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
Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, said yesterday that the irresponsibility of America's financial system was to blame for the global economic crisis, in what marks the latest episode in increasingly hostile relations between the two superpowers.
Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.
Russia is suffering its own bitter version of financial turmoil, partly because of the summer of antagonism led by Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister. Yesterday Russia suspended its stock market for the fourth day in a fortnight, to try to stem falling share prices. The move headed off a rout, although investors have been fleeing for four months and the market is down by more than half since May.
Il n'est bruit en Europe que d'une nouvelle guerre froide. Au raidissement moscovite répond le raidissement des chancelleries occidentales. Au-delà des discours exaltés et approximatifs sur la nouvelle puissance impériale russe, la question posée par les développements russo-géorgiens demeure pourtant celle de l'intégration - inachevée - du monde ex-soviétisé dans ce que Mikhaïl Gorbatchev nommait la "communauté des nations civilisées".
By rights, this year's Sochi Economic Forum should have been a victory lap for Vladimir Putin. Russia's president turned prime minister had just, in his own words, "punched the face" of upstart Georgia, and a year of record oil prices had boosted Russia's currency reserves to $700 billion.
Stock markets the world over have experienced a crush of losses and all-around volatility in recent days. Here we look at two of the most dramatic markets - those in the United States and Russia - where views of business and government could not be more different. While the U.S. Federal Reserve doesn't even pretend to think it could manage the entire economy by itself, the Russian system is predicated on government control born out of political and economic necessity.
Is Vladimir Putin a savior, a man whose eight-year reign has elevated Russia to new economic heights? Or is he a bully, a strongman who uses violence to maintain a hold on power? The likely answer is both.
The Russian government's $100bn-plus financial rescue plan has won a better reception from investors than Washington's $700bn proposal. Inter-bank lending rates have dropped sharply from last week's crisis levels and the rouble has recovered some lost ground. But, as Tuesday's Moscow stock market decline shows, the mood remains nervous with investors worried about financial stability in both Russia and the US.
"Da poco più d' un anno, la Tv russa manda in onda il pomeriggio e la sera un telegiornale in lingua inglese. Il telegiornale si chiama Russia today, ed è fatto, formalmente, piuttosto bene. Ariosa la scenografia, moderno il montaggio, e carine - anzi belle, una più bella dell' altra - le giornaliste che s' avvicendano nell' esposizione delle notizie. Confesso che le prime due sere a Mosca, la bellezza ed eleganza delle conduttrici di Russia today mi avevano così avvinto, distratto, da non farmi cogliere la sostanza giornalistica del programma."
In the course of the Valdai conference in Russia from September 7-14 we met with President Dmitri Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and Deputy Chief of the General Staff Anatoly Nogovitsyn. There was no significant difference between them in what they said about Russian policy and Russian views. Nor have such differences appeared outside the conference.
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.
