Putin, the Man & the President: Imprint from Russia to the World
Autocracy or Stability? What will the Russian President Vladimir Putin be known for long after he is no more in power?
The jury is out there.
Vladimir Putin is a Russian politician and former KGB intelligence officer currently serving as President of Russia today for nearly two decades. Elected to his current and fourth presidential term in March 2018, Putin has led the Russian Federation as either its prime minister, acting president, or president since 1999. Long considered an equal of the President of the United States in holding one of the world’s most powerful public offices, Putin has aggressively exerted Russia’s influence and political policy around the world.
US in virtual tie with Russia on global confidence, poll finds
A new Gallup poll measuring opinion in 133 countries and areas in 2018 found the US and Russia neck and neck, with 31% saying they approve of the leadership of the US, and 30% approval for Russia. It’s the first time the countries have been close to equal footing. China, meanwhile, beat both, with a 34% approval rating for its leadership skills, and Germany led the pack at 39%.
Russia’s image made particular gains in countries such as Turkey and Iran, the poll shows. The poll was based on interviews with about 1,000 people in each of the countries surveyed from March through December 2018.
‘Near Abroad’:
The “near abroad” just got a little nearer. The Ukrainian conflict has ruptured relations between Russia and the west, but in fact it is merely the latest example of Putin asserting Russia’s “rights” in its former backyard, known in Russia as “the near abroad”. Those who were surprised by Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the subsequent Russian-fuelled conflict in eastern Ukraine should have remembered: he set the mould for the “Putin doctrine” in Georgia. Russia would use troops to protect its interests in a sphere of influence increasingly hemmed in by Nato’s advance. The US blinked first.
A series of so-called colour revolutions in the post-Soviet states, namely the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, led to frictions in the relations of those countries with Russia.
The plans of Georgia and Ukraine to become members of NATO have caused some tensions between Russia and those states. In 2010, Ukraine did abandon these plans. Putin allegedly declared at a NATO-Russia summit in 2008 that if Ukraine joined NATO Russia could contend to annex the Ukrainian East and Crimea. Following the Ukrainian revolution in March 2014, the Russian Federation annexed Crimea. According to Putin this was done because “Crimea has always been and remains an inseparable part of Russia”.
Putin has made a huge statement in global affairs through Russian role in Syrian crisis with full support to the incumbent President Bashar.
On 30 September 2015, President Putin authorized Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War, following a formal request by the Syrian government for military help against rebel and jihadist groups.
The Russian military activities consisted of air strikes, cruise missile strikes and the use of front line advisors and Russian special forces against militant groups opposed to the Syrian government. After Putin’s announcement on 14 March 2016 that the mission he had set for the Russian military in Syria had been “largely accomplished” and ordered the withdrawal of the “main part” of the Russian forces from Syria, Russian forces deployed in Syria continued to actively operate in support of the Syrian government.
How has Putin changed Russia of Today?
Days before he was elected to the Russian presidency in 2000, Vladimir Putin told the BBC that Russia was “part of European culture” and that he “would not rule out” the possibility of it joining Nato.
But, a generation later, Russia has changed beyond all recognition from the chaotic, open free-for-all it was under Yeltsin. Internationally it faces isolation, sanctions, a new cold war even. At home, despite economic decline Putin enjoys perhaps the highest popularity rating of any Kremlin leader – an approval rating that topped 86% some three years ago.
Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Putin has made a huge impact on his country and the world. He has moved across diverse stands: in Ukraine, Georgia and ‘near abroad’, through his later opposition to NATO, with his alleged autocracy creating a cult of personality with crackdowns on opposition, and with dependency on propaganda and military, harbouring new found sporting prestige, but also making Russia a significant force in a multi-polar world and becoming a pivot of Asia in spite of being an European nation.
The Macho Personality Cult:
While Putin may have flip-flopped on economic issues, he has consistently moved toward greater consolidation of his own power. In 2004, he signed a law allowing the president to appoint regional governors, a privilege he mostly retains despite reforms prompted by street protests in 2011-12. Putin’s famous “castling” with Dmitry Medvedev allowed him to return to the presidency in 2012. In the meantime, Russian parliament had passed a law in extending the presidential term from four to six years. The 2018 Russian presidential election was held on 18 March 2018. Incumbent Vladimir Putin won the re-election for his second consecutive (fourth overall) term in office and now his time in power has surpassed that of Leonid Brezhnev – 18 years – and even Joseph Stalin.
Putin has given the Russians something much more in keeping with the macho spirit of the Russian muzhik: a horse-riding, bare-chested, tiger-wrestling, clean living, straight-talking action man. At least, that’s what his image makers have done for him.
It’s the economy, finally:
When Putin arrived in office, Russia was just emerging from the disastrous market reforms of the 1990s and the 1998 financial crisis. The new president had no grand economic vision: while he slashed taxes to benefit business, he also re-nationalised key sectors, starting with the breakup of political foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos oil company in 2003. Nonetheless, unused manufacturing capacity and rising prices for oil, Russia’s main export, helped usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity that Putin is still remembered for, with real disposable income doubling between 1999 and 2006.
The global financial crisis brought this growth crashing to a halt. While oil wealth had stimulated growth, little progress had been made in diversifying the economy or modernising Russia’s industries. Even before oil prices dropped and western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis came into effect in 2014, economists were predicting long-term stagnation.
Sanctions as well as falling oil prices have hurt the Russian economy. Putin has his country on his side, for now, and has achieved his strategic aims, but not without some cost.
Always a vocal proponent of a multipolar world, Putin has shifted in recent years toward greater economic and military cooperation with Asian countries, whose growing economies are hungry for Russia’s energy and whose governments are less judgmental of its human rights record. He brokered two huge deals to supply China with gas, one worth $400bn for which he is building a pipeline through 2,500 miles of mountains, swamps and seismic hotspots. He’s also exporting Russian railroad technology to North Korea, which in the meantime has been opening quasi-slave-labour logging and farming camps in Russia’s far east.
Putin’s foreign moves appeared to produce significant dividends at home, as his popular approval rating consistently remained above 80 percent in spite of Russia’s sluggish economy and endemic government corruption. Low oil prices and Western sanctions compounded an already grim financial outlook as foreign investors remained reluctant to put their capital at risk in a land where personal ties to Putin were seen as more important than the rule of law. Even after Russia emerged from seven consecutive quarters of recession, both wages and consumer spending remained stagnant in 2017. These and other domestic problems seemed to do little to dent Putin’s image; among those expressing concern for such issues in opinion polls, blame was most often affixed to Putin’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev.
Population growth?
Putin took over a country whose population was falling at an alarming rate. Russia – a population of about 150 million people at time of the fall of the Soviet Union – was losing people at a rate of almost a million a year, a combination of a reluctance to procreate and a proclivity, from men at least, to die young.
