VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
For the past eight years, the political strength of Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, has rested on what seemed an unbeatable combination -- a soaring economy that raised average incomes eightfold and a steady drive to consolidate control over government, media and business that stifled any meaningful opposition.
He’s an ethnic nationalist with a mystical sense of Russian destiny. Cold and pragmatic, he won’t play by the world’s rules.
"At the height of the crisis over Russia's invasion of Georgia last month, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin summoned the top executives of his nation's most influential newspapers and broadcasters to a private meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. The Kremlin controls much of the Russian media, and Putin occasionally meets with friendly groups of senior journalists to answer questions and guide news coverage. On Aug. 29, though, for the first time in five years, he also invited the editor in chief of Echo Moskvy, the only national radio station that routinely broadcasts opposition voices."
James Carville, campaign manager to President Bill Clinton back in 1992, put it with characteristic directness. "If there was a reincarnation," he said, "I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."
Can the United States and the West punish Vladimir Putin for his hot war on Georgia in a way that catches his attention? The answer is probably no.
Far from being a mystery and an enigma-to use Churchill's language-today's Russia now stands revealed as a bully, wrapped in nationalism and cloaked with its leader's arrogance. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's adventure in Georgia has produced shock and awe at the sight of tanks, planes and warships mobilized against a small neighbor. But Russia has always been a great mythmaker-from setting up Potemkin villages in the 18th century to fomenting great fear that Sovietism would conquer the world after 1945. Here are 10 of the biggest myths about today's Russia.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin's actions toward former Soviet states and his own democratic institutions make it difficult to create a Euro-Atlantic security community that includes Russia. Bold, daring and risky! Those words surely apply to John McCain and his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice- presidential running mate. But, ironically, they also apply to Vladimir Putin and the Russian response in Georgia. And, as in war, these words can lead to catastrophic disaster or to winning medals.
There is unlikely to be a thawing of relations with the west while Russia's prime minister has a say in the Caucasus crisis. If one man stands between the EU and a lasting resolution of the Caucasus crisis, that man is Vladimir Putin. As Europe's leaders struggled to agree a response to Georgia's enforced partition ahead of today's emergency summit in Brussels, Russia's gun-toting prime minister was pictured strutting across the Siberian taiga, wearing camouflage and a tough expression, doing his familiar "Action Man" impersonation.
Au Kremlin comme dans l’appareil d’Etat, c’est toujours Vladimir Poutine qu’on surnomme le « chef ». Et, dans la crise géorgienne, c’est le Premier ministre, et non Dmitri Medvedev, qui était à la manoeuvre.
Today's question: Russia is in the G-8 but not the World Trade Organization. Should membership in those bodies be contingent on Russia's behavior? Or is bringing Russia into those bodies the way to improve Moscow's behavior? Previously, Meier and Moynihan discussed NATO's eastward expansion and the extent to which Russia wants to exert control over former Soviet republics.
А specter is haunting Europe-the specter of Putinism. Confronted by a masterful Russian leader without living peer in brilliance or ruthlessness, the continent sorely lacks leadership and a sense of common purpose. In their muddled reactions to the Kremlin's invasion of Georgia, European states revealed a gap in perceptions that threatens to deepen: Those who suffered under the Soviet yoke sense the return of an existential threat, while those who thrived under the Pax Americana are merely annoyed at being disturbed. As Russian troops and their mercenary auxiliaries savaged a free, democratic country yearning Westward, the world got another lesson in how ineffectual Europe is in a crisis without American leadership.
One thing is for sure. This week's operation in Georgia has displayed the failure of the west's policy of belligerence towards Vladimir Putin's Russia. The policy was meant to weaken Russia, and has strengthened it. The policy was meant to humiliate Russia with Nato encirclement, and has merely fed its neo-imperialism. The policy was meant to show that Russia "understands only firmness" and instead has shown the west as a bunch of tough-talking windbags.
Vladimir Putin, who came to office brooding over the wounds of a humiliated Russia, this week offered proof of its resurgence. So far, the West has been unable to check his thrust into Georgia. He is making decisions that could redraw the map of the Caucasus in Russia's favor - or destroy relationships with Western powers that Russia once sought as strategic partners.
There's little doubt that Vladimir Putin still wears the trousers in the Kremlin. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's boyish new President, may technically be commander-in-chief of Russia's armed forces, but when the bullets began flying in South Ossetia last week, it was to Putin that Russia and the world looked for answers.
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, an all-but-unknown former KGB officer, as his successor. Putin imposed a discipline on Russia that had been absent since the Soviet Union's collapse, and he ushered in the beginnings of prosperity thanks in large part to a spike in global oil prices. But he also became one of Washington's harshest critics abroad and an autocratic ruler at home.
Vladimir Putin is no longer the leader of Russia but that appeared to make little difference in France yesterday when he was fêted as a head of state on his first official visit as Prime Minister.
Le nouveau chef du gouvernement, en visite en France pour son premier déplacement à l'étranger, garde les rênes du pouvoir.
