists and many other specialists."
Yusov continued: "He would never sit in that car and would never dress like that. He would never talk to alleged local residents, as we know that access to the real Putin in the Kremlin is restricted even for his own entourage—a meters-long table that becomes longer and longer, mandatory quarantines people undergo before meeting him."
One article headline in the Mirror is: People convinced Vladimir Putin is using doubles as his chin keeps changing. Another picture heading is: "A ledge in Putin's earlobe constantly changes."
I wondered about this and am shocked by the dozens of pictures - real and unreal - who knows. What is and isn't a real picture? We are lost in the misinformation ocean.
The body double is a well-used approach in politics off the past - one article listed Joseph Stalin, Bernard Montgomery, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Fidel Castro, Indonesian President Sukarno.
That article included Queen Elizabeth II, but she had a stand-in for rehearsals, not a body double. (This seems to magnify my concern over misinformation.)
Wikipedia has a great entry on this subject with excellent detail. The article is HERE. The term used is political decoy.
And in that article is the story about Queen Elizabeth I:
"For many years, the story of the Bisley Boy tempted people into believing that Queen Elizabeth I of England was really a man. According to the legend, Elizabeth (then a princess) had died aged 10 while staying at Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire. Her minders, terrified of the retribution of her father, Henry VIII, made a substitution. They tried to find a lookalike girl of sufficient education, but could not find one, so a lookalike boy from the nearby village of Bisley was put in her place and sworn to secrecy. This legend "explained" why Elizabeth never married, why she went bald in middle age, and why she said she had the heart and stomach of a king in the Tilbury speech. Proponents of the "Bisley Boy" story included Bram Stoker in his 1910 nonfiction book Famous Impostors. According to Laurie Lee, his mother always referred to Elizabeth as "the Bisley boy".
Isn't that legend so tempting.
Check out the dozens of Putin body double pictures.
