Crossposted from www.eurotrib.com
Imagine if the Pope had the kind of temporal power Putin (That's President Putin, SIR!!!, Your most Majestic Highness, Lord of Lords, Star of our firmament, etc, etc) holds in his cool hands right now?
There he stood, in the mindblowing halls his ancestors lived out their megalomanic arc of Russian history, they so impeccably maintained and bespeaking the kind of Imperial omnipotence that era's architecture loftily declaimed, yet his demeanour held no apparent regality.
He lanced his guests' boils of pretension with delicate, statesmanlike precision and a dry glee, perhaps consciously uncomplicit with a western audience, as if he was thinking how he would tell the boys at the fishing club later how these bigshots tried to put one over him, and he reminded them right smartly to mind their manners!
No 'putin' much around our Vlad.
