The show of force by Vladimir Putin at the Luzhniki stadium in Moscow was a great success.
The stadium is full to overflowing, a priori a galvanized crowd and in the center is Vladimir Putin, who praises the Russian soldiers employed in Ukraine, defending the banner, the fatherland “shoulder to shoulder”.
An image that went around the world and an event designed to show a certain unity of Russia in the face of criticism three weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine.
But this well-oiled script ran into a grain of sand. For several minutes, the dictator’s speech was interrupted in full rebroadcast on Russian state television.
Vladimir Putin celebrated the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, the speech was fiery, and suddenly, when it was supposed to go live, the Russian president broke off in mid-sentence, and the image on the screen was replaced by frames before his speech. The singer even screams.
A few minutes after the break, Russian television returned to the screen the end of Vladimir Putin’s speech. The incident, little commented on in the Kremlin, resembles a “simple technical failure.” An explanation that doesn’t convince skeptics who are looking for elements of what might actually have happened. The implementation may have wanted to clumsily “erase” the possible disruption of the passage of speech broadcast with a slight delay.