Mountain, mountain standing tall, who’s the fairest of them all?
In one of his first legislative directives, Kyrgyzstan’s new Prime Minister Almazbek Atambayev has sponsored a bill to designate one of his country’s myriad unnamed mountains Vladimir Putin Peak after the Russian prime minister.
Atambayev submitted the bill to parliament on the eve of his trip to Moscow. Perhaps he was worried he had nothing to offer the Russian strongman. But it makes you wonder: What else did the two men give each other?
The 4,446-meter (14,586-foot) summit is by no means among Kyrgyzstan’s tallest, but the honor is relative: It is 1,000 meters taller than Mt. Yeltsin, named after Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in 2002. Still, Putin’s pinnacle is way shorter than the 7,134-meter (23,406-foot) Lenin Peak on the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border.
David Trilling is Eurasianet’s managing editor.
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