vladimir putin history biography

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Vladimir Putin

By: History.com Editors

Published: September 25, 2023

Vladimir Putin (1952-) is a former KGB agent who has ruled Russia for more than two decades. Intent on restoring Russian might following the collapse of the Soviet Union , he has launched several military campaigns, including an invasion of Ukraine, and helped usher in what’s often described as a new Cold War . Meanwhile, he has steadily tightened his grip on power, persecuting political opponents, shuttering independent media outlets, and otherwise dismantling the country’s nascent democracy.

Putin's Early Years and Personal Life

Much about Vladimir Putin’s personal life remains murky. Born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1952, he has recalled growing up modestly in a rat-infested communal apartment building. His parents, who lost two children prior to his birth—one of whom died during the prolonged Nazi siege of Leningrad in World War II —apparently doted on him despite working long hours. As a youth, he practiced martial arts and is reputed to have gotten into many fist fights.

In 1983, Putin married a flight attendant, Lyudmila Shkrebneva, with whom he has two daughters. (The couple divorced around 2013.) He is rumored to have fathered other children as well. Throughout his time in office, Putin has kept his family out of the public eye.

Putin as a KGB Agent

After studying law at Leningrad State University, Putin joined the KGB , the Soviet counterpart of the CIA. In the mid-1980s, he was sent to the city of Dresden in East Germany, where, in his words, he gathered “political intelligence,” in part by recruiting sources. Putin remained in Dresden during the fall of the Berlin Wall , and, with a risky bluff , purportedly prevented a crowd of protestors from storming the local KGB headquarters.

Putin's Political Rise

Putin returned to Leningrad in 1990 and claimed to have resigned from the KGB the following year. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union affected him deeply; he later called it the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Around that time, he got his political start as an aide to Anatoly Sobchak , his former teacher who became his mentor and St. Petersburg’s mayor.

In 1996, Sobchak lost his bid for re-election and later fled abroad amid corruption allegations. Yet Putin continued his meteoric rise, moving to Moscow, Russia’s capital, and securing one Kremlin post after another (while also defending an economics dissertation he allegedly plagiarized ). By 1998, Putin led the KGB’s main successor organization, and the following year President Boris Yeltsin named him prime minister, the country’s second-highest office, thereby elevating him from obscurity to heir apparent.

When an ailing and increasingly unpopular Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, Putin took over as acting president. (Months later, he would win election to a full term.) Helped by rising oil and gas prices, the economy improved in the early 2000s and living standards rose. Many Russians saw him as bringing order and stability after the hyperinflation, tumultuousness, and perceived lawlessness of the Yeltsin years.

Putin's Consolidation of Power

In his first address as Russia’s president, Putin promised to protect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and property rights, and he likewise announced his commitment to democracy. Yet democratic backsliding began almost immediately under his leadership. The Kremlin brought independent television networks under state control and shut down other news outlets; abolished gubernatorial and senatorial elections; curtailed the judiciary; and restricted opposition political parties. When elections took place, outside observers noted widespread voter irregularities. Putin’s system was sometimes referred to as a “managed democracy.”

Because Russia’s constitution barred a third consecutive term, Putin stepped down in 2008, with his longtime confidante Dmitry Medvedev taking over as president. But Putin retained the role of prime minister and left little doubt about who was really in charge. When Medvedev’s term ended in 2012, the two swapped positions, and Putin once again became president. He has occupied the top job ever since, at one point signing a law that allows him to stay in power until 2036.

Putin has habitually placed his friends and old intelligence colleagues in key posts, several of whom became extravagantly wealthy, and he’s propagated a cult of personality. Perceived opponents have been called “scum” and “traitors” and dealt with harshly. Some, like oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have been jailed, whereas others have wound up dead. In 2006, for example, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down on Putin’s birthday, and that same year Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in England with radioactive polonium.

More recently, opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was banned from running for president, survived an assassination attempt , and was then imprisoned on what’s widely considered to be politically motivated charges. Yet another high-profile death occurred in 2023, when Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash after launching a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership.

Putin's Relationship with the West

Many Western leaders originally approved of Putin, with U.S. President George W. Bush saying he had “looked the man in the eye,” found him “very straightforward and trustworthy,” and gotten a “sense of his soul.” Putin was the first foreign leader to call Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11 , 2001. And though he opposed the Iraq War , Putin assisted in aspects of the so-called War on Terror . He moreover described Russia as a “friendly European nation” that desired “stable peace on the continent.”

Putin’s relationship with the West deteriorated, however, in part over NATO ’s 2004 expansion into seven Eastern European countries and over pro-Western revolutions that broke out in Georgia and Ukraine. Putin was furthermore irked by U.S. lobbying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and by its support for an independent Kosovo. In 2007, he accused the United States of overstepping “its national borders in every way.” Over time, Putin came to think of himself as a protector of traditional Russian values, standing up to a hypocritical and morally decadent West.

In 2014, as tensions escalated over Ukraine, Russia was expelled from the Group of Eight industrialized nations. Around that time, he granted asylum to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden . And, according to U.S. intelligence agencies , he interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election , greenlighting a computer hacking operation that infiltrated the campaign of Hillary Clinton .   

Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump maintained generally friendly ties. But the U.S.-Russian relationship reached arguably its lowest point in decades following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Since then, Russia has been hit with a slew of economic sanctions, Ukraine has received much Western military assistance, and U.S. President Joe Biden has called Putin a “thug,” a “murderous dictator,” and a “war criminal.”

Putin's Wars

During his more than two decades in office, Putin has used the military in increasingly aggressive ways.  Early in his tenure, he violently suppressed a separatist movement in the Russian republic of Chechnya. In 2008, he orchestrated a brief but large-scale invasion of Georgia , thus cementing Russian control of the breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Starting in 2015, he intervened in the Syrian civil war , among other things authorizing a prolonged bombardment of the city of Aleppo. Additionally, he has deployed Russian mercenaries in various African countries .

Putin’s most prolonged conflict has taken place in Ukraine . In 2014, when Ukrainian protestors ousted their Russian-backed president, Putin responded by annexing Crimea—which had been gifted from Russia to Ukraine during the Soviet era—and by backing a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Then, in 2022, he launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine, but failed to take Kiev, the capital. Heavy fighting has since claimed hundreds of thousands of lives . The Russian armed forces have been accused of purposely targeting civilians and committing torture and other atrocities, prompting the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for Putin’s arrest (though he is unlikely to stand trial).

The Man Without a Face : The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin , by Masha Gessen, published by Riverhead Books, 2012. The Strongman : Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia , by Angus Roxburgh, published by I.B. Tauris, 2012. First Person : An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin , 2000. ‘The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,’ by Steven Lee Myers. The New York Times , November 8, 2015. The Making of Vladimir Putin. The New York Times , March 26, 2022. Putin, Vladimir. Encyclopedia Britannica

HISTORY Vault: Vladimir Putin

A gripping look at Putin's rise from humble beginnings to brutal dictatorship, and his emergence as one of the gravest threats to America's security.

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Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin served as president of Russia from 2000 to 2008 and was re-elected to the presidency in 2012, where he has stayed ever since. He previously served as Russia's prime minister.

1952-present

Latest News: Vladimir Putin Announces 2024 Russian Presidential Run

According to the Associated Press , the 71-year-old Putin, who was first elected president in March 2000, has twice amended the Russian constitution so that he could theoretically remain in power until 2036. He is already the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin .

