Pjotr Sauer

Last month, the Kremlin released this curious video of Vladimir Putin dressed casually in jeans and a jacket, walking with a bouquet of flowers in a hotel to meet his high school teacher.

Pyotr Sauer is The Guardian's Russian affairs reporter.

Decoding Kremlin propaganda is very much part of the job description.

On his way to meeting his teacher, he also made chitchat with a random passerby, who later turned out to be someone who worked for the Russian security services.

The video showed the Russian president driving himself to meet Vera Gurevich.

She taught the young Putin at school number 193 in Leningrad, now St.

Petersburg.

She seemed delighted to see him, planting kisses on his waxy cheeks before he whisked her off for dinner at the Kremlin.

So we as journalists often don't know where Putin is at any moment of the time.

He is extremely careful about revealing his location.

We know that he has a number of offices that look identical to each other, which is meant to hide his location.

Sometimes he says he's in the Kremlin, but in reality he's sort of in an office that resembles his Kremlin office, but somewhere else.

And all of this is meant to prevent any possible attacks that he fears.

As his war in Ukraine enters its fifth bloody year, Putin is seen increasingly rarely in public.

What he thought would be a quick and easy conflict has proved anything but, costing the lives of half a million Russians and hitting the Russian economy hard.

That's why this public appearance was so noteworthy.

The whole image was striking because it came amid growing reports that the Russian leader is isolated, that he's paranoid, and that he might even be fearing a coup.

By releasing this image, I think the Kremlin really tried to fight those reports, and they tried to portray the Putin that many Russians have come to know over the last 26 years, a man who's comfortable with the public, who considers himself one of the people.

but do the Russian people still see him that way?

From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd.