This Friday, June 17, Gilles Bouleau was the guest of Daily, on TMC. In the show, the presenter returned to an interview that will have marked his career as a journalist: the one with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin, in 2014.
This meeting with Vladimir Poutine will have marked Gilles Bouleau. Indeed, the TF1 journalist summarized his interview with the Russian leader on the TMC set this Friday, June 17. An interview he had at the time conducted with Jean-Pierre Elkabbach for TF1 and Europe 1 in 2014, in Sochi in Susse.
The endless wait before their appointment
“At 3 p.m., there was still no minibus that was to take us from the hotel to Poutine’s residence,” explains Gilles Bouleau. If the appointment is fixed at 2 p.m. by the Kremlin, the departure to go to the place of the interview was not done until 5 p.m. And when the two journalists arrive on the spot: “We arrive in a room five times smaller than this one (compared to the “Daily” set). Without a toilet, without a faucet, without anything to eat. The detail is important,” said the journalist.
Cameramen from Russian television then joined them. “Agents of the Russian FSB!”, According to the star presenter of the JT of TF1.
Faced with the long and interminable wait, he says: “I went to pee in the begonias, we went out, I went for a drink…” After many exchanges with the press officer, Gilles Bouleau was able to carry out this famous interview… at 1 am, after the siesta of the master of the Kremlin.
For Gilles Bouleau, this delay obviously a well-rehearsed strategy of the Russian president.
Vladimir Putin “cash” behind the scenes
At the end of their meeting, the Russian president reacted to the audacity of his interlocutor interviewer, saying that no Russian journalist would have “dared” to ask any of the questions. Vladimir Poutine would then, according to Gilles Bouleau, mime with his thumb the sign of a cut throat. With his colleague Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, the journalist concluded this amazing interview with a few glasses of champagne from Georgia.
“I don’t think a war is coming,” Vladimir Putin replied at the time. It was eight years before the Russian leader invaded the borders of the neighboring country on February 24.
