Vladimir Putin has 'three years to live' and 'losing eyesight due to illness' spy claims

A growing number of unconfirmed reports allege the 69-year-old president has cancer and that his health is deteriorating quickly.

And now an FSB officer has claimed Putin “has no more than two to three years to stay alive”, adding the Russian president has “a severe form of rapidly progressing cancer”.

Messages said to be from the unidentified Russian spy to FSB defector Boris Karpichkov also say Putin is losing his sight and suffering from headaches.

“We are told he is suffering from headaches and when he appears on TV he needs pieces of paper with everything written in huge letters to read what he’s going to say,” the Russian officer told the Sunday Mirror.

“They are so big each page can only hold a couple of sentences. His eyesight is seriously worsening.”

The spy added that Putin’s limbs are “now also shaking uncontrollably”.

Previous footage from earlier this year appeared to show his hand shaking, while as he also appeared to grip a table for support during a meeting broadcast in April.

Whispers about his health appear to have originated with the hugely popular Russian Telegram channel General SVR.

It claimed Mr Putin’s doctors have warned him the surgery might incapacitate him for “a short time”, and that during this period the president will briefly hand over the reins of power to an aide.

Concerns for his health grew after former UK intelligence official Christopher Steele said the Russian leader left meetings for medical treatements.

“Meetings of the security council that are shown to supposedly last for a whole hour are actually broken up into several sections,” Mr Steele, who wrote a dossier on Donald Trump and Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 US election, told LBC radio.

“He’s constantly accompanied around the place by a team of doctors.”

And earlier this month an oligarch with close ties to Mr Putin was reportedly recorded saying he is “very ill with blood cancer”.

The unnamed Russian alleged in the recording that the president had surgery on his back shortly before ordering the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, according to the US-based New Lines magazine.