But the decline gradually bottomed out, and in 2010 the population started growing again. The secret to this reversal was largely economic: as their financial situation improved during Putin’s reign, Russians began having more children. According to the state statistics service, the country now has more than 146 million people, up from 142 million in 2008. Even if you don’t count the 2.2 million people it gained by annexing Crimea, it’s still a positive trend.
Crackdown
With the imprisonment of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the assassinations of several prominent opposition voices, Putin’s Russia was already a place where dissent was not particularly welcome.
But the pivotal moment came during the winter of 2011-12. Rolling opposition protests briefly threatened an Arab spring of sorts in Moscow. Putin moved quickly. A slew of criminal cases on dubious charges were opened against anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and 27 protesters from the May 2012 Bolotnaya Square rally. Since Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012, new laws have raised the fines for those taking part in protests ‘not sanctioned by the authorities’ to as much as 1m roubles (£13,000) or up to five years of forced labour or prison for repeat violations.
Amid growing patriotic fervour and rhetoric about traitors– Putin suggested in December that opposition members could be part of a “fifth column” undermining the country – the popular opposition movement is all but dead. Symbolically, one of its leading voices, former deputy PM Boris Nemtsov, was assassinated in front of the Kremlin.
In Putin’s third term, authorities have also tightened the screws on non-governmental organisations that receive funding from abroad, whom Putin has previously disparaged as “jackals” and traitors. According to a 2012 law, such groups must label themselves “foreign agents” in their publications and submit to audits, with stiff fines for failure to meet these onerous requirements.
Once an oasis of free speech, the Russian internet is now subject to vague laws that allow the government’s communications watchdog to block sites deemed to publish “extremist” material or content harmful to children. As a result, several major opposition sites were blacklisted in 2013. According to a 2014 law, popular bloggers must now register their true identities with the state and face potential libel suits.
The crackdown has, of course, extended to the Chechen separatists whose destruction was Putin’s first real claim to leadership fame. His campaign against the Islamic insurgency in the wider North Caucasus region has led to a reduction in violence – but also to a litany of human rights abuses.
‘Moralistic’ vision & Soviet Past:
Putin’s third term has also seen a wave of legislation inspired by his vision of Russia as a bastion of traditional morals. The most egregious example was the 2013 ban on gay propaganda, which LGBT rights activists say has contributed to a rise in homophobic harassment in the country, including vigilante group violence.
Under Putin, the second world war has become a patriotic rallying point, and a 2014 law criminalises the “distortion” of the Soviet Union’s role in the war. Other legislation imposed fines for the use of expletives on television, radio and in films shown in theatres, drawing criticism from musicians and directors.
Putin’s presidency also witnessed a change in the way Russians viewed the Soviet past. During Putin’s tenure, aspects of the Soviet period—for example, the victory in World War II, Russia’s superpower status, and even the Stalinist period—were again glorified (Stalin was described in one teaching manual as “the most successful leader of the U.S.S.R.”), and this dualism was reflected in the country’s symbols.
A multipolar world?
The charitable view of Putin’s foreign policy is that he stands up to western hegemony and, with China, acts as a balance to the overweening military and political power of the US. However, while the Russian president can plausibly claim to have history on his side in opposing Washington over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, his stance on Syria and unwavering support for Bashar al-Assad has been open to greater criticism.
It’s not all about opposition. Putin’s diplomats have worked constructively with international allies and adversaries to help bring Iran in from the cold, and – until recently at least – to work at further nuclear arms reductions.
Under Putin, the Anglo-Russian relationship has turned into a paradox: at the same time as official relations hit new, icy depths over espionage and murder, record numbers of Russians and their cash were flooding west – and London was their favourite second home.
Oligarchs parked their kids in swanky schools, listed their companies on the stock market and bought football clubs, some perhaps as an insurance policy, others because it became ultra-fashionable. But London also became a bolthole for the out of favour, home to an entire dissident community of anti-Putinistas, further straining relations between London and Moscow.
New-found sporting prestige
The Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 were a triumph for Putin, who had campaigned aggressively to host the event. Russia won the medal count with 13 golds, and no major security breaches or organisational embarrassments marred the event. Joined by faded action star Steven Seagal, Putin later presided over a Formula One race held on a course built around the Olympic park, and in 2018, the country hosted the Fifa World Cup.
Corruption
Under Putin’s leadership, Russia has scored poorly in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index and experienced democratic back sliding according to both the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index (including a record low 20/100 rating in the 2017 Freedom in the World report, a rating not given since the time of the Soviet Union). Experts do not generally consider Russia to be a democracy, citing the lack of free and fair elections, purges and jailing of opponents, and curtailed press freedom. Human rights organizations and activists have accused Putin of persecuting political critics and activists, as well as ordering them tortured or assassinated; he has rejected accusations of human rights abuses.
In 2014, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project named Putin their Person of the Year Award for furthering corruption and organized crime.
It has been seen that many state-backed huge sporting and other events involving huge construction projects have been a goldmine for crooked officials in Russia. Nemtsov, who had written a scathing report on the preparations for the Sochi Olympics, estimated that $30bn of the record $50bn spent on the games had been lost to corruption.
Despite a state campaign against corruption, Putin’s Russia has failed to shake off accusations of being fundamentally dishonest. In 2014, Russia was ranked 136 out of 175 in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index, down from 127 in 2013 and 133 in 2012. The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project also named Putin its “person of the year” after its investigations found that he had engaged with the mafia to create what it called a “military-industrial-political-criminal” complex to launder money and promote his interests abroad, including in the transfer of weapons to rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Although little information is available on his personal wealth, many expect that Putin himself has benefited from state corruption. Allegations have swirled for years that an extravagant palace being built on the Black Sea coast – reportedly guarded by the presidential secret service and now owned by a Putin confidant – secretly belongs to him and was paid for with embezzled funds. There are various estimates of his personal wealth: from $40 billion by a Kremlin insider to $200 billion by Western estimates.
New propaganda
Even as independent media found themselves on the run, Putin appointed Dmitry Kiselyov, a television presenter known for his anti-American conspiracy theories, head of the state news agency Rossiya Segodnya. In this post, Kiselyov has overseen an expansion of Sputnik News and Russia Today, which peddle the Kremlin’s talking points in foreign languages. While state-backed news outlets are nothing new, the Kremlin’s new propagandistic media have been criticised for their journalistic standards. The UK media regulator Ofcom threatened RT with sanctions over news reports that failed to comply with impartiality rules.
Critical Biography: The Man without a Face:
The Moscow journalist Masha Gessen pulls no punches in her biography of Vladimir Putin, The Man Without a Face. With opposition virtually non-existent, and having extended the presidential term from four to six years, Putin could occupy the post until 2024, making him the longest-lasting leader since Stalin.
Masha Gessen, however, believes that even as he consolidates his power, Russia is seeing the first signs of the inevitable fall of what she describes as ‘this small and vengeful man’. The tumultuous events of a long lost December of 2011, when tens of thousands took to the streets of Moscow and cities across Russia in the biggest anti-government rallies since the fall of the Soviet Union, were the harbinger of what she describes as ‘a revolution’.
The catalyst for the protests was alleged vote-rigging in the parliamentary elections on December 4, 2011, which was won by Putin’s United Russia party. But they spoke of a deeper anger about the concentration of wealth and political power in Putin’s Russia, and the pervasive corruption that accompanies it.
Putin, she writes, was ‘a faceless man’ promoted by people who wanted to ‘invent’ a president. But that plan was subverted by the man himself and the secret-police apparatus that formed him and continues to sustain him. Rather than being the safe-holder of a new era of democracy, as his sponsors had hoped, Putin has turned Russia into ‘a supersize model of the KGB’, where there can be no room for dissent or even independent action.
A Pen-picture of Putin’s Life:
Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), a city still traumatised by the effects of the Second World War.
His father had fought with the special forces, operating behind German lines, returning home severely disabled and finding work as a skilled labourer. His mother, who had almost died of starvation during the siege of the city by the Nazis, worked in a series of backbreaking jobs. They had lost two children before Putin was born.
The young Putin was a tearaway, ‘a real thug’, as he would later boast to his official biographers, often scrapping in the courtyard of the overcrowded apartment building where the family lived.
Joining the KGB, he was sent to spy school in Moscow and then dispatched to Dresden in what was then East Germany, tasked with cultivating future undercover agents among foreign students. The Soviet Union was in the first throes of perestroika, as Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the reins on Soviet bloc countries and sowed seeds of resentment among the KGB leadership and rank-and-file.
He would not return home until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Putin returned to St Petersburg, where he became assistant to the mayor, while continuing in the KGB. For all the reforms that were taking place in Russia, St Petersburg, was ‘a state within a state’: a place where the KGB remained all-powerful, where local politicians and journalists had their phones tapped, and the murder of major political and business players was a regular occurrence.
‘In other words, very much like Russia itself would become within a few years, once it came to be ruled by the people who ruled St Petersburg in the 1990s.’
In 1996 Putin went to Moscow to work at the Kremlin, rising to be head of the FSB (Federal Security Service) the successor to the KGB. It was here that he came into the orbit of Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had become the first president of the new Russian Federation in 1991 and had been re-elected for a second term in 1996, but he was slipping into a state of sorry decline. His health was failing, his behaviour increasingly erratic – most people assumed as a result of his heavy drinking.
Foremost in the dwindling circle of Yeltsin’s allies and supporters known as ‘the family’ was the oligarch Boris Berezovsky; indeed, many believed Berezovsky to be the real power behind Yeltsin’s throne. Berezovsky began to vigorously promote Putin, among ‘the family’ and to Yeltsin himself. He would remember Yeltsin’s reaction on meeting Putin: ‘He seems all right,’ the president said of his putative successor, ‘but he’s kind of small.’ In August 1999 Yeltsin appointed Putin as the prime minister.
Putin, was ‘a grey, ordinary man’ with no articulated political vision and no identifiable political ambition, on to whom everybody could project whatever they wished to see in him. Berezovsky, who had thrown his Channel One television station behind Putin, believed that ‘being devoid of personality and personal interest’, he would be both malleable and disciplined.
The Foundation for Effective Politics, the organisation set up to promote Putin, was made up primarily of young, idealistic liberals who were prepared to overlook his KGB past. ‘The reason the ground was primed for him was that people needed to feel a sort of limited nostalgia for the Soviet Union, and someone who was very sure of what he was doing and saying. Everyone was tired of Yeltsin, his erratic behaviour, his total unpredictability, the fact that he was a total embarrassment on the international stage.’
Putin was promoted as a young, energetic leader – a man who ‘wore good European suits and spoke a foreign language’, who would shepherd Russia into a bright future of economic reform and stable democracy, but also a strong man who could solve the country’s domestic problems and restore its international standing.
Within weeks of his appointment as prime minister Putin had demonstrated just how decisive he could be. In September 1999 Russia was shocked by a series of bombings of apartment blocks that killed more than 300 people and left more than 1,900 injured. The bombings were immediately blamed on Chechen terrorists – and provided an opportunity for Putin to demonstrate his credentials as a strong leader.
On September 23 a group of 24 governors – more than a quarter of the federation – had written to Yeltsin asking him to yield power to Putin. The same day, Yeltsin issued a secret decree authorising the army to resume combat in Chechnya, and Russian planes began bombing the capital, Grozny. The following day Putin issued his own order authorising Russian troops to engage in combat and made one of his first television appearances, promising to hunt down the terrorists: ‘Even if we find them in the toilet. We will rub them out in the outhouse.’
He introduced laws that effectively abolished elections to the upper house of parliament, and appointed presidential envoys to become overseers of elected regional governors. In 2004, in his second term as president, he changed the law so that governors were directly appointed by the Kremlin. Though later it was reversed partially.
Then he moved on his old ally Berezovsky. The man who had helped to make Putin had fallen out with him almost as soon as Putin became president, attacking his constitutional reforms and using his tele¬vision station, Channel One, to criticise Putin over his handling of the Kursk submarine disaster in August 2000.
After clashing with Putin, Berezovsky was obliged to flee to France, and then to Britain, where he now lives. A warrant for his arrest was filed in Russia and his shares in Channel One appropriated by the state. Within a year of Putin coming to office, all three federal television networks would be under state control.
In a sense, Putin’s methods are in a long and ignoble tradition of Russian politics: to operate from a sense of seizure and to exercise fear among adversaries. He is the heir to the great Russian tradition of “we are a country under siege” poli¬tical rhetoric, which has been used throughout Russian history.
Putin has created a Russia where there is no meaningful opposition. The candidates who run against him in elections are generally regarded as toothless, or in the case of Mikhail Prokhorov, the multi-millionaire businessman, widely dismissed as a Kremlin stooge.
Gessen believes the only opposition figure with any credibility or authority is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who was languishing in a penal colony near the Chinese border.
Khodorkovsky made his fortune from banking and from the oil company Yukos, which he acquired for $300 million in 1995 when Yeltsin began auctioning off state assets – a red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalist whose creed was expressed in a book that he co-authored in 1992, Man With a Rouble.
But having become the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky began to display a social conscience. He established an education foundation, Open Russia, funded training for journalists, and began to speak out against corruption. Khodorkovsky left for America on a business trip, but then returned, despite warnings that he would soon be arrested, and began a speaking tour, giving talks about business, democracy and the need for ‘a civil society’ in Russia. In October 2003 he was arrested, and 18 months later, he was indicted on charges of fraud and tax evasion, and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment. In 2009 he was found guilty of a new set of charges, of stealing his own oil, and sentenced again – to 14 years. Many describe Khodorkovsky as ‘the Nelson Mandela of Russia.
Putin commemorated the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the post-Soviet constitution in December 2013 by ordering the release of some 25,000 individuals from Russian prisons. In a separate move, he granted a pardon to Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He lives in self exile in Switzerland.
First Presidency: 2000 to 2004:
On March 26, 2000, Putin was elected to his first of three terms as President of the Russian Federation winning 53 percent of the vote.
Shortly after his inauguration on May 7, 2000, Putin faced the first challenge to his popularity over claims that he had mishandled his response to the Kursk submarine disaster. He was widely criticized for his refusal to return from vacation and visit the scene for over two weeks. October 23, 2002, as many as 50 armed Chechens, claiming allegiance to the Chechnya Islamist separatist movement, took 850 people hostage in Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater. An estimated 170 people died in the controversial special-forces gas attack that ended the crisis. While the press suggested that Putin’s heavy-handed response to the attack would damage his popularity, polls showed over 85 percent of Russians approved of his actions.
Next Putting clamped down even harder on the Chechen separatists, canceling previously announced plans to withdraw 80,000 Russian troops from Chechnya and promising to take “measures adequate to the threat” in response to future terrorist attacks. In November, Putin directed Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov to order sweeping attacks against Chechen separatists throughout the breakaway republic.
Putin’s harsh military policies succeeded in at least stabilizing the situation in Chechnya. Though Putin’s actions greatly diminished the Chechen rebel movement, they failed to end the Second Chechen War, and sporadic rebel attacks continued in the northern Caucasus region.
During the majority of his first term, Putin concentrated on improving the failing Russian economy, in part by negotiating a “grand bargain” with the Russian business oligarchs who had controlled the nation’s wealth since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Under the bargain, the oligarchs would retain most of their power, in return for supporting—and cooperating with—Putin’s government.
According to financial observers at the time, Putin made it clear to the oligarchs that they would prosper if they played by the Kremlin rules. Indeed, Radio Free Europe reported in 2005 that the number of Russian business tycoons had greatly increased during Putin’s time in power, often aided by their personal relationships with him.
During his first presidency, the Russian economy grew for eight straight years, and GDP measured in purchasing power increased by 72%. The growth was a result of the 2000s commodities boom, recovery from the post-Communist depression, financial crises, prudent economic and fiscal policies.
Second Presidential Term 2004 to 2008
On March 14, 2004, Putin was easily re-elected to the presidency, this time winning 71 percent of the vote.
During his second term as president, Putin focused on undoing the social and economic damage suffered by the Russian people during the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union, an event he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the Twentieth Century.” In 2005, he launched the National Priority Projects designed to improve health care, education, housing, and agriculture in Russia.
In 2007, Other Russia, a group opposed to Putin led by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, organized a series of “Dissenters’ Marches” to protest Putin’s policies and practices. Marches in several cities resulted in the arrests of some 150 protestors who tried to penetrate police lines.
In the December 2007 elections, the equivalent of the U.S. mid-term congressional election, Putin’s United Russia party easily retained control of the State Duma, indicating the Russian people’s continued support for him and his policies. A Kremlin-appointed election commission concluded that not only had the election been fair, but it had also proven the “stability” of the Russian political system.
Second Premiership 2008 to 2012
With Putin barred by the Russian Constitution from seeking a third consecutive presidential term, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was elected president. However, on May 8, 2008, the day after Medvedev’s inauguration, Putin was appointed Prime Minister of Russia. Under the Russian system of government, the president and the prime minister share responsibilities as the head of state and head of the government, respectively. Thus, as prime minister, Putin retained his dominance over the country’s political system.
In September 2001, Medvedev proposed to the United Russia Congress in Moscow, that Putin should run for the presidency again in 2012, an offer Putin happily accepted.
Third Presidential Term 2012 to 2018
On March 4, 2012, Putin won the presidency for a third time with 64 percent of the vote. Amid public protests and accusations that he had rigged the election, he was inaugurated on May 7, 2012, immediately appointing former President Medvedev as prime minister. After successfully quelling protests against the election process, often by having marchers jailed, Putin proceeded to make sweeping—if controversial—changes to Russia’s domestic and foreign policy.
In December 2012, Putin signed a law prohibiting the adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens. Intended to ease the adoption of Russian orphans by Russian citizens, the law stirred international criticism, especially in the United States.
The following year, Putin again strained his relationship with the U.S. by granting asylum to Edward Snowden, who remains wanted in the United States for leaking classified information he gathered as a contractor for the National Security Agency on the WikiLeaks website. In response, U.S. President Barack Obama canceled a long-planned August 2013 meeting with Putin.
In December 2017, Putin announced he would seek a six-year—rather than four-year—term as president in July, running this time as an independent candidate, cutting his old ties with the United Russia party.
After a bomb exploded in a crowded Saint Petersburg food market on December 27, injuring dozens of people, Putin revived his popular “tough on terror” tone just before the election. He stated that he had ordered Federal Security Service officers to “take no prisoners” when dealing with terrorists.
In his annual address to the Duma in March 2018, just days before the election, Putin claimed that the Russian military had perfected nuclear missiles with “unlimited range” that would render NATO anti-missile systems “completely worthless.” While U.S. officials expressed doubts about their reality, Putin’s claims and saber-rattling tone ratcheted up tensions with the West but nurtured renewed feelings of national pride among Russian voters.
Falling oil prices coupled with international sanctions imposed at the beginning of 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military intervention in Eastern Ukraine led to GDP shrinking by 3.7% in 2015, though the Russian economy rebounded in 2016 with 0.3% GDP growth and is officially out of the recession.
During Putin’s third presidential term, allegations arose in the United States that the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
A combined U.S. intelligence community report released in January 2017 found “high confidence” that Putin himself had ordered a media-based “influence campaign” intended to harm the American public’s perception of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, thus improving the electoral chances of eventual election winner, Republican Donald Trump. In addition, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating whether officials of the Trump campaign organization colluded with high ranking Russian officials to influence the election.
While both Putin and Trump have repeatedly denied the allegations, the social media website Facebook admitted in October 2017 that political ads purchased by Russian organizations had been seen by at least 126 million Americans during the weeks leading up to the election.
Fourth Presidential Term 2018
On March 18, 2018, Putin was easily elected to a fourth term as President of Russia, winning more than 76 percent of the vote in an election that saw 67 percent of all eligible voters cast ballots. Despite the opposition to his leadership that had surfaced during his third term, his closest competitor in the election garnered only 13 percent of the vote. Shortly after officially taking office on May 7, Putin announced that in compliance with the Russian Constitution, he would not seek re-election in 2024.
