On March 31, 2024 — Easter Sunday — X user Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) posted (archived) that Russian President Vladimir Putin had made an Easter statement affirming the superiority of the traditional family unit (based on the notion that marriage is defined as a union between a man and a woman) over alternative conceptions of the family.
Nawfal posted: "Putin on Easter: Russia will leave political correctness to the U.S." The post also featured a video, three images and a purported quote from Putin, reading, "As long as I am the president of Russia, we will not have parent 1 and parent 2, we will have mom and dad."
As of April 2, the post had received more than 1 million views (impressions).
The source cited by Nawfal was a post from the Suppressed Voice X account. That post mentioned the fact that the Transgender Day of Visibility and Easter were both celebrated on the same day in 2024. As we previously reported, Easter's date changes from year to year while Transgender Day of Visibility has fallen on March 31 every year for more than a decade.
Snopes found Nawfal's post contained a reasonably accurate quote of an actual statement made by Putin, although Putin did not make the statement on Easter 2024. We contacted Nawfal via a direct message on X to learn more about the post but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Putin made the transcribed remarks on Feb. 13, 2020, during a meeting discussing proposed amendments to Russia's Constitution, according to Reuters. The official transcript provided on the Kremlin website showed Putin's remarks translated to English, as follows:
On amendments regarding the role and status of the family
Vladimir Putin: "Let me debate with you a bit, enter into polemics, if you wish."
"As you said, a family is the union of a man and a woman. And if it is a single-parent family, then what? Some things need to be clarified. Marriage is the union of a man and a woman. A family is something slightly different. But the idea itself is correct and must be supported. We just need to think about the wording and where to do it."
"As for 'parent number one,' and 'parent number two,' I once spoke publicly and will repeat it: as long as I am President, we will have no 'parent number one,' there will be a father and a mother."
The same video clip Nawfal posted of Putin speaking was also shared in February 2020 on YouTube by El Mundo, a newspaper in Spain.
Aside from the quote, Nawfal's post included three images. One showed the Empire State Building in New York lit up in a rainbow of colors resembling those of an LGBTQ+ pride flag. However, that photo dated back to at least 2015, according to a post on the building's Facebook page. Further, the Empire State Building featured pastel colors for Easter on March 31, 2024, not rainbow colors, according to the schedule on the building's official website.
Another image in Nawfal's post showed a screenshot of a misleading headline from Fox News trumpeting the false claim U.S. President Joe Biden banned religion from an Easter egg art contest. We previously reported on this rumor. The final image in the post displayed a picture of Biden celebrating Easter in 2023.
In other words, the quote from Putin was genuine but was more than four years old and had nothing to do with Easter, and some of the images in the post were misleading and outdated.
For further reading, The Associated Press reported more details about Putin's history of cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights.