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Now Russian President Vladimir Putin's walk is the hub of attention from neurologists. It is like a "gunslinger's gait," showing him walking with minimal swinging of his right arm compared to his left. Commentators explain that this might be due to his "KGB weapons training".

The "'Gunslinger's gait': a new cause of unilaterally reduced arm swing," was published recently in the British Medical Journal and authored by neurologists from the Netherlands, Italy and Portugal, according to Agence France-Presse.

"You could say, if it were one occasion, maybe he just had a painful shoulder or some other intermittent problem," Bloem said, according to Live Science. "But then we discovered this was a consistent finding stretching out over a period of multiple years."

Bastiaan R. Bloem, one of the co-authors of the study and Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre's movement disorders neurology professor, got a message from a colleague, who sent an attached video of Putin showing his right arm swinging---but with stiffness. Comparing it with other videos made him realise that it was consistent through the years.

The "gunslinger gait" may have been learnt from "behavioural adaptation, possibly triggered by KGB or other forms of weapons training where trainees are taught to keep their right hand close to the chest while walking, allowing them to quickly draw a gun when faced with a foe," according to the British Medical Journal.

YouTube videos of other Russian officials in high places, such as Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, former defense ministers, Anatoly Serdyukov and Sergei Ivanov, as well as a senior military commander, Anatoly Sidorov, showed that minimized movement of their right arms remains unimpacted by neurological problems.

YouTube/world@news