Saturday, June 20, 2015

In the wee small hours

Vladimir Putin likes, as did Joseph Stalin, to work the graveyard shift;

It was two minutes before midnight when Russian President Vladimir Putin finally entered the meeting room in the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, more than three hours late, to be interviewed by a dozen exhausted journalists.

His retinue seemed wearily accustomed to the late-night regimen, but Putin himself - after back-to-back meetings, a speech and an on-stage interview at his annual business conference here in his home town of St Petersburg - was fresh, fulsome and feisty.

"We won in a free fight and we are going to host the World Cup," he declared, slapping away suggestions that Russia cheated with scandal-plagued FIFA to snare the 2018 competition. "That's it!"
Enquiring minds want to know who asked THAT question. Though Reuters' Paul Ingrassia did manage to get this out of Vlad The Imperious;
As for whether Russia can't, or simply won't, control its border to stop heavy weapons flowing to separatists in Ukraine: "These people got weapons with which to defend themselves. They got them in various ways." 

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