New Delhi:  Russian President Vladimir Putin’s obsession with secrecy has always bordered on the theatrical, but breathless claims in the Indian media following the Alaska summit that his excrement travels under diplomatic escort takes the journalistic obsession with ‘scoops’ to the level of farce.

The unsourced claim, which ‘poopped’ up in the international media a few years ago and is now viral, would have us believe that whenever Putin travels abroad, his security detail collects his stool and repatriates it to Russia. The alleged motive: to stop foreign agencies from testing it for clues about his health or genetics.

For this former KGB operative, who has spent over two decades choreographing an image of superhuman vitality – bare-chested in Siberia, diving for “ancient amphorae” in staged photo ops, or performing ice hockey stunts – bodily waste is surely no trivial matter. So it should not surprise us if it really were a highly classified extension of state security, guarded as jealously as his public persona. 

For clinical pathologists and gastroenterologists, a stool sample can reveal far more than someone’s last meal. It can divulge details of the person’s stress levels, diseases, liver or kidney issues, and even what medications he or she might be ingesting. For any head of state, such information is anything but trivial.

During the early days of the Ukraine war,  rumours of Putin’s ill-health and imminent demise were put into circulation in the West, presumably to demoralise the Russian war machine. And it was to buttress this rumour that the story about his secret stools was likely conjured up.

We are told that Putin’s excrement is guarded like Russia’s nuclear codes, each ‘briefcase’ embodying a vulnerability: one could unleash annihilation, the other expose the frailties of the digestive system of the man who commands these destructive weapons. In other words, if the Russian leader's fabled nuclear suitcase holds the power to end the world, his poop suitcase, it seems, guards the secret of what might threaten Putin.

Entertaining as this comparison is, however, it almost certainly belongs in the category of New Cold War folklore rather than fact. The Kremlin has never confirmed it, and no verifiable source has ever provided evidence. The tale fits the caricature of Putin as a secret-hoarding ex-KGB man so neatly that it practically debunks itself.

That said, the idea isn’t pulled entirely from thin air. Intelligence agencies have long taken a keen interest in their rivals’ biology. In 1949, the MGB – the precursor of the KGB – reportedly analysed Mao Zedong’s excreta for health insights. The CIA, too, has pursued such biological samples—blood, urine, even hair—as potential windows into a leader’s condition. In this sense, the “poop suitcase” story is less about Putin specifically than about the enduring paranoia of espionage.

And it is precisely because stool can reveal so much—disease, stress, medication use—that the claim felt plausible enough to catch fire online. Social media users quickly churned out quips about Putin leaving behind neither footprints, fingerprints, nor “poop-prints.” Others noted that geopolitics is usually about armies and borders, but sometimes also, quite literally, about shit.

Of course, in some places, the strategic handling of waste is more reality than rumour. On the Siachen Glacier, Indian soldiers have had to treat excreta with near-military precision simply to survive and protect their water supply. Veterans recall the ordeal of defecating at 15,000 feet in minus 45°C, where waste froze in layers of ice and never decomposed. Unlike Putin’s alleged poop suitcase, this is no myth: decades of frozen waste still sit embedded in the glacier.

The juxtaposition is telling. On one end, an unverified tale of Putin’s paranoia; on the other, the documented logistics of soldiers in the world’s highest battlefield. Both remind us that what seems absurd can still matter in the realms of security and survival.

In the end, Putin’s “poop protocol” is probably little more than a shitty joke that’s too good not to share. But the viral fascination with it shows how easily secrecy, power, and bathroom humour can blend into a story that, even without evidence, refuses to be flushed away.

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