President Putin has said that he never has “off days” because he does not menstruate, and suggested that he would use his martial arts prowess to fend off advances from a gay man.
The Russian leader told Oliver Stone about the advantage of not having periods as he gave the American film-maker a tour of a gilded throne room in the Kremlin.
When Stone asked if he ever had “off days”, Mr Putin, 64, replied: “I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days. I am not trying to insult anyone. That’s just the nature of things. There are certain natural cycles which men probably have as well, just less manifested. We are all human beings. It’s normal. But you should never lose control.”
The comments are included in Stone’s four-part documentary about Mr Putin, which will be shown on American television next week.
The Hollywood director and the president also talk about whether homosexuals can serve in the military. Stone asks: “If you’re taking a shower in a submarine with a man and you know he’s gay, do they have a problem with that?”
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“Well, I prefer not to go to shower with him,” Mr Putin replies, laughing. “Why provoke him? But you know, I’m a judo master and a sambo [a Russian martial art] master. And I can tell you this, that as head of state today I believe it’s my duty to uphold traditional values and family values, because same-sex marriages will not produce any children. God has decided, and we have to care about birthrates in our country. We have to reinforce families. But that doesn’t mean that there should be any persecutions against anyone.”
Mr Putin was accused of sexism in 2014 when he was asked a question about Hillary Clinton’s views on Russia’s annexation of Crimea and said: “It’s better not to argue with women.”
He approved a law in 2013 making “homosexual propaganda among minors” illegal. Attempted gay pride marches in Russia have been broken up by police and homophobic thugs. In recent months at least three gay men have allegedly been killed in Chechnya, and dozens of others there detained or tortured for their sexual orientation.
Mr Putin told Stone there were “no restrictions whatsoever” on gay people.
The documentary, called The Putin Interviews, is the result of numerous conversations between the president and the film-maker between July 2015 and February this year.
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Stone has been accused in the past of soft-soaping the Russian president, while muting his authoritarian tendencies and military aggression in Ukraine. The director defended his position in an interview with The Times in December, saying that the Kremlin had legitimate grievances about US policy, such as Nato expansion in Europe. “Why should Russia co-operate?” he said.
“There is no answer except to say, ‘You’re the bad guy and we have the right to do anything we want.’ ”