It's August, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has been to Tuva — the place where he is usually photographed shirtless. The slow news cycle certainly accounts for some of the attention that the latest Kremlin-released photo session has received from global media. But something else accounts for most of it: Putin's incredible success as a troll.

Not just the paparazzi-loving tabloids published whole photo galleries from the selection: The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time did, too. Few heads of state could boast of similar success with their government news products. The achievement is especially impressive given that Putin was already photographed shirtless in the South Siberian region on the Mongolian border in 2007 and 2009 (on another fishing trip to the region, in 2013, it was probably too cold for the shirt to come off, but Putin still got the social networks excited by kissing a large pike he'd caught).

All of Putin's famous shirtless pictures — on horseback, pole-fishing, swimming the butterfly stroke — come from vacations in Tuva, the birthplace of his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu. The region's natural beauty and remoteness — no one can see him who's not supposed to — appear to bring out a kind of macho, outdoorsy romanticism in the pale-skinned St. Petersburg native, who's lived in big cities his whole life. But why does the Kremlin keep publishing the photos, and why do the global media lap them up so?