Buoyed by high oil prices, he now seeks to bestride the world as if the social calamities that bedevil Russia – a collapsing population, a spiraling AIDS and tuberculosis crisis, corruption mushrooming to levels unimagined by Yeltsin – do not matter. At a high-level security meeting in Munich this past February, Putin, who usually draws on the secretive, manipulative, and confrontational Cold War paradigm of what constitutes Russian diplomatic behavior, lashed out at the United States with the sort of language unheard of since Khrushchev said “We will bury you.”