On July 16, 2018, Putin met with U.S. President Donald Trump in Helsinki, Finland, in what was called the first of a series of meetings between the two world leaders. While no official details of their private 90-minute meeting were published, Putin and Trump would later reveal in press conferences that they had discussed the Syrian civil war and its threat to the safety of Israel, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the extension of the START nuclear weapons reduction treaty.
Personal Life
Vladimir Putin married Lyudmila Shkrebneva on July 28, 1983. From 1985 to 1990, the couple lived in East Germany where they gave birth to their two daughters, Mariya Putina and Yekaterina Putina. On June 6, 2013, Putin announced the end of the marriage. Their divorce became official on April 1, 2014, according to the Kremlin. An avid outdoorsman, Putin publicly promotes sports, including skiing, cycling, fishing, and horseback riding as a healthy way of life for the Russian people.
A member of the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin recalls the time his mother gave him his baptismal cross, telling him to get it blessed by a Bishop and wear it for his safety. “I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since,” he once recalled.
Putin’s Policy Overview:
Domestic policies
Putin’s domestic policies, particularly early in his first presidency, were aimed at creating a vertical power structure. On 13 May 2000, he issued a decree putting the 89 federal subjects of Russia into seven administrative federal districts and appointed a presidential envoy responsible for each of those districts (whose official title is Plenipotentiary Representative).
According to Stephen White, under the presidency of Putin, Russia made it clear that it had no intention of establishing a “second edition” of the American or British political system, but rather a system that was closer to Russia’s own traditions and circumstances. According to the proponents of that description, the government’s actions and policies ought above all to enjoy popular support within Russia itself and not be directed or influenced from outside the country.
In July 2000, according to a law proposed by Putin and approved by the Federal Assembly of Russia, Putin gained the right to dismiss the heads of the 89 federal subjects. In 2004, the direct election of those heads (usually called “governors”) by popular vote was replaced with a system whereby they would be nominated by the president and approved or disapproved by regional legislatures. This was seen by Putin as a necessary move to stop separatist tendencies and get rid of those governors who were connected with organised crime. In 2012, as proposed by Putin’s successor, Dmitry Medvedev, the direct election of governors was re-introduced.
Putin succeeded in codifying land law and tax law and promulgated new codes on labor, administrative, criminal, commercial and civil procedural law. Under Medvedev’s presidency, Putin’s government implemented some key reforms in the area of state security, the Russian police reform and the Russian military reform.
Putin’s One Weapon: The ‘Intelligence State’
Russia’s leader has restored the role its intelligence agencies had in the Soviet era — keep citizens in check and destabilize foreign adversaries.
The history of the brutal Soviet security services KGB lays bare the roots of Russia’s current use of political arrests, subversion, disinformation, assassination, espionage and the weaponization of lies. None of those tactics is new to the Kremlin.
In fact, those tactics made Soviet Russia the world’s first “intelligence state,” and they also distinguished it from authoritarian states run by militaries. Today’s Russia has become even more of an intelligence state after Putin’s almost 20-year tenure as its strongman. A decade after the Soviet Union fell, Putin rose to power and recruited many of his former K.G.B. colleagues to help rebuild the state. The result is a regime with the policies and philosophy of a supercharged secret police service, a regime that relies on intelligence operations to deal with foreign policy challenges and maintain control at home.
Assassination, too, is nothing new. When he arrived in the West, Stalin’s secretary Bajanov had explained long back that the Soviet leadership would send assassins to kill anyone who knew the true nature of the Kremlin’s inner workings. This practice has continued. The unsuccessful 2018 Russian attempt to murder Sergei Skripal in Britain is almost indistinguishable from the Cold War K.G.B. assassination of the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera in 1959. Assassins covertly tracked Bandera to his Munich address and used a K.G.B.-manufactured gun that sprayed poison to make Bandera’s death appear to have been a heart attack. It was only a K.G.B. assassin’s eventual defection years later that revealed the truth.
Economic, industrial, and energy policies
Fuelled by the 2000s commodities boom including record high oil prices, under the Putin administration from 2001 to 2007, the economy made real gains of an average 7% per year, making it the 7th largest economy in the world in purchasing power. In 2007, Russia’s GDP exceeded that of Russian SFSR in 1990, having recovered from the 1998 financial crisis and the preceding recession in the 1990s.
During Putin’s first twelve years in office, industry grew substantially, as did production, construction, real incomes, credit, and the middle class. Putin has also been praised for eliminating widespread barter and thus boosting the economy. Inflation remained a problem however.
A fund for oil revenue allowed Russia to repay all of the Soviet Union’s debts by 2005. Russia joined the World Trade Organization on 22 August 2012.
Under Putin, Russia is a major exporter of oil and gas to much of Europe. Control over the economy was increased by placing individuals from the intelligence services and the military in key positions of the Russian economy, including on boards of large companies. In 2005, an industry consolidation programme was launched to bring the main aircraft producing companies under a single umbrella organization, the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC).
A program was introduced with the aim of increasing Russia’s share of the European energy market by building submerged gas pipelines bypassing Ukraine and other countries which were often seen as non-reliable transit partners by Russia, especially following the Russia-Ukraine gas disputes of the late 2000s. Russia also undermined the rival Nabucco pipeline project by buying gas from Turkmenistan and redirecting it into Russian pipelines.
Russia diversified its export markets by building the Trans-Siberian oil pipeline to support oil exports to China, Japan and Korea, as well as the Sakhalin–Khabarovsk–Vladivostok gas pipeline in the Russian Far East. Russia has also recently built several major oil and gas refineries, plants and ports. Major hydropower plants such as the Bureya Dam and the Boguchany Dam have been constructed, as well as the restoration of the nuclear industry of Russia, with 1 trillion rubles ($42.7 billion) which were allocated from the federal budget to nuclear power and industry development before 2015. A large number of nuclear power stations and units are currently being constructed by the state corporation Rosatom in Russia and abroad.
On 21 May 2014, Russia and China signed a $400 billion gas deal. A construction program of floating nuclear power plants is intended to provide power to Russian Arctic coastal cities and gas rigs, starting in 2012. The Arctic policy of Russia also includes an offshore oilfield in the Pechora Sea which is expected to start producing in early 2012, with the world’s first ice-resistant oil platform and first offshore Arctic platform. In August 2011 Rosneft, a Russian government-operated oil company, signed a deal with ExxonMobil for Arctic oil production. The construction of a pipeline at a cost of $77 billion, to be jointly funded by Russia and China, was signed off on by Putin in Shanghai on 21 May 2014. On completion, in an estimated 4 to 6 years, the pipeline would deliver natural gas from the state-majority-owned Gazprom to China’s state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation for the next 30 years, in a deal worth $400bn.
As noted by Russian journalists after the 2018 presidential inauguration, Putin has since 2007 repeatedly predicted that Russia will become “one of the world’s five largest economies” roughly within 10 years from that date; thus far this target has not been achieved.
