" … a blogger wanted to know why there are virtually no electric cars in Russia. Putin explained that electric cars actually mostly run on coal, which is what's used to generate the electricity they run on, and coal is not an environmentally friendly fuel … The blogger … was positively shocked by this bit of non-news. Teslas burn coal, very inefficiently; I hope you already knew this."

Yesterday I spent four hours watching television. This is not something I normally do because I find the entire television medium tedious, boring and a waste of time. All television programs are, in my case, a bad idea, because I dislike being programmed. In fact, I don't even own a TV. When I need to watch something, I do so in a window on the screen of my laptop. But this was a special occasion.

What I watched was Putin's nearly four-hour annual live Q&A marathon. People all over Russia submitted questions—over 2.3 million of them—by calling in, writing in, texting, recording videos, giving interviews to television crews. A very large team then organized the questions into general themes and prepared the most representative and best-expressed ones to be presented. A fair number of questions were asked live, on screen.

The main reason I watched the whole thing was because I had asked Putin a question, and I wanted to see if he was going to answer it. He did.