Quick Facts

Early life and political career, president of russia: first and second terms, third term as president, chemical weapons in syria, 2014 winter olympics, invasion into crimea, syrian airstrikes, u.s. election hacks, fourth presidential term, invasion of ukraine, seeking fifth presidential term, personal life, who is vladimir putin.

In 1999, Russian president Boris Yeltsin dismissed his prime minister and promoted former KGB officer Vladimir Putin in his place. In December 1999, Yeltsin resigned, appointing Putin president, and he was re-elected in 2004. In April 2005, he made a historic visit to Israel—the first visit there by any Kremlin leader. Putin could not run for the presidency again in 2008, but was appointed prime minister by his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Putin was re-elected to the presidency in March 2012 and later won a fourth term. In 2014, he was reportedly nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

FULL NAME: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin BORN: October 7, 1952 BIRTHPLACE: Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Russia SPOUSE: Lyudmila Shkrebneva (1983-2014) CHILDREN: Maria, Yekaterina ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Libra

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia, on October 7, 1952. He grew up with his family in a communal apartment, attending the local grammar and high schools, where he developed an interest in sports. After graduating from Leningrad State University with a law degree in 1975, Putin began his career in the KGB as an intelligence officer. Stationed mainly in East Germany, he held that position until 1990, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Upon returning to Russia, Putin held an administrative position at the University of Leningrad, and after the fall of communism in 1991, he became an adviser to liberal politician Anatoly Sobchak. When Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad later that year, Putin became his head of external relations, and by 1994, Putin had become Sobchak’s first deputy mayor.

After Sobchak’s defeat in 1996, Putin resigned his post and moved to Moscow. There, in 1998, Putin was appointed deputy head of management under Boris Yeltsin’s presidential administration. In that position, he was in charge of the Kremlin's relations with the regional governments.

Shortly afterward, Putin was appointed head of the Federal Security Service, an arm of the former KGB, as well as head of Yeltsin’s Security Council. In August 1999, Yeltsin dismissed his prime minister, Sergey Stapashin, along with his cabinet, and promoted Putin in his place.

In December 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned as president of Russia and appointed Putin acting president until official elections were held, and in March 2000, Putin was elected to his first term with 53 percent of the vote. Promising both political and economic reforms, Putin set about restructuring the government and launching criminal investigations into the business dealings of high-profile Russian citizens. He also continued Russia's military campaign in Chechnya.

In September 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States, Putin announced Russia’s support for the U.S. in its anti-terror campaign. However, when the U.S.’s “war on terror” shifted focus to the ousting of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein , Putin joined German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French President Jacques Chirac in opposition of the plan.

In 2004, Putin was re-elected to the presidency, and in April of the following year made a historic visit to Israel for talks with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon—marking the first visit to Israel by any Kremlin leader.

Due to constitutional term limits, Putin was prevented from running for the presidency in 2008. (That same year, presidential terms in Russia were extended from four to six years.) However, when his protégé Dmitry Medvedev succeeded him as president in March 2008, he immediately appointed Putin as Russia’s prime minister, allowing Putin to maintain a primary position of influence for the next four years.

On March 4, 2012, Vladimir Putin was re-elected to his third term as president. After widespread protests and allegations of electoral fraud, he was inaugurated on May 7, 2012, and shortly after taking office appointed Medvedev as prime minister. Once more at the helm, Putin has continued to make controversial changes to Russia’s domestic affairs and foreign policy.

In December 2012, Putin signed into a law a ban on the U.S. adoption of Russian children. According to Putin, the legislation—which took effect on January 1, 2013—aimed to make it easier for Russians to adopt native orphans. However, the adoption ban spurred international controversy, reportedly leaving nearly 50 Russian children—who were in the final phases of adoption with U.S. citizens at the time that Putin signed the law—in legal limbo.

Putin further strained relations with the United States the following year when he granted asylum to Edward Snowden , who is wanted by the United States for leaking classified information from the National Security Agency. In response to Putin's actions, U.S. President Barack Obama canceled a planned meeting with Putin that August.

Around this time, Putin also upset many people with his new anti-gay laws. He made it illegal for gay couples to adopt in Russia and placed a ban on propagandizing “nontraditional” sexual relationships to minors. The legislation led to widespread international protest.

In September 2013, tensions rose between the United States and Syria over Syria’s possession of chemical weapons, with the U.S. threatening military action if the weapons were not relinquished. The immediate crisis was averted, however, when the Russian and U.S. governments brokered a deal whereby those weapons would be destroyed.

On September 11, 2013, The New York Times published an op-ed piece by Putin titled “A Plea for Caution From Russia.” In the article, Putin spoke directly to the U.S.’s position in taking action against Syria, stating that such a unilateral move could result in the escalation of violence and unrest in the Middle East.

Putin further asserted that the U.S. claim that Bashar al-Assad used the chemical weapons on civilians might be misplaced, with the more likely explanation being the unauthorized use of the weapons by Syrian rebels. He closed the piece by welcoming the continuation of an open dialogue between the involved nations to avoid further conflict in the region.

In 2014, Russia hosted the Winter Olympics, which were held in Sochi beginning on February 6. According to NBS Sports, Russia spent roughly $50 billion in preparation for the international event.

However, in response to what many perceived as Russia’s recently passed anti-gay legislation, the threat of international boycotts arose. In October 2013, Putin tried to allay some of these concerns, saying in an interview broadcast on Russian television that, “We will do everything to make sure that athletes, fans and guests feel comfortable at the Olympic Games regardless of their ethnicity, race or sexual orientation.”

In terms of security for the event, Putin implemented new measures aimed at cracking down on Muslim extremists, and in November 2013 reports surfaced that saliva samples had been collected from some Muslim women in the North Caucasus region. The samples were ostensibly to be used to gather DNA profiles, in an effort to combat female suicide bombers known as “black widows.”

Shortly after the conclusion of the 2014 Winter Olympics, amidst widespread political unrest in Ukraine, which resulted in the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych, Putin sent Russian troops into Crimea, a peninsula in the country’s northeast coast of the Black Sea. The peninsula had been part of Russia until Nikita Khrushchev, former Premier of the Soviet Union, gave it to Ukraine in 1954.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Yuriy Sergeyev, claimed that approximately 16,000 troops invaded the territory, and Russia’s actions caught the attention of several European countries and the United States, who refused to accept the legitimacy of a referendum in which the majority of the Crimean population voted to secede from Ukraine and reunite with Russia.

Putin defended his actions, insisting that the troops sent into Ukraine were only meant to enhance Russia’s military defenses within the country—referring to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which has its headquarters in Crimea. He also vehemently denied accusations by other nations, particularly the United States, that Russia intended to engage Ukraine in war.

He went on to claim that although he was granted permission from Russia's upper house of Parliament to use force in Ukraine, he found it unnecessary. Putin also wrote off any speculation that there would be a further incursion into Ukrainian territory, saying, “Such a measure would certainly be the very last resort.”

The following day, it was announced that Putin had been nominated for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.

In September 2015, Russia surprised the world by announcing it would begin strategic airstrikes in Syria. Despite government officials’ assertions that the military actions were intended to target the extremist Islamic State, which made significant advances in the region due to the power vacuum created by Syria's ongoing civil war, Russia's true motives were called into question, with many international analysts and government officials claiming that the airstrikes were in fact aimed at the rebel forces attempting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad's historically repressive regime.

