Russia reconquers the Czechs.

Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, is legendary for his lack of manners. When his country assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union in 2009, Klaus—a stocky and vigorous man with close-cropped white hair and a fastidiously trimmed moustache—got into a scrap with a group of European politicians because he had refused to fly the EU flag above his office in Prague Castle. Nicolas Sarkozy pronounced the snub “hurtful,” yet Klaus was anything but contrite. Instead, he used his first address to the European Parliament to compare the EU to the Soviet Union. Tales of his unsubtle jabs at his political opponents are legion. Visiting the United States during the 2008 presidential campaign, Klaus, known and embraced by many Western conservatives as a fellow partisan, remarked to a reporter that he assumed Barack Obama wasn’t much of a beer man but “might drink those, how do you say? ... piña coladas.” His predecessor, Václav Havel, worked with him for many years and in his memoir described him variously as “utterly unbearable,” “this annoying fellow,” and “radiating a negative energy.” The British historian Timothy Garton Ash called Klaus “one of the rudest men I have ever met.”

Yet even by Klaus’s standards, the fuss he kicked up over the Lisbon Treaty was impolitic. It was October 2009, and after eight numbing years of negotiations and referenda, every EU member had signed the agreement that would give the organization a president. Every country, that is, except the Czech Republic. Its parliament had approved the treaty, and Klaus was required by law to sign it. But he was refusing to answer his telephone.

Instead, Klaus chose that moment to travel to Moscow to promote his latest book, itself a middle finger directed at the European consensus. Blue Planet in Green Shackles dismisses man-made climate change as a myth and claims that the greatest threat to freedom in the twenty-first century is the “ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.” While European officials fretted and fumed, Klaus was received in style at the Kremlin. For weeks, it appeared as if the entire European project could be derailed by a single obstinate politician with a continent-sized chip on his shoulder.

Klaus eventually signed the treaty, and many of his critics assumed he’d been holding the accord hostage in a crude play for publicity. But among close observers, his trip to Moscow raised eyebrows for another reason: He appeared to be acting in Russia’s interests—and not for the first time.

An economist by training, Klaus, who is 69 years old, has served as prime minister or president for all but five years of the Czech Republic’s life span. A zealous free-marketer—he has been called the “Margaret Thatcher of Central Europe”—he oversaw the transformation of a centrally planned economy into one of the former Soviet bloc’s most successful markets, before emerging as the leader of the right-wing Civic Democratic Party. Nevertheless, ever since the Czechs shook off the communist yoke, Klaus has come down on Moscow’s side in almost every major political debate.