The two blokes who had the pleasure of sitting next Russian President Vladimir Putin during this week's Victory Day parade in Moscow were not World War Two veterans, it can be revealed.
The slightly toned-down annual show of weaponry muscle took place inside Moscow's Red Square.
It featured one tank, thousands of soldiers and a giant missile being paraded around during the event held to celebrate how Russia claims it won the Second World War.
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And surrounding Putin was supposed to be veterans of that time – however it has now emerged that two of those sitting next to the despot were actually former Russia spies.
According to Anengtstvo, one of those was 98-year-old Yury Dvoikin, who was a volunteer in 1942 but never fought in the war.
He was sitting next to Putin on the right hand side.
Two years after he volunteered for the war he had no involvement in, Dvoikin was sent to sniper school, before being shipped out to Lviv where he was an agent for the NKVD – a Soviet spy organisation fronted by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs.
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While there he would “carry out operations to liquidate the nationalist underground on the territory of western Ukraine ”.
And on Putin's immediate left was Gennady Zaitsev, 88.
He joined the army in 1953 – several years after the end of the war – spending six years there before joining the infamous KGB Russian spy organisation.
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In 1968, he was part of a Soviet unit sent to then-Czaechoslovakia to help clamp down on anti-Soviet protests.
He was in charge of Soviet forces who occupied the country's Interior Ministry building, before being appointed the head of the KGB's Alpha counter-terrorism unit in the 1970s.
The identities of several others sitting near Putin are still being worked out, according to several Russia-based anti-Kremlin news outlets.
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