Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly knows his best angles and how to play to the camera, and he’s staged many spectacles that have stretched the outer limits of credulity in a series of memorable photo-ops since the global spotlight was first trained on him.
We’ve seen him shirtless in a bracing array of outdoorsy settings: fishing, horseback riding, swimming and packing heat in Siberia (images that provoked the venerable Associated Press to drop its usual hard-news reportage style in favor of dubbing him “K-G-Beefcake”), and frolicking with dolphins.