May 29, 2002	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 16,1423

MOSCOW, May 28: Russian President Vladimir Putin has uncovered a weapon that is breaching Western defences as few other arms have done — the killer joke.

On Tuesday, at the signing of the Rome Declaration creating a Russia-Nato council that gives Moscow a say in Allied decision-making, he reduced his partners to stitches by suggesting that the venue for the body’s meeting be called “Soviet House,” after the Russian word for council.

“I will declare that to be a joke,” Nato Secretary General George Robertson amid the laughter, fearing that the official record might miss the deadpan wit.

On Monday, amid the sober proceedings of the fifth congress of the European Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions in Moscow, Putin observed that Germany had sent a representative named Engels.

“Thank God he didn’t come with Marx,” he noted, dryly referring to the well-known writing team of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

\On Friday, during his feel-good summit with his US counterpart George W. Bush, he ribbed his guest, to the amusement of everyone around him, observing of Bush that “often he would begin a conversation with me by saying: ‘Well, of course, this is not a matter for our level, but I must say...’”

“And then a lengthy monologue would follow,” Putin said with a smile.

But his best story, one that had his listeners falling about, proved to be a statement of fact.

Over dinner at his dacha outside Moscow last Friday, Putin told Bush that some Russian caviar is obtained by cutting sturgeon open in a kind of cesarean section, then stitching them up again and throwing them back into the sea.

Other dinner guests roared with laughter, believing the Russian president to be pulling Bush’s leg.

But Bush had the last laugh. He told Putin he believed him. And the truth of Putin’s observation was later confirmed by an independent fish farmer. —AFP