Big Brother

Mister persistent

Physical fitness has brought Valdas Adamkus success at both ends of his life. In 1948, the 21-year-old Lithuanian won two gold and two silver medals at a track-and-field competition for refugees from east European nations that had been swallowed up by the Soviet occupation. Nearly six decades later in 2007, Adamkus pulled off another award-winning athletic feat: the 80-year-old Lithuanian president pounded up and down the stairs at a European Council meeting in Brussels in order to help rescue the EU's reform treaty from what appeared to be a premature death.

The diplomat

Anyone looking at the composition of Slovenia's first government after the country broke loose from Yugoslavia in the summer of 1991 might be forgiven for thinking that little has changed in the tiny Alpine republic. Its first prime minister was Alojz Peterle, currently an MEP and runner-up in the recent presidential election, its second, Janez Drnovšek, is currently the country's maverick president. (Drnovšek will hand over to Danilo Türk, a former UN diplomat, who beat Peterle, on 22 December.) In both governments, Dimitrij Rupel was foreign minister – just as he is today.

Putin's proxy

Rare is the politician who feels in his element while counting either litres of milk or laundered money, but Viktor Zubkov has an unquenchable passion for both.

Manhattan transfer

Flamboyant, slightly corpulent at the age of 39 and with rapid-fire fluent English, Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili could still pass for the New York lawyer he was before the Rose Revolution and his transformation into the darling of US foreign policy.

Moscow missionary

The stereotypical Russian diplomat is an older fellow with a brooding mind and a booming voice which he often uses to say “nyet”, and is perhaps not the most socially adept person imaginable. In almost every respect, Vladimir Chizhov is the opposite of that cliché. (Though he is in his mid-fifties and does have a rather imposing voice.)