Tsar Vladimir

Russia’s leader has consolidated power so completely and wielded it so deftly that he is not only unchallenged at home, but indispensable abroad

As a festive afterthought at the end of his last cabinet meeting of 2013, President Putin told ministers that Russia had just deployed a new nuclear submarine and was building a new generation of silo-based ballistic missiles. A few days earlier, in similarly casual vein, he let slip that Russia’s best-known political prisoner was to be released after ten years’ hard labour. Mikhail Khodorkovsky had, after all, done “serious” time.

Ruling Russia comes naturally to Vladimir Putin. Bestriding the globe is his new hobby. Like a confident Tsar he defends his people against external threats both real and imagined. He jails them when they challenge him and frees them when so moved. At home he is utterly dominant and likely to respond ruthlessly to yesterday’s