GIVEN the chance to grill their President live on air, you might guess that Russians would ask about his moves to roll back democracy, his policies in Chechnya, or the abysmal working conditions in the Russian military. Guess again.

Russians are apparently more concerned with why Mr Putin kissed a young boy on the stomach, whether he will use robots to defend Russia and what he thinks of a mythical giant octopus sleeping under the Pacific.

Those were the most popular questions on the Russian website, www.yandex.ru, which hosts Mr Putin’s first joint live webcast today with the BBC’s Have Your Say, www.bbc.co.uk/news. The webcast is the latest step in the Kremlin’s campaign to polish its image in the run-up to the G8 summit in St Petersburg from July 15 to 17.

The Kremlin has signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Ketchum, an American PR firm, to help to counter critics who say that Russia should not be in the G8 — let alone chair it — because of Mr Putin’s questionable democratic credentials.

But the questions listed on Yandex suggest that most Russian participants are less concerned with weighty issues than with the trivial, or the fantastic.

“What was achieved by your kissing the little boy Nikita on the stomach?” was one question with 14,470 people voting for it to be forwarded to the President.

Mr Putin baffled Russians and Westerners alike last week when he stopped a young boy who was walking through the Kremlin, asked his name (it was Nikita) and then lifted his T-shirt and kissed his stomach. Some political analysts speculate that it was a clumsy attempt to soften Mr Putin’s image with some “baby-kissing” PR moves.

The leading question on Yandex, with 17,066 votes, was would the President use “giant, humanoid war robots” to defend Russia? The third favourite, with 11,401 votes, was what he thought about the Cthulhu, a giant octopus invented by the novelist H. P. Lovecraft.

The most popular questions are supposed to be put to Mr Putin by Alexander Gurnov, a Russian TV journalist, and Bridget Kendall, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent.

Angus Roxburgh, a former BBC Moscow correspondent now on the PR team advising the Kremlin, said that he expected Mr Putin to answer the most popular questions, however off-the-wall. “He enjoys doing this sort of thing,” he told The Times. “And the longer it goes on, the more animated he gets. It should be fun.”

Mr Roxburgh now works alongside Tim Allen, a former Downing Street spin-doctor, for GPlus, a PR company enlisted by Ketchum to help with the Kremlin contract.

“The main thing we’re trying to persuade the Russians to do is to open up and provide more interviews than they were before, from the President down, in order to get their own message across,” he said. “A lot of the reason for the bad publicity over the last year is their failure to get their message across.”

Questions posted on the Have Your Say site, which have been checked by a moderator, appeared to be generally more serious. They ranged from queries about the conflict in Chechnya and deadly racist attacks in St Petersburg, to appeals for Mr Putin to stand up to the United States.

There were, however, a few lighter contributions.

“I think that the character Dobby in the Harry Potter movie The Chamber of Secrets looks a lot like you. Do you know if this is on purpose?” asked A.M. Venema from the Netherlands.

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