@marcbennetts1
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin’s annual “direct line” conversation with the nation was still going strong when the joking began on social media. “Question: ‘Everyone has had to make cuts to their household budgets recently. What have you cut spending on?’ Putin: ‘On you lot,’” wrote one Twitter user, in a parody of the president’s apparent lack of empathy with millions of ordinary Russians who are suffering as a result of the country’s tanking economy.
Others posted doctored photographs of a young woman from the Siberian city of Omsk, who called into April’s televised presidential Q&A session to quiz Putin on why the roads in her hometown were in such a pitiful condition. “She’s having a tough time right now,” went one Twitter meme, accompanied by a Photoshopped image of the woman being buried alive in hot asphalt.