Vladimir Putin emerged from a yellow Lada sports car in the Siberian city of Chita yesterday, after driving more than 1,200 miles to complete a road trip across Russia's Far Eastern regions.

Fitting in to what appears to be a growing PR campaign to boost his image ahead of a potential return to the Kremlin in 2012, the powerful Russian Prime Minister set off on the journey late last week, sporting a pair of dark glasses and a cream polo shirt.

Mr Putin had a small fridge of drinks in the boot and a Beatles CD to keep him company – as well as an entourage of dozens of journalists, broadcasting the trip to Russians across the country.

In one interview, given while at the wheel of the Lada to the Kommersant newspaper, Mr Putin admitted he was indeed contemplating a return to the Russian presidency in 2012. He also said that pro-democracy protesters deserved to be "beaten around the head with truncheons".

The Russian Prime Minister was testing out a highway that has been in construction for decades and is the last link in a paved road that connects Moscow and Vladivostok, several thousand miles and seven time zones apart. He was also playing up to his "man of the people" image, in a month that has seen a remarkable flurry of televised stunts, even by his standards.

During the fires that ravaged European Russia earlier this month, he was pictured co-piloting a plane that dropped water on a burning forest ("Did I hit it?" he was recorded asking the pilot. "Yes, a direct hit!" was the response). Then last week he added to his animal-related escapades, which have already featured tigers, polar bears and leopards, when he boarded a dinghy off the Kamchatka Peninsula and fired darts from a crossbow to collect skin samples from a grey whale.

Mr Putin described the car journey as "the first break I've had for a decade or so", but even if he really did enjoy speeding through the Siberian landscapes, there was no doubt that the trip was as carefully choreographed as his other exploits. The television cameras were never far away, and any exchanges he had with ordinary Siberians along the way were filmed and made into packages for the evening news bulletins on Russian television.

During the trip, he gave one of his most open interviews in recent years to Andrei Kolesnikov, a journalist with Kommersant who has covered Mr Putin during his entire tenure as President and Prime Minister, and is allowed far more free rein for criticism and sarcasm in Mr Putin's direction than most other Russian reporters.

"You understand that you have made mistakes, you just don't want to admit it," remarked Mr Kolesnikov to Mr Putin at one stage in the interview, after the Prime Minister had said that during his whole decade in power he could not think of a single mistake he had made. "Maybe we could have done some things more carefully, effectively, wisely..." said Mr Putin, but reiterated that no serious mistakes had been made.

drive from www.independent.co.uk