In Putin’s bizarre, four-hour TV address, the devil was in all the detail that he let slip

The appearance of an AI-generated Vladimir Putin in conversation with the real one wasn’t even the most surprising moment in the Russian leader’s state-of-the-nation address, writes Chris Stevenson

Double cross: Putin takes a question from an AI-generated lookalike, billed as a ‘resident of St Petersburg’ (Russian pool)

It was a spectacle that Russia had to miss out on last year – Vladimir Putin's annual, end-of-year press conference thatends up being a mix of statements and questions from the assembled audience and others. The run-time extends into the hours: often three or four, depending on how generous the Russian leader is feeling.

With last year's cancellation, this is the first major news conference that Putin has given since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A military campaign that the Kremlin appeared to think would last weeks is now close to entering its third year, with Moscow having ploughed billions of pounds, and hundreds of thousands of lives, into what is now an effective stalemate on the frontline. Stout Ukrainian defence, backed by Western support, have stymied his plans.

Almost every element of Putin's equivalent of Franklin D Roosevelt's fireside chats is stage-managed and carried by state television; he took questions for more than four hours. So the devil is in the detail, the little things that Putin lets slip while delivering what are mostly pre-prepared answers. The small cracks in the façade.

Questions, presumably from viewers (but that’s not guaranteed), appeared on screens at the back of the audience. One told Putin, who recently announced his intention to stand for re-election in 2024, to "make way for the young". Another said: “This question won't be shown! 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.” And a third: “When will the real Russia be the same as the one on TV?”

It is difficult to discern if these were a slip, or a choreographed attempt to show that dissent is accepted. Although the number of political opponents and others having been jailed for such talk shows how little Putin tolerates it. He certainly was not looking to answer such questions.

Either way, there is no doubting how awkward the juxtaposition was with Putin’s answers. Given that it was only this summer that the Russian president was facing an extraordinary attempted mutiny when Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries marched on Moscow in protest about how the invasion of Ukraine was being handled – the biggest threat to his authority Putin has faced in his more than two decades in power – he is likely to have felt the embarrassment of such cutting criticism.

While the result of that 2024 ballot will be in little doubt, given Putin's iron-grip on power, the Kremlin is keen to project a strong image – a little public dust-up gives the impression to those watching at home that democracy is alive and well in Russia. Another text question said: “Why is your 'reality' at odds with our lived reality?” Image was everything.

The news conference was the first time that Putin has faced questions from Western journalists since the Ukraine invasion began. Clearly, the Kremlin wanted to show Russians that Putin is not afraid of international scrutiny, even if he trotted out the same-old lines railing against the West being the root cause of Russia's current ills, and cheap jibes about how Western funding for Ukraine will soon run as both the EU and US struggle to authorise fresh monetary support for Kyiv. He suggested there will be no peace with Ukraine until "we achieve our objectives" – a level of vagueness that Putin has perfected.

Also on the war in Ukraine, Putin dismissed the need for a second mobilisation of reservists to fight – which would be a deeply unpopular move among families who do not want to send their sons off to die. But in doing so, he said that there were currently 617,000 Russian troops on the frontline, which, when taken with previous numbers put out by Russian officials, would suggest that more than 300,000 of Moscow's forces have been killed or wounded severely enough to leave the frontlines. That would roughly match with a recent US intelligence report that 315,000 Russian soldiers had been either killed or wounded since the war began – which it said was almost 90 per cent of Russia's military personnel who started the invasion. A suggestion that a number of people "close" to him had died was clearly aimed at suggesting that Putin felt the nation's loss.

The cancellation of last year's news conference came after Ukrainian troops reclaimed territory in the south and east, and while Putin said his troops were "improving their positions" across the whole frontline but that gains were "modest"; essentially Kremlin-speak admitting that there is a stalemate across much battlefield. Putin also admitted to the Ukrainians holding a "small area" of the Russian-occupied east bank of the Dnipro river, saying that Russian forces had retreated a few metres to "save our lads". A stark admission, even if it was done under the guise of it not being a big deal.

Putin also tried to keep things breezy. There was a joke with a man asking a question that he was young and handsome and should therefore be starting a family. There was also a bizarre moment when a "student at St Petersburg state university" – in fact an AI-generated version of Putin himself – asked about the use of body doubles, a regular bit of speculation around Putin. "That is my first double, by the way," Putin said having said that "only one person" will speak his voice.

As with so much of what Putin does, it was choreographed and calculated for maximum impact on his domestic audience, with the usual broadsides at the West. A lot of it was faintly ridiculous, but there were some definite curios beneath all the polish.