I wonder if that is what's going on in Russia today with President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Consider last week's talks with foreign leaders.
Medvedev hosted a summit with leaders from the EU in Siberia. The New York Times reported that he took a new tack with the Europeans: he was nice to them. Instead of the aggressive approach favored in the past by Putin during his negotiations with the Europeans, Medvedev came off as quiet and reserved, he even admitted that Russia had made some policy mistakes in the past few years in dealing with Europe. He gave his fellow diplomats gifts - a book of photographs that Medvedev himself has taken (which he autographed, of course). The goal was to put a reasonable face on Russia, to make the Medvedev government look like one willing to work with the Europeans, rather than against him.
Meanwhile Putin was meeting with his counterpart from Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko. Putin, not surprisingly, played the bad cop. He told Ukraine to expect contracts with Russian companies in the energy and aerospace fields to be cancelled if Ukraine goes ahead with their plans to join NATO. The topic of Russia's Black Sea fleet also came up. After the Soviet Union dissolved, much of the old Soviet navy became the Russian navy, the problem is that their base at Sevastopol is now part of Ukraine. Russia wants to keep the base, which is leased through 2017, permanently; Ukraine thinks that nine more years is long enough to play host to the Russian navy. The issue is becoming one of many sore points between the two states.
Books of photographs or threats of cancelled contracts. It will be interesting to see whether the good cop or the bad cop has more success.
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