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Artist News
Vladimir Putin calls Elton John (really this time)
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 25 September 2015
Vladimir Putin has called up Elton John on the telephone to organise a meeting. For real this time. However, unlike those pranksters, he seems to have been a little vague on when such a meeting might actually happen.
As previously reported, while in Ukraine speaking to business leaders and the country’s president about gay rights in the country, John gave an interview to the BBC restating his desire to have a similar meeting with Putin. Not long afterwards, John announced on Instagram that he’d just been on the phone with the Russian president. However, a denial from the Kremlin quickly followed, and it all turned out to have been an apparently hilarious practical joke instigated by some Russian TV presenters.
Refuting that any call had been made after the singer’s Instagram post, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov nonetheless said that, had they been aware that John wanted to meet his boss, the Kremlin would have been happy to accommodate him. And yesterday Peskov told reporters that they were now starting to get somewhere, saying: “Putin phoned him. He said: ‘I know some guys played a trick on you on the phone, but don’t get offended. They are harmless people, though that of course does not justify what they did'”.
John has not been quite so quick on the Instagram trigger this time, but it does seem that this is a genuine offer to meet and discuss Russia’s attitudes to the LGBT community.