In late October 2017, Putin was personally involved in another alarming form of aerial warfare when he oversaw a late-night military drill that resulted in the launch of four ballistic missiles across the country. The drill came during a period of escalating tensions in the region, with Russian neighbor North Korea also drawing attention for its missile tests and threats to engage the U.S. in destructive conflict.

In December 2017, Putin announced he was ordering Russian forces to begin withdrawing from Syria, saying the country’s two-year campaign to destroy ISIS was complete, though he left open the possibility of returning if terrorist violence resumed in the area. Despite the declaration, Pentagon spokesman Robert Manning was hesitant to endorse that view of events, saying, “Russian comments about removal of their forces do not often correspond with actual troop reductions.”

Months prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, multiple U.S. intelligence agencies unilaterally agreed that Russian intelligence was behind the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta, who had, at the time, been chairman of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

In December 2016 unnamed senior CIA officials further concluded “with a high level of confidence” that Putin was personally involved in intervening in the U.S. presidential election, according to a report by USA Today . The officials further went on to assert that the hacked DNC and Podesta emails that were given to WikiLeaks just before U.S. Election Day were designed to undermine Clinton’s campaign in favor of her Republican opponent, Donald Trump . Soon after, the FBI and National Intelligence Agency publicly supported the CIA’s assessments.

Putin denied any such attempts to disrupt the U.S. election, and despite the assessments of his intelligence agencies, President Trump generally seemed to favor the word of his Russian counterpart. Underscoring their attempts to thaw public relations, the Kremlin in late 2017 revealed that a terror attack had been thwarted in St. Petersburg, thanks to intelligence provided by the CIA.

Around that time, Putin reported at his annual end-of-year press conference that he would seek a new six-year term as president in early 2018 as an independent candidate, signaling he was ending his longtime association with the United Russia party.

Shortly before the first formal summit between Presidents Putin and Trump in July 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictments of 12 Russian operatives on charges relating to interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Regardless, Trump suggested he was satisfied with his counterpart’s “strong and powerful" denial in a joint news conference and praised Putin’s offer to submit the 12 indicted agents to questioning with American witnesses present.

In a subsequent interview with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, Putin seemingly defended the hacking of the DNC server by suggesting that no false information was planted in the process. He also rejected the idea that he had compromising information about Trump, saying that the businessman “was of no interest for us” before announcing his presidential campaign, and notably refused to touch a copy of the indictments offered to him by Wallace.

In March 2018, toward the end of his third term, Putin boasted of new weaponry that would render NATO defenses “completely worthless,” including a low-flying nuclear-capable cruise missile with “unlimited” range and another one capable of traveling at hypersonic speed. His demonstration included video animation of attacks on the United States.

Not long afterward, a two-hour documentary, titled Putin , was posted to several social media pages and a pro-Kremlin YouTube account. Designed to showcase the president in a strong yet humane light, the doc featured Putin sharing the story of how he ordered a hijacked plane shot down to head off a bomb scare at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, as well as recollections of his grandfather's days as a cook for Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin .

On March 18, 2018, the fourth anniversary of the country’s seizure of Crimea, Russian citizens overwhelmingly elected Putin to a fourth presidential term, with 67 percent of the electorate turning out to award him more than 76 percent of the vote. The divided opposition stood little chance against the popular leader, his closest competitor notching around 13 percent of the vote.

Little was expected to change regarding Putin’s strategies for rebuilding the country as a global power, though the start of his final term set off questions about his successor, and whether he would affect constitutional change in an attempt to remain in office indefinitely.

On July 16, 2018, Putin met with President Trump in Helsinki, Finland, for the first formal talks between the two leaders. According to Russia, topics of the meeting included the ongoing war in Syria and “the removal of the concerns” about accusations of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The following April, Putin met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un for the first time. The two leaders discussed the issue of the North Korean laborers in Russia, while Putin also offered support of his counterpart’s denuclearization negotiations with the U.S., saying Kim would need “security guarantees” in exchange for abandoning his nuclear program.

The topic of whether Putin aimed to extend his hold on power resurfaced following his state-of-the-nation speech in January 2020, which included proposals for constitutional amendments that included transferring the power to select the prime minister and cabinet from the president to the Parliament. The entire cabinet, including Medvedev, promptly resigned, leading to the selection of Mikhail V. Mishustin as the new prime minister.

Despite Putin’s earlier remarks of further incursion into Ukraine being a last resort, in the spring of 2021, Russian military forces began forming near the borders of the neighboring country for what the Kremlin claimed were training exercises. According to Reuters , more than 100,000 troops had deployed by November.

On December 17, Russia released a list of security demands that included NATO pulling back forces and weaponry from its eastern flank and ceasing further expansion, including the possible addition of Ukraine into the alliance. If the demands were not met, a “military response” was promised.

Then on February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with missile and rocket strikes on Ukrainian cities and military installations. In a televised address, Putin—claiming that Russian speakers in Ukraine faced genocide—referred to the invasion as a “special military operation,” designed to “achieve the demilitarization and denazification" of the country. In the early hours, Russian forces took Chernobyl, site of the infamous 1986 nuclear disaster, but were held back from the capital city of Kyiv.

As the conflict dragged on with Western allies supporting Ukraine, Putin announced the “special mobilization” of more than 100,000 reserve troops in September 2022.

Ukrainian troops launched a counteroffensive in June 2023 and, as of December, the conflict is still ongoing. The U.S. estimated that August that around 500,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers had been wounded or killed.

In December 2023, Putin announced that he would seek a fifth term as president of Russia in the country's upcoming elections in March 2024. With a victory, he would be able to remain in power until at least 2030 and potentially run for another subsequent six-year term.

Putin is not expected to face any serious challengers and remains popular domestically. According to CNBC , a survey by Russian news agency Tass found that more than 78 percent of Russians trust Putin, and more than 75 percent approve of his activities.

In 1980, Putin met his future wife, Lyudmila, who was working as a flight attendant at the time. The couple married in 1983 and had two daughters: Maria, born in 1985, and Yekaterina, born in 1986. In early June 2013, after nearly 30 years of marriage, Russia’s first couple announced that they were getting a divorce, providing little explanation for the decision, but assuring that they came to it mutually and amicably.

“There are people who just cannot put up with it,” Putin stated. “Lyudmila Alexandrovna has stood watch for eight, almost nine years.” Providing more context to the decision, Lyudmila added, “Our marriage is over because we hardly ever see each other. Vladimir Vladimirovich is immersed in his work, our children have grown and are living their own lives.”

An Orthodox Christian, Putin is said to attend church services on important dates and holidays on a regular basis and has had a long history of encouraging the construction and restoration of thousands of churches in the region. He generally aims to unify all faiths under the government’s authority and legally requires religious organizations to register with local officials for approval.

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Biography of Vladimir Putin: From KGB Agent to Russian President

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Vladimir Putin is a Russian politician and former KGB intelligence officer currently serving as President of Russia. Elected to his current and fourth presidential term in May 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.