Environmental policy
In 2004, President Putin signed the Kyoto Protocol treaty designed to reduce greenhouse gases. However, Russia did not face mandatory cuts, because the Kyoto Protocol limits emissions to a percentage increase or decrease from 1990 levels and Russia’s greenhouse-gas emissions fell well below the 1990 baseline due to a drop in economic output after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Putin personally supervises a number of protection programmes for rare and endangered animals in Russia, such as the Amur Tiger, the White Whale, the polar bearand the Snow Leopard.
Military development & reforms
While from the early 2000s Russia started placing more money into its military and defense industry, it was only in 2008 that the full-scale Russian military reform began, aiming to modernize Russian Armed Forces and making them significantly more effective. The reform was largely carried out by Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov during Medvedev’s Presidency, under the supervision of both Putin, as the Head of Government, and Medvedev, as the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces.
Putin inherited an army that was not fit for purpose. During his second term, he set out to reform the outdated conscript-based army, a process that only quickened after its unconvincing victory in the Georgian war. Russia now spends a higher percentage of its GDP on defence than the United States, and has allocated a record $81bn in 2015.
Key elements of the military reform under Putin included reducing the armed forces to a strength of one million; reducing the number of officers; centralising officer training from 65 military schools into 10 ‘systemic’ military training centres; creating a professional NCO corps; reducing the size of the central command; introducing more civilian logistics and auxiliary staff; elimination of cadre-strength formations; reorganising the reserves; reorganising the army into a brigade system, and reorganising air forces into an air base system instead of regiments.
The number of Russia’s military districts was reduced to four. The term of draft service was reduced from two years to one, which put an end to the old harassment traditions in Russian army, since all conscripts became very close by draft age. The gradual transition to the majority professional army by the late 2010s was announced, and a large programme of supplying the Armed Forces with new military equipment and ships was started. The Russian Space Forces were replaced on 1 December 2011 with the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces.
After U.S. President George W. Bush withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Putin responded by ordering a build-up of Russia’s nuclear capabilities, designed to counterbalance U.S. capabilities. Most analysts agree that Russia’s nuclear strategy under Putin eventually brought it into violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Because of this, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would no longer consider itself bound by the treaty’s provisions, raising nuclear tensions between the two powers. This prompted Putin to state that Russia would not launch first in a nuclear conflict but would “annihilate” any adversary. Most military analysts believe Russia would consider launching first if losing a major conventional conflict as part of an ‘escalate to de-escalate’ strategy that would bring adversaries to the negotiating table.
Putin has also sought to increase Russian territorial claims in the Arctic and its military presence here. Both Russian submarines and troops deployed in the Arctic have been increasing.
Human rights policy & the Media:
Since May 2012, when Putin was re-elected as president, Russia has enacted many restrictive laws, started inspections of non-governmental organizations, harassed, intimidated, and imprisoned political activists, and started to restrict critics. The new laws include the “foreign agents” law, which is widely regarded as over-broad by including Russian human rights organizations which receive some international grant funding, the treason law, and the assembly law which penalizes many expressions of dissent. The human rights activists have criticized Russia for censoring speech of LGBT activists due to “the gay propaganda law”and increasing violence against LGBT+ people due to the law.
Scott Gehlbach, an American Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has claimed that since 1999, Putin has reportedly punished journalists who challenge his official point of view. Maria Lipman, an American writing in Foreign Affairs (the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations), claims, “The crackdown that followed Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012 extended to the liberal media, which had until then been allowed to operate fairly independently.” The Internet has attracted Putin’s attention because his critics have tried to use it to challenge his control of information.
Reporters Without Borders, for instance, ranked Russia 148 in its 2013 list of 179 countries in terms of freedom of the press. It particularly criticized Russia for the crackdown on the political opposition and the failure of the authorities to vigorously pursue and bring to justice criminals who have murdered journalists. Freedom House ranks Russian media as “not free”, indicating that basic safeguards and guarantees for journalists and media enterprises are absent.
International sporting events
In 2007, Putin led a successful effort on behalf of Sochi (located along the Black Sea near the border between Georgia and Russia) for the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2014 Winter Paralympics, the first Winter Olympic Games to ever be hosted by Russia. Likewise, in 2008, the city of Kazan won the bid for the 2013 Summer Universiade, and on 2 December 2010 Russia won the right to host the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup and 2018 FIFA World Cup, also for the first time in Russian history. In 2013, Putin stated that gay athletes would not face any discrimination at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
Putin is chairman of the Russian Geographical Society’s board of trustees and is actively engaged in the protection of rare species. The programs are being conducted by the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Putin’s Pivot: 4 New Features of Russian Foreign Policy
Four key features characterize the current approach: risk taking, neglect of exit strategies, outsourcing and saber rattling. Although this hardly sounds like a recipe for success, it has worked quite well—at least in the short run.
Since 2014, however, a new Putin has emerged. Consider his contrasting responses to the Ukrainian crises of 2004 and 2014. As he sent commandos to occupy Crimea in 2014, Putin seemed almost to relish the prospect of military confrontation with the West. The risks were considerable. Annexation raised the stakes again, drastically limiting the scope for a negotiated resolution. Intervening in Syria was another roll of the dice. Russia risked sinking into the “quagmire,” of which President Obama warned. Before Putin acted, polls showed little enthusiasm among Russians for military involvement. Perhaps even more striking than Putin’s newly manifest appetite for risk is his willingness to keep raising the ante, piling one gamble on top of another. The Kremlin’s position is now vulnerable to chance events from the Donbas to Damascus, as well as to leaks about its various influence operations.
Putin seems to have adopted Napoleon’s famous motto: On s’engage partout, et puis l’on voit (“you start the fight and then you see”). Since 2014, Russia has plunged into a series of situations with inadequate preparation and no clear exit strategy.
The Crimean military operation was well-planned. But the political side was a mess. The repeated changes in the date and content of the referendum suggest Putin went in not having decided yet on the territory’s final status. In Syria, Russia’s operational objective was clear—to rescue Assad—but how to get out without prompting a collapse remains a puzzle. If he indeed authorized St. Petersburg trolls to infiltrate Western social networks, Putin opened another Pandora’s Box.
Crimea was not just a test of Russian military strategy; it also showed off the Kremlin’s increasing use of non-state groups and contractors. The Night Wolves biker gang and Cossack regiments mobilized to help the GRU troops. In eastern Ukraine, “volunteers” of all types streamed in to assist locals. The Kremlin has taken to outsourcing key foreign tasks to private individuals. One nationalist businessman, Konstantin Malofeev, has a broad portfolio. He reportedly financed mercenaries fighting alongside the Donbas separatists. Using unofficial actors aims to conceal Russia’s responsibility and circumvent bottlenecks and bureaucratic obstruction. However, it muddles lines of command and creates problems when such actors prove incompetent or go rogue. When Russian-supported fighters in the Donbas shot down a Malaysian passenger jet in 2014, it hardened European determination to impose major sanctions on Russia.
