We may mock President Putin as regularly as we can create a tenuous link to his dickwittery, but the country he dictates is an amazing one. Spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific across eleven time zones, responsible for the first animal, satellite, and person in space, and with a history uniting fifteen separate countries into one bloc of… er, communist misery, Russia and the former Soviet Union are a major part of our current world.

They also make probably the best off-road trucks of anyone, which are needed to traverse a vast and wild landscape, with most having their roots in the Military. Founded in 1956, off-road truck-maker Ural shares this history, and still employs 4,000 people today building trucks like this, Vladimir Drozd‘s beautifully presented Ural crane truck.

With a working crane that rotates, elevates, extends, and winches, Vladimir’s Ural functions as good as it looks, and there’s loads more of his superb model to see at his ‘Ural Crane Truck’ album on Flickr. Take a look via the link above, or here for a tenuous link to Putin’s dickwittery.