Earlier this week, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Miriam Elder wrote about her personal frustration with Russian bureaucracy.  She clearly hit a raw nerve when she dared to criticize the country’s dry cleaning establishments, because a day later, a withering riposte came through from Putin’s mustachioed prolocutor Dmitry Peskov, who demanded that Elder take note of the eons of red tape Russians must go through to secure a UK visa.  This comes, Elder argues, from a classic Soviet-era evasion tactic known as ‘whataboutism’.  She wonders though, as indeed many would, why it is that the Kremlin chooses to actively engage with relatively minor issues raised by foreign journalists, whilst refusing to acknowledge major ones: