So, presumably, all that's left for Mr. Putin now is to be hired by the Washington Post to provide balance.

 

A new study of an economics thesis written by Mr Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.

 

Mr Putin was labelled a plagiarist at the weekend after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the President's academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in 1978.

 

According to the Kremlin's official biography, Mr Putin, 53, obtained a PhD in economics from the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997. But the US researchers also established that his thesis was for a lesser degree that would not have entitled him to a full doctorate.

 

The embarrassing revelation that the former KGB agent may have cheated and lied about his qualifications follows a long search by US scholars for evidence of the President's academic prowess. A copy of the thesis was eventually found in the electronic files of a Moscow technical library.

 

According to Clifford G. Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Mr Putin's work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, by US professors William King and David Cleland. The study was translated into Russian by a KGB-related institute in the early 1990s.

 

The Washington Times reported that six diagrams and tables from the 218-page thesis also appeared to "mimic" similar charts in the US work.

 

The newspaper quoted Mr Gaddy as saying: "There's no question in my mind that this would be plagiarism."

those professors should be the russian presidents then.

It's kinda funny since I'd always heard about how smart the guy is. Oh well, it's not like he's gonna lose his job over this.