THE Russian leader, President Vladimir Putin, is leaving little to chance as he prepares to host the G8 summit of world leaders next year. Plans are already being discussed to send special planes aloft to “seed” the clouds — an old Soviet trick — and ensure good weather.

There is little he can do, however, to manage the storm being whipped up in America by critics who say Russian human rights abuses should disqualify it from the exclusive club of top industrial powers.

The summer gathering in Peter the Great’s Konstantinovsky Palace in St Petersburg will mark the first time Russia has hosted a G8 summit. So important is it to Putin that he is personally overseeing the details.

Whether or not “ionising” clouds to make the rain fall actually works, Putin hopes to persuade his western counterparts of his superhuman endowments in other departments. Russia’s enormous reserves of oil and gas put it in a position to influence global prices. With a stability in stark contrast to the Arab oil-producing world, Russia has never seemed a more attractive ally, whatever the grumbles about human rights.

If he can succeed in keeping the focus on that, Putin, 53, will have affirmed Russia’s status as a world power once more after the humiliating decline that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union 15 years ago. “Putin is in the business of making Russia strong and influential again,” said Christopher Granville, chief strategist at United Financial Group, Russia’s leading investment bank.

His critics in America want to spoil the show. A group of senators and congressmen from both Republicans and Democrats are calling for the St Petersburg summit to be cancelled and for Russia to be kicked out of the G8.

They complain that Russian influence is in the hands of an authoritarian former KGB agent who recently deplored the collapse of communism as “the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th century”.

Opponents have been particularly angered by a bill he has been promoting under which human rights monitors and other foreign groups could be barred from the country.

“Putin’s Russia is continuing to move backwards and sees any organisation out of government control as a threat,” said Tom Lantos, a Democrat congressman from California who supports proposed legislation to remove Russia from the G8. “It does not deserve its participation in meetings with democratic and industrially developed G7 countries.”

The Russians are just as happy to accuse America of human rights abuses over Iraq but in the run-up to the summit Putin, a judo black belt, wants to avoid another punch-up. He knows he is vulnerable over Russia’s “democratic deficit”.

He makes no secret of his admiration for “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless founder of the Soviet secret police, and he shows some of the same passion for secrecy.

The only pictures of his two daughters that have ever been published were taken more than a decade ago. In those days there were the makings of a free press. Putin has since crushed opposition in the media, parliament and regions, and he is widely accused of sanctioning war crimes in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

()He has cancelled regional elections, backed tyrants in Belarus and Uzbekistan and consigned enemies to jail. After falling out with Putin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon, is serving an eight-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion in a Siberian penal colony.

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