"I was deeply touched, when he smiled and looked at us with his blue eyes, my old sweet memories flooded back to me," a middle-aged Soviet-trained Vietnamese woman told the TV crew. The blue eyes in question belonged not to a movie star, but to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was visiting Hanoi, and the sweet memories in all likelihood related not to some romantic experience of the past but to the decades of lavish aid, pumped by the Kremlin into Vietnam during Cold War years.

Those words "blue eyes" sound awesome. They make sense. Mikhail Gorbachev, during whose tenure relations between Moscow and Hanoi became sour, has brown eyes. Boris Yeltsin, who never realized Vietnam was still there, has eyes of an undetectable shade, their original color completely washed away by excessive consumption of alcohol. Now the Vietnamese seem to be completely won over by the new blue-eyed Russian leader and so are the South Koreans. Putin's two-country Asian tour was a smashing success.

Putin came to Asia with a very busy agenda, ranging from ambitious joint economic projects to U.S. national missile defense. The punch line of his tour, however, was laconic: Russia the superpower is back in business. Restoring Russia's global strategic role is Putin's obsession. It is not quite clear what gives him reason to believe that a poor though vast and heavily armed country can be regarded as a superpower in a world that is chiefly run by economic interests. But nobody will be able to say Putin didn't try. Quite smartly, he has started by parading himself in front of the former satellites -- North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam.