Recently we have witnessed a flurry of high-profile and contradictory statements on the Russian state. In a role reversal, Russia's leaders have been abnormally candid while several prominent western politicians and pundits have lavished undeserved praise.

Russian president Dmitri Medvedev was bold enough last week to state that democracy is irrelevant to the Group of Eight leading nations. It is sad to see that some of Europe's leaders seem to agree with him. He also accidentally told the truth by saying that while political competition could be a good thing, it must be "competition correctly built", a phrase of which George Orwell would have been proud.