Cold climate

摘要

When Vladimir Putin plays host to Ba-rack Obama and other world leaders at the G20 summit in St Petersburg next week, mutual resentment and dislike will be ill-concealed. The American president recently likened the Russian leader's body language to that of a "bored kid in the back of the classroom". Mr Obama has cancelled a planned bilateral meeting in Moscow, choosing to visit Sweden instead. The last straw was Russia's sheltering of Edward Snowden, a fugitive American spook. But the spat over that only crystallised something apparent since Mr Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012: that the "reset", launched with much fanfare in 2009, is not just dying, but dead.