Russian state television has broadcast a new programme about President Putin’s achievements in the latest sign of the Kremlin’s concern at his faltering approval ratings.

The first hour-long episode of Moscow.Kremlin.Putin on the Rossiya-1 channel on Sunday included an interview with the leader’s press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, who described his boss as “a very humane human”. That phrase echoed a line in a famously sycophantic poem about Vladimir Lenin by the Soviet writer Vladimir Mayakovsky: “What has he done? Who is he and where is he from, this most humane human?”

One segment featured footage from a recent holiday in the Tuva region of Siberia, where Mr Putin, 65, went trekking with Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister. Commenting on whether the president needed protection while