Vladimir Putin has ventured out of his safety net for the first time in months and walked smack dab into an ambush during a televised meeting that went off the rails.
Fresh off a tightly controlled publicity stunt in Irkutsk on Friday—where the Russian leader, flanked by bodyguards, made a show of inspecting aircraft—Putin sat down with Kazakhstan’s president in the Russian city of Omsk on Saturday.
The 73-year-old Russian president could barely conceal his nervous grimace as Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev used the meeting that was supposed to be about Russia-Kazakh cooperation to throw Putin under the bus.
“I will not hide that I am receiving many signals—which I have already informed you about by phone—from Europe and the United States regarding the current state of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia," Tokayev told Putin as a slew of Kremlin-controlled TV outlets filmed the confrontation.
He went on to call BS on the Kremlin’s narrative of the war, saying, “The nature of this conflict is not entirely clear” and seems utterly pointless. Putin, meanwhile, appeared to tense up and stared down at his lap as Tokayev spoke, seemingly caught off guard.
“This all needs to stop,” Tokayev said, urging Putin to “freeze” the war and return to negotiations. He twisted the knife by adding that despite “proposals and appeals,” Kazakhstan “categorically refuses” to act as a mediator in helping to end the war, since “Russia is a great country” and can “manage on its own.”
At the end of Tokayev’s three-minute speech, Putin nervously thanked the Kazakh president and promised to give him a “detailed briefing” on the Ukraine war, before the broadcast abruptly ended.
The tense exchange came a day after Putin flew to Irkutsk in Siberia for an unannounced visit to the Irkutsk Aviation Plant, his first trip to one of Russia’s regions for domestic issues in more than eight months. He has drastically reduced travel to Russia’s regions and avoided public appearances in recent months, purportedly out of fear of being assassinated. Instead, amid relentless Ukrainian drone strikes and growing public outrage over economic woes, Putin has largely retreated into fortified underground bunkers, where he is said to have at times remained for weeks.
Footage shared by the Kremlin showed him flanked by bodyguards as he inspected the Yak-130M combat jet trainer and an MC-21 passenger jet, which has been plagued by repeated production delays.
The plant had apparently been cleared out for his visit, and Irkutsk locals fumed on social media about the entire city coming to a standstill to make way for what was widely seen as a PR stunt.
“Burn in hell,” one resident commented in response to Putin’s visit on a local website, according to the independent outlet People of Baikal.
“Will we need to bow when the tsar passes through?” another quipped.
“How scared he is of his own people,” a third person noted, only to be reminded: “Well, every other person is ready to kill him.”