Fast Facts: Vladimir Puton

• Full Name: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin
• Born: October 7, 1952, Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia) 
• Parents’ Names: Maria Ivanovna Shelomova and Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin
• Spouse: Lyudmila Putina (married in 1983, divorced in 2014)
• Children: Two daughters; Mariya Putina and Yekaterina Putina
• Education: Leningrad State University
• Known for: Russian Prime Minister and Acting President of Russia, 1999 to 2000; President of Russia 2000 to 2008 and 2012 to present; Russian Prime Minister 2008 to 2012.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia). His mother, Maria Ivanovna Shelomova was a factory worker and his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, had served in the Soviet Navy submarine fleet during World War II and worked as a foreman at an automobile factory during the 1950s. In his official state biography, Putin recalls, “I come from an ordinary family, and this is how I lived for a long time, nearly my whole life. I lived as an average, normal person and I have always maintained that connection.” 

While attending elementary and high school, Putin took up judo in hopes of emulating the Soviet intelligence officers he saw in the movies. Today, he holds a black belt in judo and is a national master in the similar Russian martial art of sambo. He also studied German at Saint Petersburg High School, and speaks the language fluently today.

In 1975, Putin earned a law degree from Leningrad State University, where he was tutored and befriended by Anatoly Sobchak, who would later become a political leader during the Glasnost and Perestroika reform period. As a college student, Putin was required to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but resigned as a member in December 1991. He would later describe communism as “a blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilization.”

After initially considering a career in law, Putin was recruited into the KGB (the Committee for State Security) in 1975. He served as a foreign counter-intelligence officer for 15 years, spending the last six in Dresden, East Germany. After leaving the KGB in 1991 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he returned to Russia where he was in charge of the external affairs of Leningrad State University. It was here that Putin became an advisor to his former tutor Anatoly Sobchak, who had just become Saint Petersburg’s first freely-elected mayor. Gaining a reputation as an effective politician, Putin quickly rose to the position of first deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg in 1994. 

Prime Minister 1999 

After moving to Moscow in 1996, Putin joined the administrative staff of Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin . Recognizing Putin as a rising star, Yeltsin appointed him director of the Federal Security Service (FSB)—the post-communism version of the KGB—and secretary of the influential Security Council. On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin appointed him as acting prime minister. On August 16, the Russian Federation’s legislature, the State Duma , voted to confirm Putin’s appointment as prime minister. The day Yeltsin first appointed him, Putin announced his intention to seek the presidency in the 2000 national election.

While he was largely unknown at the time, Putin’s public popularity soared when, as prime minister, he orchestrated a military operation that succeeded resolving the Second Chechen War , an armed conflict in the Russian-held territory of Chechnya between Russian troops and secessionist rebels of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, fought between August 1999 and April 2009. 

When Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned on December 31, 1999, under suspicion of bribery and corruption, the Constitution of Russia made Putin acting President of the Russian Federation. Later the same day, he issued a presidential decree protecting Yeltsin and his relatives from prosecution for any crimes they might have committed.    

While the next regular Russian presidential election was scheduled for June 2000, Yeltsin’s resignation made it necessary to hold the election within three months, on March 26, 2000. 

At first far behind his opponents, Putin’s law-and-order platform and decisive handling of the Second Chechen War as acting president soon pushed his popularity beyond that of his rivals.

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. When asked on the Larry King Live television show what had happened to the Kursk, Putin’s two-word reply, “It sank,” was widely criticized for its perceived cynicism in the face of tragedy. 

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.

Less than a week after the Dubrovka Theater attack, 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. In 2003, the Chechen people voted to adopt a new constitution confirming that the Republic of Chechnya would remain a part of Russia while retaining its political autonomy. 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. 

Whether Putin’s “grand bargain” with the oligarchs actually “improved” the Russian economy or not remains uncertain. British journalist and expert on international affairs Jonathan Steele has observed that by the end of Putin’s second term in 2008, the economy had stabilized and the nation’s overall standard of living had improved to the point that the Russian people could “notice a difference.”

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.

On October 7, 2006—Putin’s birthday— Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist and human rights activist, who as a frequent critic of Putin and had exposed corruption in the Russian Army and cases of its improper conduct in the Chechnya conflict, was shot to death as she entered the lobby of her apartment building. While Politkovskaya’s killer was never identified, her death brought criticism that Putin’s promise to protect the newly-independent Russian media had been no more than political rhetoric. Putin commented that Politkovskaya’s death had caused him more problems than anything she had ever written about him. 

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.

The democratic legitimacy of the election was questioned, however. While some 400 foreign election monitors stationed at polling places stated that the election process itself had not been rigged, the Russian media’s coverage had clearly favored candidates of United Russia. Both the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe concluded that the elections were unfair and called on the Kremlin to investigate alleged violations. 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. 

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, where as many as 50 Russian children in the final stages of adoption were left in legal limbo.   

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. 

Also in 2013, Putin issued a set of highly controversial anti-gay laws outlawing gay couples from adopting children in Russia and banning the dissemination of material promoting or describing “nontraditional” sexual relationships to minors. The laws brought worldwide protests from both the LGBT and straight communities.  

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. 

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 reelection 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. 

On February 23, 2022, Putin launched an unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine, which had officially declared itself an independent country on August 24, 1991. Putin justified the act with the false narrative that Ukraine was not a real country. That it “belongs” to Russia as part of a “Great Russia” and the “Russian World,” and that there is, according to Putin, no Ukrainian people, no Ukrainian language, and no separate Ukrainian history. 

After Russia launched its 2022 invasion, the United States, the European Union (EU), and other NATO member nations condemned Putin, substantially increased military, humanitarian, and economic assistance to Ukraine, and imposed a series of increasingly crippling financial and economic sanctions on Russia. In addition, hundreds of U.S. and other companies withdrew, suspended, or curtailed operations in or with Russia.

On February 8, 1994, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ) accepted Ukraine into its Partnership for Peace, a collaborative arrangement open to all non-NATO European countries and post-Soviet states. Russia became a NATO member in June 1994 and conducted various cooperative activities with NATO, including joint military exercises, until 2014, when NATO formally suspended ties with the country. As the Cold War ended, Russia opposed the eastern expansion of NATO. However, thirteen former Soviet partnership members eventually joined the alliance.

Ukraine is not a NATO member. However, Ukraine is a NATO partner country, which means that it cooperates closely with NATO but it is not covered by the security guarantee in the Alliance’s founding treaty.

The invasion seemed to tarnish Putin’s image among the Russian people, as young citizens, along with middle-aged and even retired people, took to the streets to speak out against a military conflict ordered by their President—a decision in which, they claimed, they had no say.

Putin responded by shutting down public dissent against the attack on Ukraine. By the end of July 2022, a total of over 7,624 protesters had been detained or arrested to 7,624 since the invasion began, according to an independent organization that tracks human rights violations in Russia.

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.

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. 

While some say he may be the world’s wealthiest man, Vladimir Putin’s exact net worth is not known. According to the Kremlin, the President of the Russian Federation is paid the U.S. equivalent of about $112,000 per year and is provided with an 800-square foot apartment as an official residence. However, independent Russian and U.S. financial experts have estimated Putin’s combined net worth at from $70 billion to as much as $200 billion. While his spokespersons have repeatedly denied allegations that Putin controls a hidden fortune, critics in Russia and elsewhere remain convinced that he has skillfully used the influence of his nearly 20-years in power to acquire massive wealth. 

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. 

