On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the launch of a "special military operation" in eastern Ukraine seeking the "demilitarisation and denazification" of Ukraine.
Even as tensions rise in the region with the forces of the two countries facing each other in battle, a dramatic story related to Vladimir Putin's parents has gone viral in India.
Several posts have gone viral on Facebook and WhatsApp groups attributing the story to a book written by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The viral posts feature a photo of a young Putin sitting on his mother Maria Ivanovna Putina's lap. The text details an event from his parents' life during the Second World War.
In her memoir 'Hard Choices' published in 2014, Hillary Clinton recalled a conversation where Putin told her how his father saved his mother during the Siege of Leningrad when she was mistakenly thought to be dead and nursed her back to health.
"He launched into a story about his parents that I had never heard or read about. During the war Putin's father came home from the front lines for a short break. When he approached the apartment where he lived with his wife, he saw a pile of bodies stacked in the street and men loading them into a waiting flatbed truck. As he drew nearer, he saw a woman's legs wearing shoes that he recognized as his wife's. He ran up and demanded his wife's body. After an argument the men gave in, and Putin's father took his wife in his arms and, after examining her, realized she was still alive. He carried her up to their apartment and nursed her back to health. Eight years later, in 1952, their son Vladimir was born," Clinton wrote.
Clinton goes on to write that when she recounted the tale to then U.S. Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul, "he said he too had never heard it before."
"Obviously I have no way to verify Putin's story, but I've thought of it often. For me, it sheds some light on the man he has become and the country he governs. He's always testing you, always pushing the boundaries," she wrote.
However, the tale Putin told Clinton differs from the one he tells in his 2000 autobiography.
In his autobiography, "First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President" published in 2000, Putin spoke briefly about his family, his childhood and his career at the KGB among other things.
Not much is known about the Russian leader's childhood which he spent in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). Putin's father fought in the Second World War while his mother survived the brutal Siege of Leningrad battling starvation.
Though he recounts the tale of his mother almost being taken away with other dead people, it differs significantly from the anecdote Clinton claims Putin shared with her.
Putin is quoted to have stated that his mother fainted due to starvation with people laying her to rest near corpses only for her to wake up just in time. In his narration of the episode, his father was at the war front and not with his mother. Putin mentioned that his father was "in the battlefield the whole time" and "didn't get a chance to look for her".
"My uncle helped her. He would feed her out of his own rations. There was a time when he was transferred somewhere for a while, and she was on the verge of starvation. This is no exaggeration. Once my mother fainted from hunger. People thought she had died, and they laid her out with the corpses. Luckily Mama woke up in time and started moaning. By some miracle, she lived. She made it through the entire blockade of Leningrad. They didn't get her out until the danger was past," Putin wrote.
In another anecdote, Putin's father shared his meagre rations when he was hospitalised with his starving wife.
"My father managed to survive. He spent several months in the hospital. My mother found him there. She came to see him every day. Mama herself was half dead. My father saw the shape she was in and began to give her his own food, hiding it from the nurses. To be sure, they caught on pretty quickly and put a stop to it. The doctors noticed that he was fainting from hunger. When they figured out why, they gave him a stern lecture and wouldn't let Mama in to see him for awhile. The upshot was that they both survived. Only my father's injuries left him with a lifelong limp," Putin wrote.
So, which version of the story is true? Or is it just a piece of fiction spun by the former KGB man as the British historian and author Ben Macintyre wrote in 2014.
In a column for The Times in 2014, Macintyre casts doubts over Putin's claims stating that it could be a "revealing half-truth that politicians tell when they want to manipulate the past to frame the present."
"These dramatic tales of battlefield courage, civilian resilience and survival against the odds are straight out of the book of Soviet military mythology. Their veracity, or otherwise, will never be fully established and in a way the truth is irrelevant — this is the version of his past that Mr Putin wants Russia and the wider world to believe. That is more revealing than any amount of verified history," Macintyre writes adding that it is something Hillary Clinton herself practised.
BOOM was unable to find other sources to corroborate Putin and Clinton's story about his parents.
