In the aftermath of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzkov’s spectacular fall from grace, much attention was paid to his authoritarianism, his absenteeism, his penchant for protest quashing and forest crushing, and for the architectural eyesores and snarling traffic jams which sprouted in the city under his tenure.  However it also is worth remembering, as Paul Goble on Window on Eurasia points out, that the mayor, when not overseeing his own brand of metropolitan expansionism with sky-scraping edifices and urban sprawl, did also make the odd grandiloquent foray into foreign policy:

“Luzhkov was by turn famous and infamous, Moscow State University expert Aleksandr Karavayev says, for his foreign policy pronouncements, including his calls for Siberian river diversion to Central Asia and the restoration of Russian control of the Crimea. And the current tandem does not want to see his replacement making such declarations.”