Petulant and even paranoid, but deals can be made with Putin

It is an extraordinary and very Russian spectacle: a country of 11 time zones apparently delivering, in a single shout with no dissenting voices, an overwhelming endorsement of President Putin, its leader.

The reason for the lack of divergence is very clear from the reports that preceded the count of votes: a consistent pattern of intimidation of voters and candidates, with a few regions showing a suspiciously high turnout to boot (99 per cent reported in Chechnya by its president and 98 per cent in Ingushetia, said state news agencies). It is an unwanted compliment for democracy that someone who has so little interest in the content of it goes to such lengths to pursue the form.

Now that Putin has the appearance of a mandate that he wanted, what does he plan to do with it? The first answer is easy — to secure his grip on power beyond the end of his current term when, under the Constitution, he is obliged to step down at least temporarily.

Of the three manoeuvres open to him, only that of appointing himself prime minister, and then putting in an obedient placeman without ambition as president, offers the certainty that he wants. The alternatives — of appointing a strong figure as president or defying the Constitution and staying for a third term — would pose more threats.

But if he can navigate this problem, then the West, particularly Russia's near neighbours, will have to brace themselves for more of the same: prickly relations, always awkward and getting more so, which spring more from an aggrieved, even paranoid, mindset than from calculation.

The best that can be said is that, at the moment, Russia appears to be picking its fights one by one, on their own merits, rather than causing trouble for its own sake and uniting its grievances into a solid front of obstruction.

Putin's tendency for petulance and overreaction is shown well by Russia's exit on Friday from the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty — and then its suggestion, yesterday, that it would opt back in if Western countries met its demands.

Russia has an eight-year-long grievance against the treaty, originally devised in 1990 and which aimed to bring balance and transparency to armed forces between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ural mountains.

It has gibed at the 1999 amendment, written to take account of the break-up of the Soviet Union, and wanted, in effect, an exemption to allow it to keep forces in Moldova and Georgia.

Putin has added, more recently, his objection to America's planned missile shield in Central and Eastern Europe. When on Friday he signed a federal law suspending Russia's obligations to the CFE treaty, that was the prime reason that he gave.

And now Russia may be back. Yesterday he gave hints that it was all potentially part of a deal. “If our partners ratify this treaty after all, we do not rule out that we will opt back into the treaty on a fully fledged basis”, the Tass news agency quoted him as saying.

That is the best that can be expected from Putin's Russia: that it regards all these grievances as potentially to be settled by bargaining. Iran, Kosovo, gas supplies; they are all to play for.

That is the recipe for a relationship of enormous awkwardness, recurrent obstruction, and bad-temper. But it is not one of steady malevolence and, for the moment, it is workable.