In April 2006 at the meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington, with central bankers Mario Draghi, Ben Bernanke and Jean-Claude Trichet looking on, Putin’s finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, shook hands with the American Treasury secretary. Kudrin had come to announce the repayment of a large tranche of international debt still owed to the Paris Club of creditors from the bad old days of the 1990s.
