Israeli President Moshe Katsav is currently facing charges for rape. Recently, an Israeli diplomatic delegation including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. An article from the Russian newspaper Kommersant quoted Putin as follows, speaking to the group:

“?????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????! ???????????????????????????????? ????????????????????? ?????????????????????????? ????????????????????! ?????????????????????????? ????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????! ???? ???????????????????????????? ???????? ???????????????????????? ????????? ????????????????! ???????? ???????????? ????????????????? ????????????????????????! ????????? ???????????? ???????????? ????????????????????????????????!”

In a New York Times story, this remark is characterized as “flippant” and reported as follows:

According to journalists and officials in the room and published accounts by Agence France-Presse late Wednesday and Kommersant and The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, Mr. Putin was heard saying, ???????Say hello to your president,??????? to Mr. Olmert, referring to President Moshe Katsav, who could face criminal charges that he raped and assaulted two former employees. Mr. Putin added, ???????He really surprised us.??????? The microphone was quickly turned off as reporters were ushered from the room, but the news organizations reported that Mr. Putin went on. ???????We did not know he could deal with 10 women,??????? he said, according to those in the room and the Post and Agence France-Presse accounts, apparently referring to the complaints by several women that Mr. Katsav harassed them or worse. Kommersant????????s version ???????? citing the remarks in Russian ???????? was cruder. ???????He turned out to be quite a powerful man,??????? the paper????????s reporter in the official Kremlin pool, Andrei Kolesnikov, quoted Mr. Putin as saying. ???????He raped 10 women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him.???????

In fact, it????????s far worse than ???????flippant.??????? Russian Cyrill Vatomsky translates Putin’s statement as follows:

Please relay my greetings to your president! He turned out to be quite a stud! Raped 10 women! I sure did not expect that from him! He sure surprised us all! We all envy him!

The Russian phrase Vatomsky translates as “stud” — “?????????????????????????? ????????????????????” — is quite similar to the type of language Putin infamously used when he said he would ???????stomp the Chechens in their outhouses??????? using the colloquial verb “??????????????????????????.” For the New York Times to simply translate this phrase as ???????powerful man??????? is gross negligence, leading to a faulty conclusion that the remark was merely ???????flippant.??????? As Cyrill explains, ?????????????????????????? is a word to be generally applied to a machine rather than person, and ???????????????????? is to “man” what “broad” is to “woman” in English.

Even under the Times version, Can you imagine how the world would react if U.S. President George Bush spoke this way about rape? This incident might seem unbelievable to those not familiar with Putin, but as blogger Robert Amsterdam points out that, in fact it????????s commonplace. He cites to a New York Times article which states:

In 2000, Larry King asked him about what happened to the Kursk, a submarine that under mysterious circumstances had ended up disabled on the sea bed with its entire crew dead. ???????It sank,??????? Mr. Putin said. Two years later, at a news conference in Brussels, a French reporter asked him a pointed question about Chechnya. Mr. Putin suggested that the reporter might want to become a radical Islamist, and invited him to Moscow for a circumcision, saying he could recommend a procedure so that nothing would grow back.

In the aftermath of the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya on Putin????????s birthday, Putin????????s response was to publicly label her an enemy of the state. He said: ???????This murder has done more damage to Russia — and the current authorities of Russia and Chechnya, which she has been covering lately in her work — than Politkovskaya’s articles.??????? This prompted Politkovskaya????????s editor to reply: ???????Putin said an outrageous thing today about Anna. What he said today is so outrageous that it is unworthy of a man, and it is unworthy of the president of Russia.???????

If Vladimir Putin would say these things publicly, in front of heads of state, does one dare to imagine what he says behind closed doors to his KGB cronies? And what thoughts might he be thinking, that he dare not verbalize even to his most trusted associates?

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.