Minutes later Putin walked in, jumped up on stage like a Western politician on the campaign trail and personally chose whom to take questions from, mostly soft-ball inquiries from the Kremlin press pool.
But while the victory he was basking in offered little surprise, the Russian leader did make rare news.
Putin suggested he had agreed to the idea of swapping Alexei Navalny for prisoners held in the West, but offered no explanation for why just days later Navalny was dead.
He was responding to a question from NBC News, which asked whether events such as the jailing of American journalist Evan Gershkovich, the barring of Boris Nadezhdin — a candidate who opposed his war in Ukraine — and the death of Navalny in an Arctic penal colony during the campaign would really have happened in a democracy.
Russia’s independent media has either been disbanded or forced to work from exile in the wake of the Kremlin’s crackdown.
‘Don’t say goodbye’
At another event in central Moscow, Russian politicians, celebrities and journalists had begun to gather for a celebration early Sunday afternoon.
Eating Russian pancakes from the rooftop venue with a stunning view over Moscow, the crowd watched a live show broadcast online with video feeds from various regions, including those in occupied Ukraine who were voting in this election for the first time.
An election night logo read “Russia has no borders” — a reference, organizers told NBC News, to the fact that voting had taken place around the world, although in Ukraine those words may carry a different meaning.
A woman in an elegant gown wore a diamond brooch in the shape of a Z, the ubiquitous pro-war icon of Putin’s Russia. She said the brooch was Chanel, the “Z” repurposed from the piece’s original “N.” She said she was Ukrainian but had renounced her citizenship in 2014, calling Ukraine’s leadership “terrorists” in an echo of a common Kremlin claim.
Everyone there was pro-Putin and pro-war, with musical…
Read the full article here
