MOSCOW, April 17 (Reuters) – The Kremlin on Friday denied that President Vladimir Putin was insulated from bad news after a celebrity blogger accused unidentified top officials of not telling Russia’s paramount leader the truth about the country’s problems.
Viktoria Bonya, a social media influencer who is well known inside Russia for her appearances on reality TV shows, said this week that she supported Putin and listed five problems which she said officials were not briefing him on honestly. Her video was watched more than 20 million times, liked over 1.4 million times, and attracted over 75,000 comments on Instagram.
Asked on Friday about Bonya’s assertion that Putin, who has ruled Russia as either president or prime minister since 1999, is not told the full extent of problems inside Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was wrong.
“No. It is not so,” Peskov said. “Putin is the head of state, and his powers means he deals with the widest range of issues on the agenda.”
The Kremlin on Thursday took the unusual step of publicly acknowledging sharp criticism from Bonya, saying work was already under way to address a slew of problems she had identified.
After those remarks on Thursday, Bonya released a new video in which she burst into tears of joy. In it, she thanked the Kremlin for its attention to the issues she had raised and said that she was of and with the Russian people.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov and Guy FaulconbridgeEditing by Andrew Osborn)
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