(
)
You want your ring back, Bob? Nyet a chance!
A condescending Vladimir Putin yesterday said he never even saw Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring — and declared the best solution to the “complicated international problem” would be to make him a duplicate.
“If it is so precious to Kraft and the team, I have a proposal. We will ask our firms to make a really good, big thing, so everyone will see what an expensive thing it is, with good metal and a stone,” the Russian president mocked.
In that way, “this jewel is passed on from generation to generation in the team whose interests Mr. Kraft represents.”
With an additional dose of sarcasm, he added, “This would be the smartest solution partners can ever achieve when tackling such a complicated international problem.”
The ring scandal surfaced last month when The Post reported how Kraft was with a group of business executives visiting Russia in 2005, a few months after his team beat the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX.
Kraft said that when he met Putin in St. Petersburg, he intended only to show him the 124-diamond-studded ring, which commemorated the Patriots’ victory.
But the Russian leader put the 4.94-carat bauble on his hand and bizarrely exclaimed, “I can kill someone with this ring.”
Then as Kraft put his hand out — expecting the ring’s return — Putin “put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out,” Kraft recalled.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said he was standing “right behind the president” and witnessed how Kraft had handed over the ring — as a gift.
Kraft’s version of what happened was just “weird,” Peskov said.
But the ring scandal didn’t go away this week, perhaps because it confirmed the former KGB officer’s reputation as a fancier of the finer things in life.
Yesterday, Putin tried to ridicule the story.
“You know, I remember neither Mr. Kraft nor the ring,” Putin said when asked by journalists at an economic forum in St. Petersburg.
“I remember some souvenirs were handed out,” he said.
Kraft had said the ring meant so much to him that he wanted the White House to help get it back. But it’s now sitting in a display case at a Kremlin library.
A Patriots spokesman had no comment on the brouhaha yesterday.