President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov can celebrate the end of their best week in the Middle East in the past two and a half years. Rather than being dismissed as irrelevant or supporters of the region's most brutal dictators, they're being described with a different sobriquet — statesmen. The proximate reasons for this change, of course, lie with a Russian-brokered proposal that would see Assad relinquish his chemical weapons.