An awful week for Vladimir Putin

THE OPENING ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 was meant to be the defining moment of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, showing off a resurgent Russia to the world and turbocharging his popularity at home. With a price tag of $50bn, he left nothing to chance. Russia doped its athletes and trumpeted their gold medals as though they were the spoils of war. Whipped up by the state propaganda machine, the celebration morphed into anti-Western hysteria; and the Sochi Olympics gave way, within days, to the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donbas, in eastern Ukraine.

Six years on, the after-effects are catching up with the Kremlin. On December 9th the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) banned Russia from major international sport events for four years (see article). In a country where symbols matter more than substance this ban, despite its loopholes, comes as a huge humiliation. It came on the day that Mr Putin sat down with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, and the leaders of France and Germany, to negotiate a settlement to the Russia-sponsored war in Donbas that has claimed 13,000 lives.