Twitter appears to suspend Vladimir Putin account

| 6:40 pm EST November 28, 2018
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Donald Trump violates Twitter’s terms of service on a regular basis, but it’s become clear that Twitter is never going to suspend his infamous account so long as he’s still the “President” of the United States. So what does it take for a world leader to get booted from the platform? We may be getting that answer, as it appears Twitter just suspended an account belong to – get this – Vladimir Putin.

As of this evening, the @PutinRF_Eng account on Twitter has gone poof. Instead it’s been replaced with the message “This account has been suspended.” No explanation has been provided as to why. To be clear, @PutinRF_Eng is not an official checkmark-verified Twitter account. However, it has more than a million followers, and has long been widely accepted – by the media and the public – as being a legitimate account belonging to Putin.

It should be pointed out that this is just one of Vladimir Putin’s English-language Twitter accounts. Another such account, @KremlinRussia_E, is checkmark-verified, and as of this moment, is still functioning. Because only one of Putin’s accounts was removed, this can’t be seen as an attempt at taking away his voice on Twitter. Rather the suspension would have to be related specifically to Putin’s @PutinRF_Eng account. It’s also possible that the suspension is some kind of error or glitch.

If you’re trying to tie this suspension to something in the real world that could have triggered it, it’s worth noting that Vladimir Putin’s Russia did attack Ukraine naval vessels over the weekend, in an apparent pretext for invading Ukraine. That said, we don’t really know what’s going on here yet with this suspension. It’s worth noting again that, while all indications have always been that @PutinRF_Eng really is Vladimir Putin, this was not a Twitter-verified account.