Theories abound after Putin speech disappears from live broadcast

dpa Moscow The disappearance of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public address from TV screens on Friday was a technical error, said the Kremlin. But t...

dpa MoscowThe disappearance of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public address from TV screens on Friday was a technical error, said the Kremlin.But that didn’t stop a lot of alternate theories from hitting the internet.In one of his highest-profile public appearances since Russian troops invaded Ukraine three weeks ago, Putin was at a patriotic rally-cum-military parade in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium on Friday.Dressed in a thick winter coat and turtleneck, he had just started to speak - on a stage draped with a banner reading “For a world without Nazism” - when his image cut out across the country.People were left with only pre-recorded images. The Kremlin insisted it was a technical glitch. And then the internet was suddenly full of satire about what had happened.One group of people immediately feared something had happened to the health of the president, who is 69.Others made jokes.“The best joke: The show was abruptly broken off because Putin accidentally used the word ‘fighting,’” tweeted Kira Yarmysh, the spokesperson for jailed opposition figurehead Alexei Navalny, riffing on laws put in place since the February 24 invasion that make it a crime to refer to it as a “war” or “invasion.” There was also speculation that there had been a threat to the president. After all, there were people outside the stadium who noted that it was shameful to cheer Putin like this when people were dying in Ukraine.Meanwhile, channels on the Telegram messaging service with close ties to the Kremlin seethed and said heads would roll for the glitch, coming just days after Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova disrupted an evening news broadcast by appearing behind the presenter with an anti-war poster.After all that, even after television managed to broadcast the speech, many scratched their heads at its brevity. He spoke of the need to rescue ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine from “genocide” and, once he was done, he left almost immediately, stopping once to wave, and leaving Russia to wonder what just happened.