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MOSCOW: A khaki-clad Prime Minister Vladimir Putin issues commands, assisted by a voluptuous red-haired aide with a resemblance to the spy Anna Chapman in a new computer game, developed by a Russian company.
Putin “is the commander-in-chief, the leader of the game, he is the constant right hand of the player,” said Varvara Zolotova, chief marketing officer of Moscow developers Progrestar Inc. “He is the leader just as in life he is for young people.”
The young-looking Putin, with a full head of hair, walks around, gun pointed in a khaki shirt and gives players assignments in the game, called “Voinushka,” or “Shoot 'em Up.”
He is also depicted on the online game's opening page in army uniform, with his sleeves rolled up over toned muscles and gun pointed James Bond-style.
The game was launched last month and is available as an application on Russia's two most popular social networking sites, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.
While the game apparently buffs Putin's public image as a cool-headed strongman, his spokesman complained the premier had not been consulted over the game.
“The authors have not contacted us to ask permission to use the image of Vladimir Putin,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Life News tabloid website.
The game developers chose Putin after doing a survey of the most popular figures among young people, Zolotova said. “Putin is a popular hero, young people really like him both as a political figure and as a person.”
The Putin figure has a red-haired side-kick in an army fur hat with a rifle on her shoulder and her khaki tunic unbuttoned to reveal her spectacular cleavage. The figure has been compared to Anna Chapman, the most publicity-hungry member of a spy ring exposed in the United States last summer, who has posed in lingerie, but in fact she was not planned that way, Zolotova said.
“The heroine was drawn without a personality but people saw them together and thought that she was Anna Chapman,” Zolotova said.
Chapman last year used her Facebook account to promote a poker game application for iPhone, called Poker with Anna Chapman.
