Perhaps expecting some respite from weeks of having his public image battered both in media and in the polls, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin arrived to France this week to do some business for Gazprom (roping in EDF for 10% of South Stream) and to go shopping for a 500 million euro Mistral warship.  Putin has come to regularly expect warm embraces from the French leadership – Jacques Chirac once awarded him the Legion of Honor a few weeks before Anna Politkovskaya was murdered, while Nicolas Sarkozy gave the same prize to Sergey Naryshkin – but this visit turned out to be different.

Following high-level outrage over the death of Hermitage lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, various other assaults against anti-fascist activists and journalists, and a front page story in Le Monde on the ongoing travesty of the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one journalist rightly confronted François Fillon and Putin at the press conference, asking how it was possible that they could smile over such business deals in the face of so many human rights problems.  Whereas Fillon went for the boilerplate evasive answer, Putin let down his guard, lost his usual control, and got provocatively personal with regard to the Khodorkovsky question.