His critics enjoyed it too, but for different reasons. The flight was widely ridiculed in the Russian blogosphere, especially amid speculation that Putin would wear a beak along with the coverall to make the birds think he was their parent.
“The Kremlin press service doesn’t know what other signal to send to the citizens so that they would finally understand that the national leader has lost it,” a popular blogger who goes by the moniker Perzident Roissi — a takeoff on “President of Russia” — said in a Twitter post.
A later, more serious post said, “Putin has given cranes the freedom that he has been taking away from citizens of Russia all these years.”
And Masha Gessen, editor of a Russian travel magazine and author of an anti-Putin biography called “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” said she was fired Monday after refusing to send a reporter to cover Putin’s flight.
Say what you want about Putin—he’s a man.
I stand corrected.
He does look every bit as silly as Dukakis in that tank.
Putin is very good at maintaining his cult of personality, but he’s got nothing on Kim Jong Un. Now, there’s a man with power. Did you see him “looking at things” in a supermarket. It was awe-inspiring.