Before 2014, Putin often criticized the West, but he generally avoided actions or threats that might provoke unwelcome countermeasures. Since Crimea, he has seemed determined to show off Russia’s military prowess and resolve. Most recently, he boasted of a nuclear-powered missile that can evade U.S. defenses and illustrated with a video showing.
This new approach—combining risk-taking, neglect of exit strategies, outsourcing and saber rattling—sounds unlikely to work well. In fact, it has done better than might have been expected. Since 2015, Putin has suffered no huge disaster and enjoyed notable successes.
However, the drawbacks of the approach are also pretty clear: It offers little hope of progress on the most important goal—boosting Russia’s economic performance—and it requires considerable luck and juggling skill. Even if the new style has so far kept the West off balance while expanding Russia’s influence in the Middle East, there is no guarantee that this will continue.
Relations with the United States, Europe, and NATO
Under Putin, Russia’s relationships with NATO and the U.S. have passed through several stages. When he first became president, relations were cautious, but after the 9/11 attacks Putin quickly supported the U.S. in the War on Terror and the opportunity for partnership appeared. However, the U.S. responded by further expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders and by unilateral withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
From 2003, when Russia did not support the Iraq War and when Putin became ever more distant from the West in his internal and external policies, relations continued to deteriorate.
In an interview with Michael Stürmer, Putin said there were three questions which most concerned Russia and Eastern Europe: namely, the status of Kosovo, the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and American plans to build missile defence sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and suggested that all three were linked.
In a January 2007 interview, Putin said Russia was in favor of a democratic multipolar world and strengthening the systems of international law.
Putin opposed Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence, warning supporters of that precedent that it would de facto destabilize the whole system of international relations.
Putin had good relations with former American President George W. Bush, and many European leaders. His “cooler” and “more business-like” relationship with Germany’s current chancellor, Angela Merkel is often attributed to Merkel’s upbringing in the former DDR, where Putin was stationed as a KGB agent. He had a very friendly and warm relationship with the former Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi; the two leaders often described their relationship as a close friendship, continuing to organize bilateral meetings even after Berlusconi’s resignation in November 2011.
In late 2013, Russian-American relations deteriorated further when the United States canceled a summit (for the first time since 1960) after Putin gave asylum to Edward Snowden, who had leaked classified information from the NSA. Relations were further strained after the 2014–15 Russian military intervention in Ukraine and the Annexation of Crimea.
In 2014, Russia was suspended from the G8 group as a result of its annexation of Crimea. However, in June 2015, Putin told an Italian newspaper that Russia has no intention of attacking NATO.
In December 2016, US intelligence officials (headed by James Clapper) quoted by CBS News stated that Putin approved the email hacking and cyber attacks during the U.S. election, against the democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. A spokesman for Putin denied the reports. Putin has repeatedly accused Hillary Clinton, who served as U.S. Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, of interfering in Russia’s internal affairs, and in December 2016, Clinton accused Putin of having a personal grudge against h With the election of Trump, Putin’s favorability in the U.S. increased. A Gallup poll in February 2017 revealed a positive view of Putin among 22% of Americans, the highest since 2003. However, Putin has stated that U.S.–Russian relations, already at the lowest level since the end of the Cold War, have continued to deteriorate after Trump took office in January 2017.
On July 16, 2018, fresh from the success of Russia’s well-received hosting of the World Cup football championship, Putin held a summit meeting in Helsinki with Trump. The two had conducted discussions at the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hamburg, Germany, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation gathering in Da Nang, Vietnam, in 2017, but the encounter in Finland marked their first formal one-on-one meeting.
In the press conference that followed, Putin once again denied any Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump then sent shock waves when, in response to a reporter’s question, he indicated that he trusted Putin’s denial more than the conclusions of his own intelligence organizations, which only days earlier had resulted in the U.S. Department of Justice’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents for their meddling in the election.
Moreover, given the opportunity to condemn transgressive Russian actions, Trump instead cast blame on the United States for its strained relationship with Russia. Trump also warmed to Putin’s offer to allow U.S. investigators to interview the Russian agents in return for Russian access to Americans of interest in Russian investigations.
The Russian press trumpeted the summit as a huge success for Putin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described the outcome of the summit as “better than super.” The response in the United States was mostly shock, and a number of Republicans joined Democrats in strongly condemning Trump’s performance.
Relations with the United Kingdom
In 2003, relations between Russia and the United Kingdom deteriorated when the United Kingdom granted political asylum to Putin’s former patron, oligarch Boris Berezovsky. This deterioration was intensified by allegations that the British were spying and making secret payments to pro-democracy and human rights groups.
The end of 2006 brought more strained relations in the wake of the death by polonium poisoning of former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, who became an MI6 agent in 2003. In 2007, the crisis in relations continued with expulsion of four Russian envoys over Russia’s refusal to extradite former KGB bodyguard Andrei Lugovoi to face charges in the murder of Litvinenko. Mirroring the British actions, Russia expelled UK diplomats and took other retaliatory steps.
On 4 March 2018, former double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury. Ten days later, the British government formally accused the Russian state of attempted murder, a charge which Russia denied. After the UK expelled 23 Russian diplomats (an action which would later be responded to with a Russian expulsion of 23 British diplomats), British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on 16 March that it was “overwhelmingly likely” Putin had personally ordered the poisoning of Skripal. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the allegation “shocking and unpardonable diplomatic misconduct”.
Relations with Australia and Latin American countries
Putin and his successor, Medvedev, enjoyed warm relations with the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Much of this has been through the sale of military equipment; since 2005, Venezuela has purchased more than $4 billion worth of arms from Russia.
In September 2007, Putin visited Indonesia and in doing so became the first Russian leader to visit the country in more than 50 years. In the same month, Putin also attended the APEC meeting held in Sydney where he met with John Howard, who was the Australian Prime Minister at the time, and signed a uranium trade deal for Australia to sell uranium to Russia. This was the first visit by a Russian president to Australia.
Relations with Middle Eastern and North African countries
On 16 October 2007, Putin visited Iran to participate in the Second Caspian Summit in Tehran, where he met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This was the first visit of a Soviet or Russian leader to Iran since Joseph Stalin’s participation in the Tehran Conference in 1943, and thus marked a significant event in Iran-Russia relations. At a press conference after the summit Putin said that “all our (Caspian) states have the right to develop their peaceful nuclear programmes without any restrictions”.
Subsequently, under Medvedev’s presidency, Iran-Russia relations were uneven: Russia did not fulfill the contract of selling to Iran the S-300, one of the most potent anti-aircraft missile systems currently existing. However, Russian specialists completed the construction of Iran and the Middle East’s first civilian nuclear power facility, the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, and Russia has continuously opposed the imposition of economic sanctions on Iran by the U.S. and the EU, as well as warning against a military attack on Iran.
