Talk about Patriotic! The New York Post reports that Pats owner Robert Kraft wasn’t exactly telling the truth in 2005 when he said he’d given his Super Bowl ring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin just took it, which is fitting behavior for the head of a kleptocracy.

From yesterday’s New York Post (via Mediaite):

Kraft explained the incident happened while Sandy Weill and other business execs were in St. Petersburg. “I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’ ” Kraft told the crowd at Carnegie Hall’s Medal of Excellence gala at the Waldorf-Astoria.“I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

According to the Post piece, someone from the George W. Bush administration called Kraft and said, ‘It would really be in the best interest of US-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present.” (As the Post points out, the Soviet Union had collapsed 14 years earlier.)

So Kraft acquiesced.  Damn good thing he wasn’t traveling with Ricki Noel Lander at the time, eh?