Russian propaganda descends on Washington.

RAMZAN KADYROV, one would assume, is hardly the sort of man the Russian government would want to show off to a group of foreign dignitaries. The Moscow-appointed president of Chechnya has been accused of deploying his several-thousand-man-strong personal militia—since absorbed into the Chechen government—to torture and murder his opponents, and many suspect that he played a role in the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who exposed Russia’s brutal repression of separatists. Kadyrov, who inherited rule over the erstwhile rebel province after his father was assassinated in 2004, has praised Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as a “beauty” who should be made “president for life.” And he is a pugilist, literally and rhetorically: A boxer, he invited Mike Tyson to visit the Chechen capital of Grozny in 2005, praising the convicted rapist and ear-eater’s “fists of iron.” “I will be killing as long as I live,” Kadyrov once boasted to a reporter.

Nonetheless, the 32-year-old Kadyrov was one of a number of Russian heavyweights with whom Western journalists, academics, and think-tank experts from around the world were invited to meet in September during a conference sponsored by the government’s official news service, RIA Novosti. The gathering, known as the “Valdai Discussion Club,” took place just a few weeks after Russia’s invasion of Georgia, and among those present were Jonathan Steele, onetime Moscow correspondent for The Guardian; Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation; International Herald Tribune editorial page editor Serge Schmemann; and Robert Blackwill, a U.S. envoy to Iraq and ambassador to India under George W. Bush. The group was treated to meetings with Russian counterparts, a visit to Europe’s biggest mosque, tours of a Cossack village, a jaunt to the seaside resort town (and 2014 Winter Olympics site) of Sochi, and bull sessions with a series of high-level Russian officials, the highlight of which was a three-hour question-and-answer session with Prime Minister Putin himself.

The intent of the annual conference is to wine, dine, and flatter the overseas VIPs into a certain sympathy for the Russian perspective. But if the Kremlin had told Kadyrov, whose bushy red beard and thick physique lend him the demeanor of a high school wrestling coach, to tone it down, he hadn’t received the memo. “This guy’s a lunatic,” Marshall Goldman, a longtime adviser to American presidents on Russia and a regular participant in the Valdai Club meetings, says of the former separatist leader. Goldman reports that Kadyrov spoke of Chechnya as a “zoo” and its inhabitants as “animals,” and said his only regret was that he didn’t murder the rebel leader responsible for the bombing that killed his father “with his own hands.”

Kadyrov was hardly the only figure at the gathering to offer an unvarnished Russian take on current affairs. Also on the schedule were Sergei Bagapsh and Eduard Kokoity, the presidents, respectively, of the separatist Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of whom, according to Goldman, called Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, a “drug addict” and “unbalanced mentally.” In the much-anticipated meeting with Putin, a participant asked about the use of “disproportionate force in South Ossetia,” to which the prime minister delivered a tirade in which he asked whether “it was necessary to wipe away the bloody sniffles,” and inquired, “What did you expect us to do? Brandish a penknife?”

The Valdai Club, inaugurated in 2004, is part of a multipronged effort by the Kremlin to improve American perceptions of Russia. These attitudes have suffered a precipitous decline over the past several years as Vladimir Putin transmogrified from the promising inheritor of Boris Yeltsin’s benign, if chaotic, rule into a bold autocrat. Reports on Russia in the Western press these days are mainly about the closure of independent TV stations and newspapers, violent crackdowns on journalists and human rights activists, and restraints on opposition parties so onerous that the country is effectively a one-party state. August’s war with Georgia only worsened Russia’s already damaged image.