Putin gets down and dirty with the pack from the press

RUSSIA: The Russian president let it all hang out at a press conference at the Kremlin yesterday, writes Conor Sweeney in Moscow

Vladimir Putin's four-hour performance at the Kremlin yesterday mixed flirtatious banter with metaphors about mucus and showed a gift for sarcastic brush-offs worthy of a stand-up comedian.

Putin twice referred to a runny nose during the annual presidential news conference - to dismiss rumours about his personal wealth and to discuss the pressures of public office.

Newspaper reports about his alleged fortune were just rubbish, he said, "excavated from someone's nose and then spread on those bits of paper".

Telling his audience he had worked "like a galley slave" in the Kremlin, Putin said leaders must take firm decisions and not wobble in the face of adversity.

"Heads of state have no right to whinge or drool for any reason . . . If they are going to slobber and blow snot and say things are bad, bad, then that's how it will be," Putin said.

He also showed some sympathy for President George Bush. "Sometimes you have to make decisions that nobody else can make . . . Do you think Bush has it easy?" he asked.

When one young woman said she had a paper heart to present to him on Valentine's Day, Putin invited her to step down and pass it on to his officials.

The president seemed to be thinking about European bodies, and not of the institutional kind, when another asked about a news article suggesting that Russia's gas giant, Gazprom, was eating into Europe's body.

"Why are the Americans so worried about a European body? Maybe because they want to tear themselves away from it, nice body that it is," he said, laughing and making generous hand gestures to illustrate his point.

To illustrate her question about demographics, another woman said she personally would like to have a child. "Why are you asking me?" Putin shot back to applause from his audience, many of them reporters from Russia's regional press.

But there was no whiff of attraction when it came to a question about Hillary Clinton and her comment that former KGB officers can't have souls.

"A state official must at least have brains," he snapped, on one of several occasions when the easy-going facade seemed to slip.

© 2008 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times