Russia’s Putin strips for stardom, again

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin drew scrutiny reserved for Hollywood action heroes this week, as Kremlin images of him fishing, swimming, rowing and riding bare-chested on a Siberian mountain were snapped up by media all over the world.

During a brief visit to the fields and streams of the Russian republic of Tuva, the Russian prime minister doffed his shirt to break cords of wood with his bare hands, ride a horse and swim a furious butterfly stroke, all for the benefit of government cameras.

Two state-owned Russian television channels broadcast video of Putin’s leisure pursuits Tuesday night, and within hours everyone from the BBC to the tabloids seized on the story — perhaps grateful for something to cover in August, the slowest of news months.

The Western media seemed fascinated by the notion that the tough-talking former KGB lieutenant colonel, regarded as the shadowy power behind President Dmitry Medvedev’s throne, would bare much, if not all, for an adoring public.

And Putin’s star turn also seems to have marked his emergence as that rare breed, the global politician turned media star, alongside U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Even the celebrity gossip Web site TMZ weighed in, with characteristic cheek, commenting cattily on the prime minister’s chest.

“The 56-year-old showed off his weapons of mass destruction — aka his moobs — by riding a horse shirtless while on vacation in Siberia.”

Other media emphasized Putin’s past in the intelligence services, or his image as a tough guy that Western leaders tangle with at their peril.

“Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin,” the New York Post trumpeted, alluding to Putin’s resemblance to the grizzled cowboys in Marlboro cigarette ads.

Canada’s National Post reported that Putin “sure does love the spotlight. … There are enough photos here that the former KGB agent could easily put out a calendar.”

The Guardian in Britain edged toward psychoanalysis in an article headlined online: “Vladimir Putin’s tough-guy swimming technique.”

On NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” the U.S. talk show host flashed a picture of Putin on horseback and said, “It looks like he was posing for the cover of the world’s worst romance novel.”

Putin’s butterfly stroke, the Guardian scribe wrote, evoked the fragrant atmosphere of the locker room.

“It may have a fug of raw, sweating masculinity about it, but it’s also the most irritating of all strokes. It’s splashy and unsociable, an uncompromising stroke that pays no heed to the elderly gentleman choking on chlorinated backwash in the neighbouring municipal lane.”

The photo extravaganza was only the latest stunt intended to keep Putin in the Russian public eye.

In the past, he has scolded skinflint oligarchs, rescued doomed factories, flown in a jet fighter, dived to the bottom of the world’s deepest lake and shot a tiger with a tranquilizer dart.

It wasn’t even Putin’s first topless wilderness photo op: Similar pictures were produced during a 2007 summer fishing trip to Siberia with Prince Albert II of Monaco.

His feats play differently at home and abroad. He draws admiration from a mostly adoring Russian public, while there is a critical edge to much of the Western coverage.

“These days, hardly a month goes by without Mr. Putin pulling such a stunt,” Britain’s The Independent harrumphed.

“But while these latest photographs were clearly once again designed to boost the prime minister’s macho image, the cynical observer might wonder if the poses that he strikes aren’t rather more Brokeback Mountain than Jason Bourne.”

The Sydney Morning Herald focused high in its story on Putin’s sinister wardrobe. “The 56-year-old former president was kitted out in green military fatigues, impenetrable black sunglasses and a green slouch hat,” the paper reported.

In contrast, some of the coverage of Putin’s trip by Russia’s state-controlled media was breathless.

“The river was fast-flowing and full of rapids, but this didn’t scare Vladimir Putin one little bit,” the official government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported.

Coincidentally or not, the trip coincided with Putin’s 10 years in the upper echelons of power.

He was first appointed prime minister by President Boris Yeltsin in August 1999, later elected president, and named prime minister last year by his successor, Medvedev.