VLADIMIR PUTIN'S SPINE
IS ONCE AGAIN
IN THE NEWS
PRESIDENT PUTIN
HOLDING A PRESS CONFERENCE
AT THE END OF THE 2012 APEC SUMMIT
Vladivostok, Russia, September 9, 2012
"Transfers" can be hard (transferring from standing to sitting, or from sitting to standing); ask someone who knows.
Why this is in the news again: Since the Vladivostok APEC Summit (above), Vladimir Putin had been taking to working at his country home (which sounds like a variation on the Yeltsin-era "working with documents"). In Vladimir Vladimirovich's case, the noble reason given was to not tie up Moscow traffic. But the president was also canceling meetings with foreign leaders, those who would have come to him as well as those whom he would have had to travel to meet.
Finally, he emerged to travel to Turkey to meet with Prime Minister Recep Erdogan on December 3. Then he was reported to have "winced as he lowered himself into an armchair," prompting the Prime Minister to "bend solicitously as if to help him," and a photograph was made.
A little more on the backstory: Just before showing up on Vladivostok's Russky Island for the Russian Far Eastern APEC Summit, Putin undertook to help some endangered Siberian cranes.
He suited up (a rather dazzling white suit) and took off in a motorized hang glider to lead "a group of the captivity-raised birds onto their correct migratory path."
It was afterwards speculated that this stunt might have injured (or re-injured) his back. But it also gave the president a chance to boast that only the "weak" cranes did not follow his lead. And he did sit for a longish press conference. And then came his sixtieth birthday, and then the non-appearances.
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