As one of the most powerful, influential, and often-controversial world leaders of the past two decades, Vladimir Putin has uttered many memorable phrases in public. A few of these include: 

• “There is no such thing as a former KGB man.”
• “People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves.”
• “Russia doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. It destroys them.”
• “In any case, I’d rather not deal with such questions, because anyway it’s like shearing a pig—lots of screams but little wool.”
• “I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days.” 
• “ Vladimir Putin Biography .” Vladimir Putin official state biography
• “ Vladimir Putin – President of Russia .” European-Leaders.com (March 2017)
• “ First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin .” The New York Times (2000)
• “ Putin’s Obscure Path From KGB to Kremlin .” Los Angeles Times (2000)
• “ Vladimir Putin quits as head of Russia's ruling party .” The Daily Telegraph (2002)
• “ Russian lessons .” Financial Times. September 20, 2008
• “ Russia: Bribery Thriving Under Putin, According To New Report .” Radio Free Europe (2005)
• Steele, Jonathan. “ Putin’s legacy is a Russia that doesn't have to curry favour with the west .” The Guardian, September 18, 2007
• Bohlen, Celestine (2000). “ YELTSIN RESIGNS: THE OVERVIEW; Yeltsin Resigns, Naming Putin as Acting President To Run in March Election .” The New York Times.
• Sakwa, Richard (2007). “Putin : Russia's Choice (2nd ed.).” Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. ISBN 9780415407656.
• Judah, Ben (2015). “Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell in and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin.” Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300205220.
• Boris Yeltsin: First President of the Russian Federation
• Political Parties in Russia
• A Brief History of the KGB
• The "Deep State" Theory, Explained
• What Is Balkanization?
• The Truth Behind 14 Well-Known Russian Stereotypes
• The History and Geography of Crimea
• The Biggest Donald Trump Scandals (So Far)
• What Was the USSR and Which Countries Were in It?
• Causes of the Russian Revolution
• What Is an Oligarchy? Definition and Examples
• Biography of Nikita Khrushchev, Cold War Era Soviet Leader
• Saparmurat Niyazov
• Geography of Moscow, Russia
• Geography and History of Finland
• Top Books: Modern Russia - The Revolution and After

The Making of Vladimir Putin

Tracing Putin’s 22-year slide from statesman to tyrant.

President Vladimir Putin during a New York Times interview in 2003. Credit... James Hill for The New York Times

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By Roger Cohen

• Published March 26, 2022 Updated June 22, 2023

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PARIS — Speaking in what he called “the language of Goethe, Schiller and Kant,” picked up during his time as a K.G.B. officer in Dresden, President Vladimir V. Putin addressed the German Parliament on Sept. 25, 2001. “Russia is a friendly European nation,” he declared. “Stable peace on the continent is a paramount goal for our nation.”

The Russian leader, elected the previous year at the age of 47 after a meteoric rise from obscurity, went on to describe “democratic rights and freedoms” as the “key goal of Russia’s domestic policy.” Members of the Bundestag gave a standing ovation, moved by the reconciliation Mr. Putin seemed to embody in a city, Berlin, that long symbolized division between the West and the totalitarian Soviet world.

Norbert Röttgen, a center-right representative who headed the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee for several years, was among those who rose to their feet. “Putin captured us,” he said. “The voice was quite soft, in German, a voice that tempts you to believe what is said to you. We had some reason to think there was a viable perspective of togetherness.”

Today, all togetherness shredded, Ukraine burns, bludgeoned by the invading army Mr. Putin sent to prove his conviction that Ukrainian nationhood is a myth. More than 3.7 million Ukrainians are refugees; the dead mount up in a month-old war; and that purring voice of Mr. Putin has morphed into the angry rant of a hunched man dismissing as “scum and traitors” any Russian who resists the violence of his tightening dictatorship.

His opponents, a “fifth column” manipulated by the West, will meet an ugly fate, Mr. Putin vowed this month, grimacing as his planned blitzkrieg in Ukraine stalled. True Russians, he said, would “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths” and so achieve “a necessary self-purification of society.”

This was less the language of Kant than of fascist nationalist exaltation laced with Mr. Putin’s hardscrabble, brawling St. Petersburg youth.

Between these voices of reason and incitation, between these two seemingly different men, lie 22 years of power and five American presidents. As China rose, as America fought and lost its forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as technology networked the world, a Russian enigma took form in the Kremlin.

Did the United States and its allies, through excess of optimism or naïveté, simply get Mr. Putin wrong from the outset? Or was he transformed over time into the revanchist warmonger of today, whether because of perceived Western provocation, gathering grievance, or the giddying intoxication of prolonged and — since Covid-19 — increasingly isolated rule?

Mr. Putin is an enigma, but he is also the most public of figures. Seen from the perspective of his reckless gamble in Ukraine, a picture emerges of a man who seized on almost every move by the West as a slight against Russia — and perhaps also himself. As the grievances mounted, piece by piece, year by year, the distinction blurred. In effect, he became the state, he merged with Russia, their fates fused in an increasingly Messianic vision of restored imperial glory.

From the Ashes of Empire

“The temptation of the West for Putin was, I think, chiefly that he saw it as instrumental to building a great Russia,” said Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state who met several times with Mr. Putin during the first phase of his rule. “He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.”

But if irredentist resentment lurked, alongside a Soviet spy’s suspicion of the United States, Mr. Putin had other initial priorities. He was a patriotic servant of the state. The post-communist Russia of the 1990s, led by Boris N. Yeltsin, the country’s first freely elected leader, had sundered.

In 1993, Mr. Yeltsin ordered the Parliament shelled to put down an insurgency; 147 people were killed. The West had to provide Russia with humanitarian aid, so dire was its economic collapse, so pervasive its extreme poverty, as large swaths of industry were sold off for a song to an emergent class of oligarchs. All this, to Mr. Putin, represented mayhem. It was humiliation.

“He hated what happened to Russia, hated the idea the West had to help it,” said Christoph Heusgen, the chief diplomatic adviser to former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany between 2005 and 2017. Mr. Putin’s first political manifesto for the 2000 presidential campaign was all about reversing Western efforts to transfer power from the state to the marketplace. “For Russians,” he wrote, “a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against.” Quite the contrary, “it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any change.”

But Mr. Putin was no Marxist, even if he reinstated the Stalin-era national anthem. He had seen the disaster of a centralized planned economy, both in Russia and East Germany, where he served as a K.G.B. agent between 1985 and 1990.

The new president would work with the oligarchs created by chaotic, free-market, crony capitalism — so long as they showed absolute fealty. Failing that, they would be expunged. If this was democracy, it was “sovereign democracy,” a phrase embraced by Mr. Putin’s top political strategists, stress on the first word.

Marked, to some degree, by his home city of St. Petersburg, built by Peter the Great in the early 18th century as a “window to Europe,” and by his initial political experience there from 1991 working in the mayor’s office to attract foreign investment, Mr. Putin does appear to have been guardedly open to the West early in his rule.

He mentioned the possibility of Russian membership of NATO to President Bill Clinton in 2000, an idea that never went anywhere. He maintained a Russian partnership agreement signed with the European Union in 1994. A NATO-Russia Council was established in 2002. Petersburg man vied with Homo Sovieticus.

This was a delicate balancing act, for which the disciplined Mr. Putin was prepared. “You should never lose control,” he told the American movie director Oliver Stone in “The Putin Interviews,” a 2017 documentary. He once described himself as “an expert in human relations.” German lawmakers were not alone in being seduced by this man of impassive features and implacable intent, honed as an intelligence operative.

