Charles Glover has some interesting quotes from polittechnologist Aleksei Makarkin in this FT blog post.

“Putin is very pragmatic, he has got political intuition” he said. “Putin knows he needs to re-brand himself in order to be able to deal with the west.”

More prominent, he said, was Mr Putin’s decision in April, together with Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, to lay a wreath for the victims of the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which nearly 22,000 Polish army officers were killed by the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB.