![]() ![]() For many Russians, the opening strains of Tchaikovsky’s score are as likely to remind them of political upheaval as they are the beauty of classical ballet. Why Swan Lake? It may seem like a random artistic choice, but to anyone who lived in the former USSR, it made perfect sense. ![]() In the background, the site played a looped video from the ballet Swan Lake. On the site, big, bold numbers counted, in real time, the days, hours, minutes, and seconds since Putin had last been seen. Andrii Kapranov, who works in web marketing in Kiev, lost no time in creating a website to track the Russian leader’s disappearance. Ukrainians, at war with Russian-backed separatists in the east of their country, were particularly excited by the latter possibility. Speculation spun out of control: was his mistress giving birth to a secret child? Had he had a stroke? Or plastic surgery? Was it a coup? ![]() His meetings were cancelled, he disappeared from the public eye, and the Kremlin refused to explain what was going on. For nearly eleven days in mid-March, Vladimir Putin was missing. ![]()
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