Writing in the Washington Post Strobe Talbott recalls a tense time during the days of the Kosovo crisis (and how many crises ago was that?) when he had a brief but telling encounter with Vladimir Putin, then a mere security chief but plainly a man on the make and someone to watch … carefully. At one point:
In our meeting, he managed to seem both relaxed and on guard … His personal touches were pointed. For no reason other than to show he had read my KGB dossier, he dropped the names of two Russian poets I had studied in college.
Talbott mines that vignette for insights into the character of the man who is now our adversary if not our enemy and concludes that:
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