Vladimir Putin's torso, which he sometimes bares during sporting pursuits, is a familiar part of his public image. How much Putin reveals of the man behind the buff exterior is another question.
After 18 years as Russia's leader, and with another six-year term sure to follow a March election, Putin doesn't show the appetites or vulnerabilities that can personalise Western politics, even when staged or spun. If he has moments of merriment or melancholy, they happen in private.
His air of shadow, distance and restraint also stands out in Russia's more rigid political culture. Never has Putin burst into wild dancing a la Boris Yeltsin or confessed a boyish affection for arena rock like Dmitry Medvedev did as a self-described Deep Purple fan.
He may be chronically on guard, deliberately not exposing his inner life out of concern that opponents could exploit it. Or he might be exhibiting his essence: a man so focused on power that other interests blur.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in action during the Night Hockey League match at the GUM department store skating rink at Red Square (AAP) Source: AAP
"He doesn't like people naturally," Mikhail Zygar, a top editor at independent Dozhd TV and the author of All The Kremlin's Men, said. "He considers those politicians who talk about values to be cheating him."
Yet others see a strong strain of warmth in Putin. "Easygoing", encouraging and even healing is the description offered by Yuri Tolstoy, who was one of Putin's law professors in Leningrad, now St Petersburg.
Tolstoy, now 90, says the 65-year-old president visited him this past autumn after he received Russia's highest civilian honour.
"He is a charming and witty man. He is sincere and open in communication with anyone," another of Putin's former professors, Dzhenevra Lukovskaya, said. "Speaking globally, I'd say President Putin meets the challenges of the national self-identification of Russia."
Russia appears to be the self-identification of Putin as well. If he lacks an overarching system of ethics and moral imperatives, he has an essential sense of being Russian, perhaps of embodying Russia itself.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin talk during a photo session at the APEC summit in Vietnam. Source: Sputnik
"He's not there because he's believes he's a dictator. No, he believes he's the man who's trying to save the country," Zygar said.
At the same time, "Putin is not a strategical player as he is portrayed; he is a very tactical player, he is good at responding" in Zygar's view.
He cited Russia's military offensives in Syria as an example. Putin's motivation in starting the Syria campaign was exasperation with the international criticism over Russia's backing for separatist rebels in Ukraine's war.
File: Russian President Vladimir Putin walks holding a rifle in the Tuva region of Siberia in this Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2007 (AAP) Source: AAP
What's known of Putin's youth suggests that he hungered for two kinds of power - visible and clandestine - in an environment imbued with both Russia's suffering and its valour.
Putin was born on October 7, 1952, to factory-worker parents in Leningrad, a city pervaded by memories of a nearly 900-day Nazi siege during World War II. One of his older brothers died of diphtheria during the siege; the other died a few months after birth.
According to First Person, a book of interviews published after he became acting president in 1999, Putin and his parents lived in a dismal communal apartment with a wretched toilet down the hall.
Putin said he responded to the rough circumstances by becoming a childhood "hooligan", one of the few in his school barred from joining the Communist Young Pioneers. In his early adolescence, Putin channelled his aggressive tendencies into the martial arts, a sport he practised avidly into late middle-age.
In a moment of naive determination, he says he went to a local KGB office to ask about joining the spy service. He was told the agency was highly sceptical about the trustworthiness of prospective agents who walked in from the street.
"All those years in university, I waited for the man at the KGB office to remember me," Putin said. One day "a man came and asked me to meet with him. He didn't say who he was, but I immediately figured it out ... If they didn't want to say where, that meant it was there."
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a master class at a judo school in St.Petersburg, on Saturday, Dec. 24, 2005 (AAP) Source: AAP
"I would not exaggerate the importance of his KGB years," where he was more of a bureaucrat than a spy, Zygar said. Instead, he sees Putin's epiphany as something that happened after he left the KGB and became a deputy of Anatoly Sobchak, St. Petersburg's reform-minded mayor.
Sobchak was such a democrat at heart that he allowed an open election and then accepted his defeat in it.
"That was a tragedy for Sobchak's team and a tragedy for Putin personally and that was the lesson: how you should never repeat those mistakes: free and fair elections, open debates and really influential opposition," Zygar said.
The lesson is likely to apply to the 2018 presidential election. The only truly influential opposition aspirant, anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, is almost certain to be blocked from the ballot because of a felony conviction.
That means Russians who hope to see Putin unseated are focused on longshot Ksenia Sobchak, Anatoly Sobchak's daughter, a television personality who has never held office and who as yet has not qualified for the ballot.