“You must understand, he is from the K.G.B., lying is his profession, it is not a sin,” said Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador in Moscow from 2017 to 2020. “He is like a mirror, adapting to what he sees, in the way he was trained.”

A few months before the Bundestag speech, Mr. Putin famously won over President George W. Bush, who, after their first meeting in June 2001, said he had looked into the Russian president’s eyes, gotten “a sense of his soul” and found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Mr. Yeltsin, similarly swayed, anointed Mr. Putin as his successor just three years after he arrived in Moscow in 1996.

“Putin orients himself very precisely to a person,” Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man before he served a decade in a Siberian penal colony and had his company forcibly broken up, told me in an interview in 2016 in Washington. “If he wants you to like him, you will like him.”

The previous time I had seen Mr. Khodorkovsky, in Moscow in October 2003, was just days before his arrest by armed agents on embezzlement charges. He had been talking to me then about his bold political ambitions — a lèse-majesté unacceptable to Mr. Putin.

An Authoritarian’s Rise

The wooded presidential estate outside Moscow was comfortable but not ornate. In 2003, Mr. Putin’s personal tastes did not yet run to palatial grandiosity. Security guards lounged around, gawking at TVs showing fashion models on the runways of Milan and Paris.

Mr. Putin, as he likes to do, kept us waiting for many hours. It seemed a small demonstration of one-upmanship, a minor incivility he would inflict even on Ms. Rice, similar to bringing his dog into a meeting with Ms. Merkel in 2007 when he knew she was scared of dogs.

“I understand why he has to do this,” Ms. Merkel said. “To prove he’s a man.”

When the interview with three New York Times journalists at last began, Mr. Putin was cordial and focused, comfortable in his strong command of detail. “We firmly stand on the path of development of democracy and of a market economy,” he said, adding, “By their mentality and culture, the people of Russia are Europeans.”

He spoke of “good, close relations” with the Bush administration, despite the Iraq war, and said “the main principles of humanism — human rights, freedom of speech — remain fundamental for all countries.” The greatest lesson of his education, he said, was “respect for the law.”

At this time, Mr. Putin had already clamped down on independent media; prosecuted a brutal war in Chechnya involving the leveling of Grozny, its capital; and placed security officials — known as siloviki — front and center in his governance. Often, they were old St. Petersburg buddies, like Nikolai Patrushev, now the secretary of Mr. Putin’s security council. The first rule of an intelligence officer is suspicion.

When asked about his methods, the president bristled, suggesting America could not claim any moral high ground. “We have a proverb in Russia,” he said. “One should not criticize a mirror if you have a crooked face.”

The overriding impression was of a man divided behind his unflinching gaze. Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin,” said there was “a varnish of liberalism to his discourse in the early 2000s,” but the pull of restoring Russian imperial might, and so avenging Russia’s perceived relegation to what President Barack Obama would call “a regional power,” was always Mr. Putin’s deepest urge.

Born in 1952 in a city then called Leningrad, Mr. Putin grew up in the shadow of the Soviets’ war with Nazi Germany, known to Russians as the Great Patriotic War. His father was badly wounded, an older brother died during the brutal 872-day German siege of the city, and a grandfather had worked for Stalin as a cook. The immense sacrifices of the Red Army in defeating Nazism were not abstract but palpable within his modest family, as for many Russians of his generation. Mr. Putin learned young that, as he put it, “the weak get beat.”

“The West did not take sufficient account of the strength of Soviet myth, military sacrifice and revanchism in him,” Mr. Eltchaninoff, whose grandparents were all Russian, said. “He believes deeply that Russian man is prepared to sacrifice himself for an idea, whereas Western man likes success and comfort.”

Mr. Putin brought a measure of that comfort to Russia in the first eight years of his presidency. The economy galloped ahead, foreign investment poured in. “It was perhaps the happiest time in the country’s life, with a measure of prosperity and level of freedom never matched in Russian history,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Mr. Gabuev, who, like thousands of liberal Russians, has fled to Istanbul since the war in Ukraine began, added that “there was a lot of corruption and concentration of wealth, but also lots of boats rising. And remember, in the 1990s, everyone had been poor as a church mouse.” Now the middle class could vacation in Turkey or Vietnam.

The problem for Mr. Putin was that to diversify an economy, the rule of law helps. He had studied law at St. Petersburg University and claimed to respect it. In fact, power proved to be his lodestone. He held legal niceties in contempt. “Why would he share power when he could live off oil, gas, other natural resources, and enough redistribution to keep people happy?” Mr. Gabuev said.

Timothy Snyder, the prominent historian of fascism, put it this way: “Having toyed with an authoritarian rule-of-law state, he simply become the oligarch-in-chief and turned the state into the enforcer mechanism of his oligarchical clan.”

Still, the biggest country on earth, stretching across 11 time zones, needed more than economic recovery to stand tall once more. Mr. Putin had been formed in a Soviet world that held that Russia was not a great power unless it dominated its neighbors. Rumblings at the country’s doorstep challenged that doctrine.

In November 2003, the Rose Revolution in Georgia set that country firmly on a Western course. In 2004 — the year of NATO’s second post-Cold War expansion, which brought in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia — massive street protests, known as the Orange Revolution, erupted in Ukraine. They, too, stemmed from a rejection of Moscow and the embrace of a Western future.

Mr. Putin’s turn from cooperation with the West to confrontation began. It would be slow but the general direction was set. Once, asked by Ms. Merkel what his greatest mistake had been, the Russian president replied: “To trust you.”

A Clash With the West

From 2004 onward, a distinct hardening of Mr. Putin’s Russia — what Ms. Rice, the former secretary of state, called “a crackdown where they were starting to spin these tales of vulnerability and democratic contagion” — became evident.

The president scrapped elections for regional governors in late 2004, turning them into Kremlin appointees. Russian TV increasingly looked like Soviet TV in its undiluted propaganda.

In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist critical of rights abuses in Chechnya, was murdered in Moscow on Mr. Putin’s birthday. Another Kremlin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence agent, who had dubbed Russia “a mafia state,” was killed in London, poisoned with a radioactive substance by Russian spies.

For Mr. Putin, NATO expansion into countries that had been part of the Soviet Union or its postwar East European imperium represented an American betrayal. But the threat of a successful Western democracy on his doorstep appears to have evolved into a more immediate perceived threat to his increasingly repressive system.

“Putin’s nightmare is not NATO, but democracy,” said Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister who met with Mr. Putin several times. “It’s the color revolutions, thousands of people on the streets of Kyiv. Once he embraced an imperial, military ideology as the foundation of Russia as a world power, he was unable to tolerate this.”

Although Mr. Putin has portrayed a West-leaning Ukraine as a threat to Russian security, it was more immediately a threat to Putin’s authoritarian system itself. Radek Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, said: “Putin is of course right that a democratic Ukraine integrated with Europe and successful is a mortal threat to Putinism. That, more than NATO membership, is the issue.”

The Russian president does not take well to mortal threats, real or imagined. If anyone had doubted Mr. Putin’s ruthlessness, they stood corrected by 2006. His loathing of weakness dictated a proclivity for violence. Yet Western democracies were slow to absorb this basic lesson.

