Russian President Vladimir Putin has pardoned and freed the former head of oil giant Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
As Russia stands to look as the peacemaker over the issue of Syrian chemical weapons, the country is suffering from widely negative perceptions from populations around the world.
From opposing shale gas exploration to defending US whistle-blower Edward Snowden, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his PR machine have been forging an unlikely alliance with Western protest voices.
As Russia and the United States, and their respective allies, lock horns at the G20 and in the UN Security Council and perhaps eventually find a face-saving way out of their self-inflicted paralysis, the dynamic of the Syrian civil war has long taken a direction that will see neither of them as a winner.
A week that started with a march toward war, that melted in the heat of U.S. politics, that morphed into high-level diplomacy, ended with a U.S.-Russian deal to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons.