The diplomat

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.

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.)

The listener

Alexander Weis, the new head of the European Defence Agency (EDA), always wanted to do international work. That is how he explains his decision to work for the German defence ministry right after finishing law school. The ministry was his first and only employer until the EDA job came along. “I had the wish not to remain ‘national',” he says.