They needed Russia, and not only for its oil and gas. The Russian president, who was the first to call President Bush after 9/11, was an important potential ally in what came to be called the Global War on Terror. It meshed with his own war in Chechnya and with a tendency to see himself as part of a civilizational battle on behalf of Christianity.

But Mr. Putin was far less comfortable with Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda,” announced in his second inaugural of January 2005, a commitment to promote democracy across the world in pursuit of a neoconservative vision. In every stirring for liberty, Mr. Putin now saw the hidden hand of the United States. And why would Mr. Bush not include Russia in his ambitious program?

Arriving in Moscow as the U.S. ambassador in 2005, William Burns, now the C.I.A. director, sent a sober cable, all post-Cold War optimism dispelled. “Russia is too big, too proud, and too self-conscious of its own history to fit neatly into a ‘Europe whole and free,’” he wrote. As he relates in his memoir, “The Back Channel,” Mr. Burns added that Russian “interest in playing a distinctive Great Power role” would “sometimes cause significant problems.”

When François Hollande, the former French president, met Mr. Putin several years later, he was surprised to find him referring to Americans as “Yankees” — and in scathing terms. These Yankees had “humiliated us, put us in second position,” Mr. Putin told him. NATO was an organization “aggressive by its nature,” used by the United States to put Russia under pressure, even to stir democracy movements.

“He expressed himself in a cold and calculating way,” Mr. Hollande said. “He is a man who always wants to demonstrate a kind of implacable determination, but also in the form of seduction, almost gentleness. An agreeable tone alternates with brutal outbursts, which are thereby made more effective.”

The more assured he grew in his power, the more Mr. Putin appears to have reverted to the hostility toward the United States in which he was formed. The NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999 during the Kosovo War, and the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, had already given him a healthy distrust of American invocations of the United Nations Charter and international law. Convinced of the exceptionalism of Russia, its inevitable fate to be a great power, he could not abide American exceptionalism, the perception of America throwing its power around in the name of some unique destiny, an inherent mission to spread freedom in a world where the United States was the sole hegemon.

These grudges came to a head in Mr. Putin’s ferocious speech in 2007 to the Munich Security Conference. “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he declared to a shocked audience. A “unipolar world” had been imposed after the Cold War with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making.”

The result was a world “in which there is one master, one sovereign, and at the end of the day this is pernicious.” More than pernicious, it was “extremely dangerous,” resulting “in the fact that nobody feels safe.”

The Threat of NATO Expansion

After the Munich speech, Germany still had hopes for Mr. Putin. Ms. Merkel, raised in East Germany, a Russian speaker, had formed a relationship with him. Mr. Putin put his two children in Moscow’s German school after his return from Dresden. He liked to quote from German poems. “There was an affinity,” said Mr. Heusgen, her top diplomatic adviser. “An understanding.”

Working with Mr. Putin could not mean dictating to him, however. “We deeply believed it would not be good to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO,” Mr. Heusgen said. “They would bring instability.” Article 10 of the NATO Treaty, as Mr. Heusgen noted, says any new member must be in a position to “contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” Just how the two contested countries would do that was unclear to Ms. Merkel.

The United States, however, with the Bush presidency in its last year, was in no mood to compromise. Mr. Bush wanted a “Membership Action Plan,” or MAP, for Ukraine and Georgia, a specific commitment to bringing the two countries into the alliance, to be announced at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. NATO expansion had ensured the security and freedom of 100 million Europeans liberated from the totalitarian Soviet imperium; it should not stop.

Mr. Burns, as ambassador, was opposed. In a then-classified message to Ms. Rice, he wrote: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Already, in February 2008, the United States and many of its allies had recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, a unilateral declaration rejected as illegal by Russia and seen as an affront to a fellow Slav nation. Ms. Bermann, the former French ambassador to Moscow, recalled Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, warning her at the time: “Be careful, it’s a precedent, it will be used against you.”

France joined Germany in Bucharest in opposing the MAP for Georgia and Ukraine. “Germany wanted nothing,” Ms. Rice recalled. “It said you could not take in a country with a frozen conflict like Georgia” — an allusion to the tense standoff between Georgia and the breakaway, Russian-backed, self-declared republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

To which Mr. Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, retorted: “You were a frozen conflict for 45 years!”

The compromise was messy. The NATO leaders’ declaration said that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” But it stopped short of endorsing an action plan that would make such membership possible. Ukraine and Georgia were left with an empty promise, consigned to drift indefinitely in a strategic no man’s land, while Russia was at once angered and offered a glimpse of a division it could later exploit.

“Today we look at the statement and think it was the worst of all worlds,” said Thomas Bagger, the departing senior diplomatic adviser to the German president.

Mr. Putin came to Bucharest and delivered what Ms. Rice described as an “emotional speech,” suggesting Ukraine was a made-up country, noting the presence of 17 million Russians there, and calling Kyiv the mother of all Russian cities — a claim that would develop into an obsession.

To Mr. Sikorski, Mr. Putin’s speech was not surprising. He had received a letter that year from Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, a fierce Russian nationalist who was then the deputy speaker of the Duma, suggesting that Poland and Russia simply partition Ukraine. “I did not respond,” Mr. Sikorski said. “We are not in the business of changing borders.”

Still, for all the differences, Mr. Putin had not yet hardened into outright hostility. President Bush and Ms. Rice proceeded to Mr. Putin’s favored resort of Sochi on the Black Sea Coast.

Mr. Putin showed off the sites planned for the 2014 Winter Olympics. He introduced them to Dmitri A. Medvedev, his longtime associate who would become president in May, as part of a choreographed maneuver to respect Russian’s constitutional term limits but allow Mr. Putin to return to the Kremlin in 2012 after a spell as prime minister.

There were Cossack dancers. Some Americans danced and the mood there was very good.

Three months later, a five-day war erupted in Georgia. Russia called it a “peace enforcement” operation. Having provoked an impetuous Georgian attack on its proxy forces in South Ossetia, Russia invaded Georgia. Its strategic goal was to neutralize any ambitions for Georgian NATO membership; this was largely achieved. Moscow recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, integrating them into Russia.

Mr. Putin, in his deliberate manner, had drawn a first line in the sand, with no meaningful Western response.

Us Versus Them

On May 7, 2012, as a 30-gun salute echoed over Moscow and riot police officers in camouflage rounded up protesters, Mr. Putin returned to the Russian presidency. Bristling and increasingly convinced of Western perfidy and decadence, he was in many respects a changed man.

The outbreak of large street protests five months earlier, with marchers bearing signs that said “Putin is a thief,” had cemented his conviction that the United States was determined to bring a color revolution to Russia. The demonstrations erupted after parliamentary elections in December 2011 that were widely viewed as fraudulent by domestic and international observers. The unrest was eventually crushed.

Mr. Putin accused then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of being the primary instigator. “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” he said. Ms. Clinton retorted that, in line with America’s values, “we expressed concerns that we thought were well founded about the conduct of the elections.”

So much for the Obama administration’s attempts at a “reset” in relations with Russia over the four years that the milder Mr. Medvedev, who was always beholden to Mr. Putin, spent in office.

Still, the idea that Mr. Putin posed any serious threat to American interests was largely dismissed in a Washington focused on defeating Al Qaeda. After Gov. Mitt Romney said that the biggest geopolitical threat facing the United States was Russia, he was mocked by President Obama.

“The Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Mr. Obama said by way of contemptuous instruction during a 2012 presidential debate.

