No one else on the world stage today is quite like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The Russian president has become a past master at upstaging international meetings, sowing dissension in the west’s ranks and upping the stakes in an ever more acrimonious contest with the US.

The latest example is his outrageous threat, issued just ahead of this week’s G8 summit, to target Europe with Russia’s nuclear arsenal if the US’s fledgling missile defence system is ever placed on European soil. This is also the man who labels himself, with formidable chutzpah, the world’s only “pure democrat” and complains: “After the death of Mahatma Gandhi there’s nobody to talk to.”