This job stinks! Vladimir Putin’s bodyguards lock up his poo

This is Vladimir Poopin’.

Members of Russia’s elite Federal Protective Service have pulled a double punch – locking up President Vladimir Putin’s excrement when he travels abroad and bringing it home under armed guard.

The secretly collected craps was first reported on Thursday in French news magazine Paris Match by two senior Russian journalists.

According to the report, federal protection officers collect Putin’s poops without causing a stink and put them in specialized packages, which then go into a dedicated briefcase for return to the motherland.

The magazine reports evidence of collections that took place during a visit by Putin to France in May 2017, as well as a 2019 visit to Saudi Arabia.

Ex-BBC journalist Farida Rustamova tweeted that she had been told Putin had been taking portable toilets abroad with him for years.

Upper Muscovite manure is sometimes destroyed rather than brought back to Russia, the scribe added, citing sources.

Either way, the extent to which Putin’s security state is willing to go to protect his stool samples from foreign intelligence operatives adds to rampant speculation that the Russian president is deeply ill.

The reported defecation cover-up follows a US intelligence assessment that Putin is secretly being treated for advanced cancer – and increasingly paranoid about his grip on power.

That same report said foreign governments were a key source of information for US assessments of Putin’s health.

Rumors of Putin’s imminent demise have been reported since the early days of his invasion of Ukraine.

In early April, journalists from Russian media The Project reported that Putin was very ill and was secretly seeing an oncologist.

This report was followed by several claims, some from Telegram channels believed to be aligned with Kremlin dissidents, that Putin was due to undergo various surgeries or was looking for a potential successor.

Some of those potential successors are rumored to come from the ranks of Putin’s former bodyguards – a role widely seen as a fast track to top positions in the Kremlin.