In an interview today with the state-controlled Russia Today channel, Vladimir Putin spoke about Pussy Riot‘s protests, both the famous one at the Moscow cathedral earlier this year and one in 2008 where members including the now-jailed Nadezhda Tolokonnikova had sex in public at the Moscow biological museum to protest Dmitry Medvedev’s ascent to presidency.

Defending the state’s reaction to February’s punk prayer, Putin explained, “The state is obliged to protect the feelings of the faithful.”

“The country has very grave memories of the initial period of Soviet rule when a huge number of priests suffered. Many churches were destroyed and all our traditional faiths suffered huge damage,” he said.

When asked about the sex demonstration in 2008, the Russian president started off focused, saying, “They had a group sex session in a public place. They then uploaded it onto the Internet. The authorities should have looked at this too,” but then devolved into some weird territory, as he often does.

“Some fans say that group sex is better than one-on-one because, like in any collective work, you can take it easy a bit,” he said, which sounds like a comment on communism on the one hand, and a humble brag on the other. “But uploading it onto the Internet is controversial and can be subject to legal proceedings.”

Given the recent street protests and other political activism surrounding his re-election, Putin’s comment seemed a little out of touch, though not inconsistent with his general persona. Back in 2009 he “tamed a polar bear” and just his week he strapped himself to a hang glider and lead a group on birds on their first migration. Of course this guy knows about the perks of group sex.

In these ways, Putin can seem like the photographic negative of Mitt Romney, who is equally out of touch and weird, but in a squeaky clean cyborg kind of way. Those two should hang.