Putin Went Crazy On The Topic Of Aging
- 13.09.2025, 13:17
The head of the Kremlin is obsessed with the idea of "eternal youth."
In 2021-2025, the Russian Science Foundation (RNF) supported 43 projects in the field of fundamental medicine related to aging. In 2016-2020, there were only seven such projects, "Nova-Europe" found out.
This year, according to information on the foundation's website, the size of grants under the main program is four to seven million rubles annually, with the possibility of extending funding for one or two years. In 2017, the size of standard grants was smaller: from three to six million rubles.
If the minimum estimates of the size of the allocated grants are taken into account, RNF funding for projects related to aging could grow from 21 million rubles in 2016-2020 to 172 million rubles in 2021-2025. In reality, the difference could be even greater.
The majority of projects related to aging were supported by the RNF in 2021-2023 - 34 such applications received support from the fund during this period. For example, the foundation awarded a grant for the project "Mechanisms of innate immunity in the formation of physiological and pathological aging", which studies how the mechanisms of innate immunity affect the way aging occurs in different people, and is looking for markers that could help predict how aging will be: normal or pathological. The authors of another RNF-supported study are trying to find a link between certain changes in the brain and eye with Alzheimer's disease and find a way to prevent the development of the disease.
In 2025, the foundation has supported five medical projects that can be found using the keyword "aging." These include, for example, "Investigation of the autophagy-mediated effect of stress (glucose deprivation) on the ability of cells at the stage of chemoprevention-induced cellular aging to return to repeated division" and "Changes in the electrical activity of neurons of the dorsomedial nucleus of the hypothalamus ex vivo during aging".
The Russian Science Foundation is a state non-profit foundation established in 2013 to support basic and applied scientific research in Russia. In 2024, the total amount of RNF grants amounted to about 40 billion rubles.
In addition, in 2025 at least one more project, actually related to aging, was supported under the title "Regulation of cell renewal processes in the body, the fundamental basis for long-term preservation of functional activity of organs and tissues, health and active longevity of humans". Its leader is Maria Vorontsova, whom the media call Putin's eldest daughter.
The T-Invariant notes that Vorontsova received a grant under the program for funding world-class scientific laboratories, although her Hirsch Index - one of the most important scientometric indicators that determine the demand for a scientist's research - is significantly lower than that of other winners of the competition under this program. The size of the grant under the program applied for by Vorontsova is larger than usual and can be up to 30 million rubles.
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated interest in the topic of life extension and the fight against aging. Recently, an accidentally recorded conversation between Putin and Xi Jinping during a military parade in Beijing on September 3, 2025, about the possibilities of extending human life was circulated online. The Chinese leader noted that there are predictions that people could live up to 150 years in this century. Putin, for his part, reiterated that thanks to modern medical and technological means, people will be able to "feel younger and younger and even achieve immortality."
The Reuters agency, which posted the video of the conversation, subsequently removed it from its resources and asked its customers who bought the video to do the same, as China's state broadcaster CCTV revoked its license to use the material.
Shortly after his conversation with the Chinese leader, Putin visited the Sirius laboratory complex in the Krasnodar region, where he was shown "young strawberries."
In 2024, Vladimir Putin announced a new national project - "New Technologies for Saving Health", with the task to "save 175 thousand lives" by 2030, and a significant role in it is assigned to the fight against aging: the development of technology, prevention, neurotechnology, assessment of biological age, bioprinting of organs. The publication Meduza named the initiator of this project as Mikhail Kovalchuk, a longtime friend of Putin. He promotes the ideas of "Russian genome" and significant life extension.
The experts interviewed by "Meduza" doubt that the stated goals will be fulfilled: a significant part of the science directions is not yet confirmed, the budget is not clear, difficulties with resources and scientific infrastructure make the project more symbolic than actually working on a large scale.
The publication "Project" reported that Vladimir Putin, on a tip-off from Sergei Shoigu, has taken an interest in antler baths - a health-improving procedure in which a person is immersed in a warm infusion of blood from young, not yet ossified deer antlers. Extraction of antlers is carried out in an extremely cruel way for deer. This procedure supposedly improves the cardiovascular system and rejuvenates the skin. Its effectiveness has not been proven.