Russian President Vladimir Putin
...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...
got an unusual gift for his 70th birthday on Friday: a tractor.
As the leaders of several ex-Soviet nations met at the Czarist-era Konstantin Palace in St. Petersburg, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus presented Putin with a gift certificate for the vehicle. Tractors have been the pride of Belarusian industry since Soviet times.
Lukashenko, an autocratic leader who has ruled the ex-Soviet nation with an iron hand for nearly three decades while cultivating a man of the people image, told news hounds he used a model in his garden similar to the one he gifted Putin.
It wasn’t clear how the Russian leader responded to the gift, which Lukashenko’s office revealed.
Putin didn’t mention the gift in televised remarks at the start of the meeting when he talked about the need to discuss ways of settling conflicts between ex-Soviet nations.
