Russians smell fishy in Putin’s pike stunt
Print Edition
There was a time when Vladimir Putin’s macho antics inspired pride among Russians, but many are finding it hard to believe the president’s latest stunt Ñ catching a huge pike in Siberia.
Video footage released by the Kremlin last week showed Putin dressed in camouflage fatigues and sunglasses, fishing, driving a motorboat and petting reindeer in a remote region of Siberia with his prime minister.
But the images of the 60-year-old president hauling in a pike which the Kremlin said weighed 21 kilograms proved too much for some Russians to swallow.
Online satirists were questioning whether the incident was staged and whether the pike was really as big as the Kremlin said.
“Wonder who planted that fish for Putin to catch,” said a caption placed under two online pictures, one of Putin holding the fish and the other showing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev emerging from a river in a wetsuit.
Experienced anglers posted photographs of large pike they had caught, questioning the size and weight of Putin’s catch.
And prominent opposition bloggers claimed yesterday that Putin had fallen into the classic amateur fisherman’s trap of exaggerating the size of his catch.
Blogger Alfred Kokh calculated the length, diameter and volume of the fish and said it could only have weighed “10-11 kilograms” and not the 21 kilograms as claimed by the Kremlin.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov rubbished the claims, which he blamed on “it being summer, there’s nothing to do, people need to talk.”
“I personally saw the scales and was present at the weighing. The pike really weighed more than 20 kilograms,” he told the Russian News Service.
Some bloggers alleged that the man who caught the fish was not Putin but a double or that the footage dated from a past trip to Tuva in 2007 given the president seemed to be wearing the same watch and clothes.
“The clothes are not old clothes, they are new clothes,” said Peskov. “As for the watch, it is the same one as he wore then.”
Putin remains Russia’s most popular politician, with a recent opinion poll showing his trust level at 45 percent.
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