Vladimir Putin may have made a comeback, but one question remains: What was he up to during those 11 days of absence from the public eye?

Official statements on his whereabouts were so bland, and the abundant conspiracy theories so absurd, that the answer may well be much simpler than anybody has dared to suggest so far.

After all, 264 hours (that's 15,840 minutes to you) away from prying eyes must be a boon to any public figure. So here are some ideas on what Putin was occupied with as the world awaited his return in suspense.

"War and Peace," the longest Russian novel ever written, has a grand total of 478,458 words — more if you are plowing your way through a translation. The average reading speed is 300 words per minute, but since there's nothing average about Putin, let's say he can manage double that amount, so 600. That's realistic enough, putting him somewhere inbetween a businessman and a professor.

One read-through, then, would take him just over 797 minutes. Meaning that, since that last public appearance on March 5, Putin could have read Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece 19 times, beating BBC journalist Andrew Marr's 15 times. And he still would have had enough time left to make a start on "Anna Karenina."

While Putin's frequent shirtless public appearances never fail to make headlines, the reason behind them has yet to be given the attention it deserves. What if such stunts are just a sign that the president has, once more, neglected to do his washing? Not a clean shirt in sight, so bring on the wild horse/fishing rod to match the shirtless head of state!

A conservative estimate might put the presidential shirt-count at 100. Assuming that he could fit a dozen shirts into the washing machine at a time, Putin would need to run 9 cycles. Allow, then, two hours per cycle, and the Big Presidential Laundry Day of 2015 would barely have made a dent in his 11 days' disappearance — just 1080 of the 15,840 minutes at his disposal.

So he probably continued with his T-shirts, then did his undies and, shortly before reappearing, finished with his bed linens, table cloths, curtains and that one apron he doesn't like to talk about.

Putin, play an American board game? Maybe that's why he had to do it secretly, avoiding two risks at once: offending Russian voters, and putting the idea of board game export sanctions into the heads of U.S. government officials.

Commanding armies, claiming territories and making complex strategic decisions mean that a single round of Risk can take up to 8 hours. Needless to say, all of Putin's games would be ultra-complex 480-minute affairs, so he may well have been doing 33 rounds while the world was speculating on his whereabouts.

Shame he still hasn't told anyone what his secret mission card for the next round says.

Home-made Borscht takes time to prepare. There's beef stock to be made, there are onions, beets and carrots to be peeled and cut. There is a lot of simmering and the occasional stirring.

Going by an estimated time of 170 minutes or just shy of three hours, Putin may well have spent his time out of the limelight rustling up an impressive 93 batches of borscht. (In all likelihood, though, he probably only cooked 90 portions and spent the remaining time scrubbing splotches of pink beet juice off every kitchen surface.)

Combine "railway" and "Russian leader," and cue instant flashbacks of history lessons on Lenin's return from exile. But with time to spare, who knows whether Putin wasn't also riding the tracks more recently? In 81 of the 264 hours of his disappearance, he'd already be in Buryatia's Ulan Ude, home of, fittingly, a massive Lenin bust.

Then again, if he's prepared to spend six days and seven nights on the train, Putin could get as far as Beijing for a quiet visit with some friends who are becoming more and more important. After that, it's anybody's guess how he spent the remaining five days: turn around and head back to Moscow or travel further to visit another recently significant ally?