Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top spokesman raised the prospect of canceling the country’s next presidential election just days after the Kremlin voice characterized the political contest as an expensive formality with a foregone conclusion.

“Elections are what a democracy demands and Putin himself decided to hold them, but theoretically, they don’t even have to be held,” Dmitry Peskov told Russian media. “Because it’s clear that Putin will be elected. That’s completely my personal opinion."

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Peskov broached that topic even while seeking to explain away his statement that his country’s “presidential election is not really democracy.” The prominent Kremlin aide insisted he was misunderstood, just days after Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexei Navalny learned that his current nine-year imprisonment would be extended for another 19 years.

“Our presidential election is not really democracy, it is costly bureaucracy,” Peskov told the New York Times. “Mr. Putin will be re-elected next year with more than 90 percent of the vote.”

That deterministic remark appeared in print on the same day that a Russian court consigned Navalny to almost two more decades in prison. Peskov’s initial attempt to modulate his remarks acknowledged that “democracy requires” regular presidential elections.

“The answer was the following: the level of consolidation around the president is absolutely unprecedented and it can be said already now that if he runs [for president], he will be reelected by an overwhelming majority, and the election — theoretically — only entail unnecessary spending,” he told state-run TASS.

Navalny was the target of an attempted assassination during his 2020 initiative to unify Putin’s various political opponents behind a common slate that could defeat the ruling party’s parliamentary candidates. After being treated for poisoning at a German hospital, he was arrested upon his return to Russia on the basis that he had violated his probation by failing to check in with Russian authorities while being comatose at the hospital. He drew another 19 years last week on “extremism” charges.

“This is an unjust conclusion to an unjust trial,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a Friday statement. "For years, the Kremlin has attempted to silence Navalny and prevent his calls for transparency and accountability from reaching the Russian people. ... The United States strongly condemns Russia’s continued detention of Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and the more than 500 other designated political prisoners Russia holds.”

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Peskov’s remarks to the New York Times struck Putin’s critics as a rare moment of candor about the state of Russian democracy. “This is extremely unlike Russian top bureaucracy,” Riddle Russia Editorial Director Anton Barbashin wrote on social media.

Expatriate Russian political scientist Konstantin Sonin had a similar thought. “Peskov sounds uncharacteristically direct and truthful,” he said.