The animations used by President Vladimir Putin to accompany his militaristic speech on Thursday go back at least a decade, reports say.
Putin on Thursday gave his annual speech to the Federation Assembly, ahead of presidential elections on March 18. He used the occasion to announce an array of new nuclear weapons he claimed could travel anywhere in the world and avoid interception.
One of the animations displayed on a giant screen showed a series of nuclear warheads attacking what appeared to be the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Some news outlets immediately pointed out that the footage displayed on the giant screen in Putin’s address was taken from a documentary titled "Satan" that was broadcast in 2007 on Russia's state-run Channel One television channel.
"In the original, the warheads hit the target, but this moment was not shown in the video during the [2018] speech," the Republic.ru news website reported on Thursday.
The same animation of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM, called the Sarmat, was used again in a Channel One broadcast in 2011, the Newsru.com news website reported.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been barred from the elections over a criminal conviction which his supporters say is politically motivated, on Twitter mocked the series of video demonstrations as "cartoons."
