A fake news report, giving Russians a chance to imagine what it would be like to see Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin stand trial, has become a viral hit, racking up more than 2.1 million views since it was posted on YouTube on Tuesday.
The fictional clip, “The Arrest of Vladimir Putin,” was made by remixing actual footage from the trial of one of Mr. Putin’s enemies, the former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and digitally altering the video to place the prime minister in the dock instead of the jailed oligarch.
A fictional video report posted online this week, imagining Vladimir Putin on trial.The 50-second clip looks and sounds like a typical news report from Russian state television and features the logo of a major channel. In a standard monotone over shots of the courtroom, an unseen correspondent reports that “three hours ago the former prime minister was brought to the Khamovnichesky court” after being charged with carrying out criminal acts including theft of state property, abuse of office and participation in acts of terrorism.
Most of the footage used to construct the fictional report was recorded during the second trial of Mr. Khodorkovsky, who was arrested on charges of fraud in 2003, after he appeared to challenge Mr. Putin by raising the issue of rampant corruption during a live television broadcast and going back on a promise to stay out of politics.
Video of the judge in Mr. Khodorkovsky’s trial, Viktor N. Danilkin, and the setting, Khamovnichesky District Court in central Moscow, forms the backbone of the fictional clip. While Mr. Putin is pictured behind bars in the video, in Mr. Khodorkovsky’s 2010 trial, the defendant was kept in a transparent enclosure. At past hearings, however, the former billionaire was filmed standing inside a cage, as is typical for criminal defendants in Russian courtrooms.
Some of the footage was clearly borrowed from the 2011 documentary “Khodorkovsky” by the German filmmaker Cyril Tuschi. The first shots inside the courtroom in the fictional clip are taken from the last scene of Mr. Tuschi’s documentary, just before and after his interview with Mr. Khodorkovsky there.
Near the end of the fictional report, video of the judge asking the defendant to identify himself seems to be identical to a scene from Mr. Khodorkovsky’s trial that was included in the trailer for the documentary.
On Tuesday, after the fictional video appeared, Mr. Khodorkovsky posted a link to it in an update to the Twitter feed he maintains from prison.
In a note posted on the Web site for his documentary on Wednesday, Mr. Tuschi linked to the remix and wrote: “Someone did some re-editing on our Khodorkovsky film and for the first time I am not upset about not being asked beforehand. Creative Russia!”
The detention of Mr. Khodorkovsky, who was declared “a prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International last year, has become a political issue before next month’s presidential election, which Mr. Putin is expected to win. In December, after another presidential candidate, Mikhail Prokhorov, promised to pardon Mr. Khodorkovsky should he be elected, Mr. Putin told reporters in Moscow that he, too, would “consider a petition” to free Mr. Khodorkovsky, “if he writes this request, but first it’s necessary to become president.” Mr. Khodorkovsky is not scheduled to be released until 2017.
The fictional report was uploaded to a YouTube channel promoting a documentary based on the book “Blowing Up Russia,” written by a former K.G.B. officer, Alexander Litvinenko, shortly before he died in London after being poisoned with a rare radioactive isotope, Polonium 210.
As Viv Groskop explained in a review of “Blowing Up Russia” in the British newspaper The Observer in 2007: “The book that supposedly marked Litvinenko out as a target should be a gift to the amateur investigator. But anyone hoping to find a glimmer of a clue here will be sorely disappointed. His book rehashes the well-known argument that the 1999 terrorist bombing campaign that precipitated Russia’s second war with Chechnya and propelled Putin to the presidency was in fact organized by Russia’s own security services.”
As The Lede noted in a previous post on an Internet video that attacked another of Mr. Putin’s opponents, the anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, by comparing him to Hitler, viral political ads in Russia are even less subtle than those unleashed on American voters. The new video picturing Mr. Putin in the dock appeared days after supporters of his bid for the presidency released an ad that imagined the cataclysm in store for the nation should the opposition slogan “Russia Without Putin” become a reality.
That video, “Russia Without Putin — Russia Without a Future,” warns, among other things, that Russia would soon surrender its nuclear weapons to the United States, allow the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Russian city of Sochi to be hosted by Georgia, and fall into total anarchy within two years.
