All of Putin's famous shirtless pictures -- on horseback, pole-fishing, swimming the butterfly stroke -- come from vacations in Tuva, the birthplace of his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
... But why does the Kremlin keep publishing the photos, and why do the global media lap them up so?
The obvious answer to the first question is that Putin is selling his impressive physique -- particularly for a man of 65 with a sedentary job -- to the domestic audience. As safe as he may feel about the 2018 election, which will be a mockery of democracy like many before it, he seems interested in convincing voters that he remains the virile man who took over the government some 17 years ago.
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Putin isn't impressing too many Russians with these exploits, not with his hockey goal-scoring prowess nor with his carefully staged judo displays. Russians are used to leaders presenting themselves as superhuman in various ways ... Putin doesn't run Russia on the basis of a personality cult, but rather by force and cunning. The Kremlin doesn't publish the pictures in an attempt to create such a cult: It's done so before and it knows the tepid domestic effect.
It appears increasingly likely that the Kremlin comes out with the macho imagery mainly for Western audiences' sake. They appear to be fascinated by shirtless Putin, and Western media use the images for years to illustrate stories about the Russian president; even the most sycophantic pro-Kremlin media have stopped recycling the 2007 and 2009 pictures.
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Western media don't have to play along. But it's August -- and perhaps there's a little of that unrequited love. Come on, colleagues, you can do better than that -- how about a spread of Angela Merkel's holiday pictures? Putin doesn't need any more propping up.