Vladimir Putin has suffered from cancer, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone has claimed.

The US filmmaker was granted unprecedented access to the Kremlin leader over a two year period - meaning he knows him better than perhaps any Westerner.

Stone, , whose credits include JFK and Platoon, said in a new podcast that Putin had suffered from cancer, and that he believed he had overcome it.

If true, this has not been admitted to the Russian people.

His words come amid acute speculation that the Kremlin leader is now currently seriously ill.

Stone said separately that he has not met Putin for three years, and his in-depth interviews with him were between 2015 and 2017.

“Remember this, Mr Putin has had this cancer and I think he’s licked it,” he told podcast interviewer Lex Fridman.

“But he’s also been isolated because of Covid.”

There have been suggestions in Russia that Putin’s deep isolation from Covid was due to a pre-existing but unspecified medical condition which made him especially vulnerable.

Explaining why Putin may have misjudged the invasion of Ukraine, Stone speculated that “perhaps he lost touch - contact - with people”.

It was not clear if Putin was getting the correct intelligence, he admitted.

“You would think he was not well informed perhaps, about the degree of cooperation he would get from the [ethnic Russians] in Ukraine…

“That would be one factor, that he didn’t assess the situation correctly.”

It could also be that his “isolation from normal activity” and no longer meeting people “face to face” due to health concerns for Putin over Covid may have led to errors.

But then after Covid, he was forced to see them at a long distance across a table.

Stone’s words on cancer raise the possibility - if true - that he had initially overcome cancer, but that it returned in the three years since he met Putin.