Another thought that has occurred to me was that the leaked assassination story might have just been seen as a good way to get a the press interested in what would otherwise have been a not particularly newsworthy summit.

I think I may be taking these conspiracy theories a little too far now…

We know that the state controlled this news leak (there were identical quotes from an anonymous source in TASS, RIA, and Interfax). We know the Iranians immediately discarded the threat. And most importantly, within hours Pravda was carrying a headline casting Putin’s decision to travel anyways as heroic. As an added benefit, inventing an Islamist plot to assassinate him has the added benefit of shoring up Russia’s anti-terrorism credentials at a critical time.

However if the conspiracy theorists are disappointed with such a pedestrian political stunt, they can just resort to default: blame an exiled London oligarch. He’ll be more than happy to do an interview about it.