In April 2008, Putin became the first Russian President who visited Libya. Putin condemned the foreign military intervention of Libya, he called UN resolution as “defective and flawed,” and added “It allows everything. It resembles medieval calls for crusades.” Upon the death of Muammar Gaddafi, Putin called it as “planned murder” by the US.
Russia and India & BRICS:
In 2012, Putin wrote an article in the Hindu newspaper, saying that “The Declaration on Strategic Partnership between India and Russia signed in October 2000 became a truly historic step”. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during Putin’s 2012 visit to India: “President Putin is a valued friend of India and the original architect of the India-Russia strategic partnership”.
Putin’s Russia maintains positive relations with other BRIC countries. The country has sought to strengthen ties especially with the People’s Republic of China by signing the Treaty of Friendship as well as building the Trans-Siberian oil pipeline geared toward growing Chinese energy needs. The mutual-security cooperation of the two countries and their central Asian neighbours is facilitated by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) which was founded in 2001 in Shanghai by the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
The announcement made during the SCO summit that Russia resumes on a permanent basis the long-distance patrol flights of its strategic bombers (suspended in 1992) in the light of joint Russian-Chinese military exercises, first-ever in history held on Russian territory, made some experts believe that Putin is inclined to set up an anti-NATO bloc or the Asian version of OPEC. When presented with the suggestion that “Western observers are already likening the SCO to a military organization that would stand in opposition to NATO”, Putin answered that “this kind of comparison is inappropriate in both form and substance”. President Putin has attended the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Summit conferences since 2013.
Domestic Public image
Putin’s approval (blue) and disapproval (red) ratings 1999–2015. Putin reached an all-time high approval rating in June 2015 of 89%.
According to a June 2007 public opinion survey, Putin’s approval rating was 81%, the second highest of any leader in the world that year. In January 2013, at the time of 2011–2013 Russian protests, Putin’s approval rating fell to 62%, the lowest figure since 2000 and a ten-point drop over two years. By May 2014, following the annexation of Crimea, Putin’s approval rating had rebounded to 85.9%, a six-year high.
After EU and U.S. sanctions against Russian officials as a result of the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, Putin’s approval rating reached 87 percent, according to a Levada Center survey published on 6 August 2014. In February 2015, based on new domestic polling, Putin was ranked the world’s most popular politician. In June 2015, Putin’s approval rating climbed to 89%, an all-time high. In 2016, the approval rating was 81%.
Observers see Putin’s high approval ratings as a consequence of significant improvements in living standards, and Russia’s reassertion of itself on the world scene during his presidency.
Despite high approval for Putin, confidence in the Russian economy is low, dropping to levels in 2016 that rivaled the recent lows in 2009 at the height of the global economic crisis. Just 14% of Russians in 2016 said their national economy was getting better, and 18% said this about their local economies. Putin’s performance at reining in corruption is also unpopular among Russians. Newsweek reported in June 2017 that “An opinion poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center indicated that 67 percent held Putin personally responsible for high-level corruption”.
In July 2018, Putin’s approval rating fell to 63% and just 49% would vote for Putin if presidential elections were held. Levada poll results published in September 2018 showed Putin’s personal trustworthiness levels at 39% (decline from 59% in November 2017) with the main contributing factor being the presidential support of the unpopular pension reform and economic stagnation. In October 2018 two thirds of Russians surveyed in Levada poll agreed that “Putin bears full responsibility for the problems of the country” which has been attributed to decline of a popular belief in “good tsar and bad boyars”, a traditional attitude towards justifying failures of top of ruling hierarchy in Russia.
In January 2019 percentage of Russians trusting the president hit the historic minimum -33.4%.
Assessments
Critics state that Putin has moved Russia in an autocratic direction. Putin has been described as a “dictator” by political opponent Garry Kasparov, as a “bully” and “arrogant” by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and as “self-centered” and an “isolationist” by the Dalai Lama. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in 2014 that the West has demonized Putin.
Many Russians credit Putin for reviving Russia’s fortunes. Former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, while acknowledging the flawed democratic procedures and restrictions on media freedom during the Putin presidency, said that Putin had pulled Russia out of chaos at the end of the Yeltsin years, and that Russians “must remember that Putin saved Russia from the beginning of a collapse.” In 2015, opposition politician Boris Nemtsov said that Putin was turning Russia into a “raw materials colony” of China.
Russia has suffered democratic backsliding during Putin’s tenure. Freedom House has listed Russia as being “not free” since 2005. In 2004, Freedom House warned that Russia’s “retreat from freedom marks a low point not registered since 1989, when the country was part of the Soviet Union.” The Economist Intelligence Unit has rated Russia as “authoritarian” since 2011, whereas it had previously been considered a “hybrid regime” (with “some form of democratic government” in place) as late as 2007. According to political scientist, Larry Diamond, writing in 2015, “no serious scholar would consider Russia today a democracy”.
Putin cultivates an outdoor, sporty, tough guy public image, demonstrating his physical prowess and taking part in unusual or dangerous acts, such as extreme sports and interaction with wild animals, part of a public relations approach that, according to Wired, “deliberately cultivates the macho, take-charge superhero image”. Some of the activities have been criticised for being staged. Outside of Russia, Putin’s macho image has been the subject of parody. Putin is believed to be self conscious about his short height.
Notable examples of Putin’s adventures include: flying military jets, demonstrating martial arts, riding horses, rafting, and fishing and swimming in a cold Siberian river, many of which he did bare chested. Other examples are descending in a deepwater submersible, tranquilizing tigers and polar bears, riding a motorbike, co-piloting a fire-fighting plane to dump water on a raging fire, shooting darts at whales from a crossbow for eco-tracking, driving a race car, scuba diving at an archaeological site, attempting to lead endangered cranes in a motorized hang glider, and catching large fish.
There are a large number of songs about Putin. Some of the well-known include: “Go Hard Like Vladimir Putin” by K. King and Beni Maniaci “VVP” by Tajiksinger Tolibjon Kurbankhanov, “Our Madhouse is Voting for Putin” by Working Faculty and “A Song About Putin” by the Russian Airborne Troops band. There is also “Putin khuilo!”, the song, originally emerged as chants by Ukrainian football fans and spread in Ukraine (among supporters of Euromaidan), then in other countries. A song called “A Man Like Putin” by Poyushchie vmeste was also a hit across Russia, topping the Russian Music Charts.
Putin’s name and image are widely used in advertisement and product branding. Among the Putin-branded products are Putinka vodka, the PuTin brand of canned food, the Gorbusha Putina caviar and a collection of T-shirts with his image.
In 2007, he was the Time Person of the Year. In 2015, he was No. 1 on the Time’s Most Influential People List. Forbes ranked him the World’s Most Powerful Individual every year from 2013 to 2016.