Vladimir Putin continues to lend a hand to United Russia in the State Duma campaign. He has already toured several regions of Siberia and the Far East that lie beyond the reach of Ukrainian drones and even risked a trip to Nizhny Novgorod. The president appears at events marking the start of the school year and at international forums. This week he arrived in Vladivostok for the Eastern Economic Forum. His active return to public politics is meant to shore up United Russia’s rating: the party has long billed itself as “the president’s party” and treats the head of state as its informal leader.
Yet turning Putin into the central figure of the daily news cycle is producing the opposite effect. The more often he appears in public and the more he speaks without a carefully prepared text, the more obvious his detachment from reality becomes — and the more questions arise about his grasp of it. At a meeting with teachers, Chinese-language instructor Dmitry Balanchukov mentioned that he had recently visited the North Pole. The president’s reply was unexpected.
“Can you imagine, orcas live right nearby, and they eat these bears like minnows. They just attack in a pack and tear them to pieces. It’s all very interesting. Yes, yes, that’s the food chain. Children need to be told about this too, so they understand what kind of world we live in and why we are conducting the special military operation,” Putin said.
The remark may well be the most memorable line of the entire campaign. What he meant is hard to say. Was Russia the bear that struck first so as not to be torn apart by orcas? Or was the “bear-minnow” Ukraine, sitting at the bottom of the food chain? Science does not confirm that orcas hunt polar bears. The internet, however, is full of AI-generated clips showing exactly that. Most likely Putin saw one of those videos — perhaps shown to him by children or grandchildren — and decided to share the “scientific knowledge” with a wider audience.
The presidential press service and loyal media had little choice but to publish the parable: he delivered it with such confidence that ignoring his erudition would have looked like insolence. The result was not the image of a wise elder but that of an elderly man who cannot tell AI slop from reality, believes whatever clip appears online, and explains a war of which society has grown tired with peculiar examples drawn from supposed natural life. At the summit in Bishkek, prompted by court journalist Pavel Zarubin, Putin tried to clarify himself. It only made things worse. He offered no comment on the scientific emptiness of his earlier words and merely added that Russia does not want to find itself at the bottom of the “food chain,” which is why it is fighting.
At the Eastern Economic Forum, moderators tried to extract comments from the president on current social problems and the issues that actually worry the public. By the laws of public relations, the head of state was supposed to reassure citizens. His answers are more likely to deepen their anxiety.
The moderators told him that parents of schoolchildren are alarmed by the “squeezing out” of ninth-grade graduates into vocational colleges, even though the teenagers and their families want to continue their education at school. Putin was bothered only by the word “squeezing out”: he replaced it with “creating the conditions” for the economy to obtain the skilled workers it needs. In effect, the head of state confirmed that ninth-graders are being steered toward vocational schools because the authorities require it, and he sees nothing wrong with that. With a barely concealed smirk he spoke of business’s “voluntary contributions” to the war economy, and when discussing the gasoline shortage he urged Russians to “be prepared for anything.”
Thus, instead of reassurance, citizens heard that the needs of the state outweigh the wishes of schoolchildren and their parents, that the gasoline shortage must simply be endured, and that the war was launched according to the laws of the animal world. It is hard to imagine that such a message will please voters or earn United Russia extra points.
A Campaign in Silence
Vladimir Putin’s revelations are the brightest element of an election campaign unfolding in unprecedented quiet. According to the outlet Verstka, parties are spending — or even accumulating in their official campaign accounts — record-low sums, despite inflation. United Russia, which has always filled its fund to the legal limit, now has only half the permitted amount. The budget of New People — the party headed by billionaire Alexei Nechayev and quietly backed by the presidential administration — has shrunk fivefold compared with the previous campaign. And those are only the official figures.
In the past, political consultants regarded the size of the official campaign fund as inadequate for a full-scale effort: parties and candidates always had “black cash” to make up the difference. The fact that even the official thresholds have not been reached this time suggests there are no slush funds either. The reasons lie both in the economic crisis (traditional sponsors and the state itself have little appetite for “civilian” spending) and in the Kremlin’s desire to suppress spontaneous turnout. The same pattern is visible in the limp debates: participants in the regional rounds often fail to show up at all, or arrive with nothing to say.
Until these elections, Sergei Kiriyenko’s political bloc preferred to run reasonably visible, if largely content-free, campaigns — not least because campaigning itself was a profitable business. The participation of citizens independent of the vertical was considered acceptable: campaigns took place in relatively calm conditions, without war, war fatigue, or economic strain.
Now the appearance at polling stations of voters independent of the authorities — people who, exhausted by events, might turn angry — is apparently seen as a political risk in its own right. That is why the presidential administration and the systemic participants in the race are, by all appearances, trying not to attract unnecessary attention to the campaign.
At the same time, the political bloc has no intention of lowering its turnout KPI, which official media put at 55 percent and independent outlets estimate at 60 percent. The Kremlin expects to hit those numbers through intensified corporate mobilization. Across the country, “mobilization brigadiers” drawn from the staff of large budgetary organizations and loyal commercial companies have appeared. They oversee groups of colleagues ranging from a dozen to several dozen people and are responsible for ensuring turnout not only of the employees themselves but of their relatives as well. Similar schemes were previously used in individual regions and companies subject to heavy administrative pressure, with personnel departments organizing corporate mobilization together with officials and political consultants. The practice now appears to be being scaled up nationwide, and it is this expansion that is supposed to deliver the Kremlin the figures it needs. A higher share of dependent voters at the polls can also improve United Russia’s official results.
The division of the electorate into “dependent” and “independent” voters, however, creates a longer-term political risk. Should the crisis deepen further or a new wave of mobilization occur, voters independent of the authorities may conclude — as they did in 2011−2012 — that the existing political system does not represent their interests. That, in turn, could call into question the perceived legitimacy of the new State Duma. For now, though, the Kremlin’s political managers appear to have no other obvious instrument for solving the short-term task of delivering the required result.
