Why Putin’s awkward Q&A may not be all it seemed
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It seemed like the voices of angry Russians had suddenly broken through the Kremlin’s censors to embarrass Vladimir Putin at his annual question-and-answer session.
A batch of SMS messages apparently sent in by ordinary Russians on a live feed posed tough questions about the hard lives that most people lead amid soaring prices and crumbling infrastructure.
Some wondered if a rogue censor was letting them through.
Meanwhile, Kremlin propagandists suggested that the awkward questions were proof that Russians live in a free country, not the dictatorship that most analysts say Putin has created.
“This clearly shows that the organisers are trying to minimise any censorship,” said Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin speech writer.
However, the critical SMS messages, which went unanswered, appeared to show the Kremlin’s fingerprints.
There were eight to 12 messages, too many to claim that they had slipped past the censors. The language was also careful and steered clear of criticising the war in Ukraine.
One message in particular appeared to undermine what may have been a skillful Kremlin disinformation campaign. This was the only message that, at first glance, laid into the Russian leader.
“This question won’t be shown!” the message began.
“I’d like to know, when will our president pay attention to his own country? We’ve got no education, no healthcare. The abyss lies ahead...” it continued in clever language which actually begs Putin for help and predicts catastrophe if he doesn’t step in.
It felt like Putin, with his messiah complex and determination to deflect complaints away from his invasion of Ukraine, was talking to himself.
And in many ways, he was, with the questions possibly designed by the Kremlin to promote the idea of free speech in Russia to a domestic and international audience.
The Kremlin has banned most protests and any criticism of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but it is still important to its strategists that ordinary Russians are presented with a veneer of democracy. A presidential election is planned for March and Putin wants to be loved by ordinary Russians.
This sort of subterfuge has occurred before.
In 2017, the Kremlin tried a similar tactic and also posted critical messages on the live feed throughout a question-and-answer session.
Then as now, the language was also stilted and focused on domestic policies.
Several people who worked on the 2017 programme told the BBC that the messages had been part of a Kremlin plot. They said that all the questions and SMS messages had been pre-approved.
“First some people take them away, then others take them away and so on right up to the presidential press service,” one of the sources said.
The Kremlin’s taste for subterfuge is well known. Putin’s question-and-answer session on Thursday may also have been a Kremlin disinformation project.
