File this one under strange but true…
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is being credited with saving a TV film crew from a wild Siberian tiger. Both Putin and the TV crew were in the wilds of Russia’s Far East to check on a conservation program aimed at saving the critically endangered Amur tiger (Amurs are a sub-species of the Siberian tiger that live in the Amur River region near the Chinese border and are the largest cats in the world).
The tiger was supposed to be caught in a trap, but when the TV crew approached, it got loose and headed straight for them. Reportedly, Putin grabbed a tranquilizer rifle from an aide and shot the tiger before it could attack. Putin then helped the scientists measure the sleeping tiger and attach a satellite-tracking collar. Rossiya television opened their national newscast with the report of Putin saving their crew.
Okay, passed the tiger, there are two other interesting elements to this story.
First is a quote from Putin: "First of all, we must thank our colleagues, Americans, European colleagues for being involved with this [the conservation program] during a difficult time for Russia when no-one was paying any attention to this," Putin said on TV. Now during the Cold War there was a skill called Kremlinology - basically it involved obsessively pouring over Russian media stories, official photographs and such to look for clues as to what the secretive Soviet leadership might be planning. So, putting on my Kremlinologist hat, could this statement, thanks to the Americans and Europeans, be an indication that Putin wants to repair relations with the West that have been strained by the whole Georgia conflict?
Second is the idea of Putin as an environmentalist. The Reuters story notes that Putin has in the past (unilaterally) redrawn the course of a pipeline that environmentalists felt passed too close to the environmentally-sensitive Lake Baikal and also moved the site of the Olympic village for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi away from a sensitive area. All that and saving tigers too…
(photo from pravda.ru)
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