Pre-election stories from the hagiography of the Great and Inimitable Vladimir Putin – and this has been noticed not just by me for a long time already- have begun to appear more and more often in the Russian mass information media. You may recall that earlier this summer, before he was putting out wildfires from the safety of a posh airplane, Putin found the time to met with bikers (Russians hadn’t even heard of such a word as “baikyer” until recently; and also play host to the bungling and spectacularly fallen spies and sang the song “Where does the Motherland begin?” with them…

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But the burdens of the prime minister are many, and he also had to spend his summer attending to diplomatic duies – such as a meeting with president of Ukraine Vitkor Yanukovich. I could not read the reports about this «historic» event without tears welling up in my eyes. In my imagination their conversation probably unfolded like this: