Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday angrily dismissed protests against his regime as “provocations” and said anyone who took part in unsanctioned street rallies against the Kremlin should expect a “whack on the head.”
Using characteristic street language, Putin derided Russia’s opposition as a group of publicity-seeking malcontents and said they had only themselves to blame if they were on the receiving end of police brutality during anti-government meetings.
Putin’s scathing remarks in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper come before protests inside Russia yesterday as well as demonstrations against the Russian government in several cities internationally.
Anti-Putin rallies were due to take place for the first time outside the Russian consulate in Kensington Palace Gardens in London, and in New York, Helsinki, Berlin and Tel Aviv.
For the past eight months Russia’s small but vociferous opposition has held rallies in Moscow and St Petersburg on the 31st of each month. Organizers said they would go ahead with a planned rally in central Moscow’s Triumfalnaya square yesterday, despite the likelihood of arrest by riot police who had violently broken up previous gatherings.
Speaking while driving a Lada on a road trip over the weekend in Russia’s far east, Putin said Russians needed to get permission before they could take to the streets.
“You’ve got it? Go and march. If not, you don’t have the right. Go to a rally without permission and you get a whack on the bonce. It’s that simple,” he said.
Putin said the demonstrators invited the Western media along and “poured red paint on their heads” to give the Kremlin a bad name. He said that in London, demonstrators who protested without permission also got a “whack on the nut.”
Putin made his comments to Andrey Kolesnikov, Kommersant’s special correspondent and Russia’s best-known print journalist, who traveled with him along a new federal highway between Khabarovsk and Chita.
At one point Putin was forced to stop after stones got stuck in the wheels of his sporting Lada Kalina, Kolesnikov wrote.
Writing on his blog on Monday, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov said the interview revealed Putin to be “mendacious, ignorant and spiteful.”
He poured scorn on Putin’s claim that he had never heard of the liberal rock star Yuri Shevchuk, who has led recent rallies strumming his guitar.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS