Once Again, Putin Was Unable To Give An Interview Without Reading From A Teleprompter
17- 23.08.2026, 12:07
- 12,092
The installation didn't help.
During a recent interview with propagandist Pavel Zarubin, Putin read his answers from a teleprompter for most of the conversation, speaking off the cuff only for the first five minutes. Afterward, he stared at a single point to the left of his interlocutor and read aloud a text written by speechwriters, noted Russian journalist Ilya Shepelin.
As Shelepin noted, the directors of the Kremlin film crew apparently took previous experience into account: this time they abandoned the shot from the camera positioned behind Zarubin’s right shoulder, in which it was particularly noticeable that Putin’s gaze was directed not at his interlocutor but toward the prompter. Because of this, the standard “figure-eight” layout for dialogue scenes was disrupted during editing; however, they still could not completely hide the fact that the president was reading from a script—the video clearly shows him coughing as he delivers his lines.
Meanwhile, on the Kremlin’s website, the article about the interview—with a headline inviting readers to see how Putin interacts with Zarubin—is accompanied by a photo in which the president is not looking at the journalist.

Earlier, several months ago, during a discussion on the gasoline crisis in Russia, Putin also read from a teleprompter, barely glancing at Zarubin, who was standing next to him.