Russia, under American pressure, had abstained in a 2011 United Nations Security Council vote for military intervention in Libya, which authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. When this mission, in Mr. Putin’s perception, morphed into the pursuit of the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who was killed by Libyan forces, the Russian president was furious. This was yet further confirmation of America’s international lawlessness.

Something else was at work. “He was haunted by the brutal takeout of Qaddafi,” said Mark Medish, who was senior director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton presidency. “I was told that he replayed the videos again and again.” The elimination of a dictator felt personal.

Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria and now a special adviser to the Institut Montaigne think tank in Paris, places Mr. Putin’s definitive “choice of repolarization” in 2012. China had risen, offering new strategic options. “He had become convinced that the West was in decline after the 2008 financial crisis,” Mr. Duclos said. “The way forward now was confrontation.”

In this clash, Mr. Putin had armed himself with cultural and religious reinforcements. He cast himself as the macho embodiment of conservative Orthodox Christian values against the West’s irreligious embrace of same-sex marriage, radical feminism, homosexuality, mass immigration and other manifestations of “decadence.”

The United States and its allies, in Mr. Putin’s telling, were intent on globalizing these subversive values under cover of democracy promotion and human rights. Saint Russia would stand against this baleful homogenization. Putinism, as it was now fleshed out, stood against a godless and insinuating West. Moscow had an ideology once more. It was one of conservative resistance, and it appealed to rightist leaders across Europe and beyond.

It was also, it seems, a reflection of something more. When, in the Oliver Stone documentary, Mr. Putin is asked if he ever has “bad days,” his response is: “I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days.” Pressed a little by the generally deferential Mr. Stone, the Russian president opines, “That’s just the nature of things.”

Later, Mr. Stone asks about gays and the military. “If you are taking a shower in a submarine with a man and you know he is gay, do you have a problem with that?” Mr. Putin replies: “Well, I prefer not to go to the shower with him. Why provoke him? But you know, I’m a judo master.”

This, apparently, was meant as a joke.

But Mr. Putin was not joking about his conservative challenge to Western culture. It allowed him to develop his own support in Europe among hard-right parties like the French National Rally, formerly the National Front, that received a loan from a Russian bank. Autocratic nationalism revived its appeal, challenging the democratic liberalism that the Russian leader would pronounce “obsolete” in 2019.

A number of fascist or nationalist writers and historians with mystical ideas of Russian destiny and fate, prominent among them Ivan Ilyin, increasingly influenced Mr. Putin’s thinking. Ilyin saw the Russian soldier as “the will, the force and the honor of the Russian state” and wrote, “My prayer is like a sword. And my sword is like a prayer.” Mr. Putin took to citing him frequently.

“By the time Putin returns to the Kremlin he has an ideology, a spiritual cover for his kleptocracy,” said Mr. Snyder, the historian. “Russia now extends however far its leader decides. It’s all about eternal Russia, a mash-up of the last 1,000 years. Ukraine is ours, always ours, because God says so, and never mind the facts.”

When Mr. Putin traveled to Kyiv in July 2013, on a visit to mark the 1,025th anniversary of the conversion to Christianity of Prince Vladimir of the Kyivan Rus, he vowed to protect “our common Fatherland, Great Rus.” Later he would have a statue of Vladimir erected in front of the Kremlin.

For Ukraine, however, such Russian “protection” had become little more than a thinly veiled threat, whatever the extensive cultural, linguistic and family ties between the two countries.

“Poland has been invaded many times by Russia,” Mr. Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, said. “But remember, Russia never invades. It just comes to the assistance of endangered Russian-speaking minorities.”

A Leader Emboldened

The 22-year arc of Mr. Putin’s exercise of power is in many ways a study of growing audacity. Intent at first at restoring order in Russia and gaining international respect — especially in the West — he became convinced that a Russia rich in oil revenue and new high-tech weaponry could strut the world, deploy military force and meet scant resistance.

“Power, for the Russians, is arms. It is not the economy,” said Ms. Bermann, the former French ambassador, who closely followed Mr. Putin’s steady militarization of Russian society during her time in Moscow. She was particularly struck by the grandiose video display of advanced nuclear and hypersonic weaponry presided over by the president in a March 2018 address to the nation.

“Nobody listened to us,” Mr. Putin proclaimed. “Listen to us now.” He also said, “Efforts to contain Russia have failed.”

If Mr. Putin was, as he now seemed to believe, the personification of Russia’s mystical great-power destiny, all constraints were off. “When I first met him you had to lean in a little to understand what he was saying,” said Ms. Rice, the former secretary of state. “I’ve seen Putin go from a little shy, to pretty shy, to arrogant, and now megalomaniacal.”

An important moment in this development appears to have come with Mr. Obama’s last-minute decision in 2013 not to bomb Syria after Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, crossed an American “red line” against using chemical weapons. Mr. Obama took the case for war to a reluctant Congress instead, and under the lingering American threat and pressure from Moscow, Mr. al-Assad agreed to the destruction of the weapons.

The hesitation appears to have left an impression on Mr. Putin. “It was decisive, I think,” said Mr. Hollande, the former French president, who had readied warplanes to take part in the planned military strike. “Decisive for American credibility, and that had consequences. After that, I believe, Mr. Putin considered Mr. Obama weak.”

Certainly, Mr. Putin rapidly ramped up his efforts to expand Russian power.

Ukraine, by ousting its Moscow-backed leader in a bloody popular uprising in February 2014, and so de facto rejecting Mr. Putin’s multibillion-dollar blandishments to join his Eurasian Union rather than pursue an association agreement with the European Union, committed the unpardonable. This, for Mr. Putin, was the devouring specter of color revolution made real. It was, he insisted, an American-backed “coup.”

Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea and orchestration of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two Russian-backed breakaway regions followed.

Two decades earlier, in 1994, Russia had signed an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up its vast nuclear arsenal in exchange for a promise of respect for its sovereignty and existing borders. But Mr. Putin had no interest in that commitment.

Mr. Heusgen said a breaking point for Ms. Merkel came when she asked Mr. Putin about the “little green men” — masked Russian soldiers — who appeared in Crimea before the Russian annexation in March 2014. “I have nothing to do with them,” Mr. Putin responded, unconvincingly.

“He lied to her — lies, lies, lies,” Mr. Heusgen said. “From then on, she was much more skeptical about Mr. Putin.” She would tell Mr. Obama that the Russian leader was “living in another world.”

Later, when Mr. Putin ordered Russian forces into Syria and, in 2016, embarked on the ferocious bombardment of Aleppo, Ms. Merkel told him the bombing had to stop. But the Russian leader would have none of it.

“He said there were some Chechen fighters and terrorists there, and he did not want them back, and he would bomb the whole of Aleppo to get rid of them,” Mr. Heusgen said. “It was of an absolute brutality. I mean, how brutal can you get?”

Lies and brutality: The core methods of late Putin were clear enough. For anyone who was listening, Mr. Lavrov, the foreign minister, had made that evident at the 2015 Munich Security Conference.

In a speech as violent as Mr. Putin’s in 2007, Mr. Lavrov accused Ukrainians of engaging in an orgy of “nationalistic violence” characterized by ethnic purges directed against Jews and Russians. The annexation of Crimea occurred because a popular uprising demanded “the right of self-determination” under the United Nations Charter, he claimed.

The United States, in Mr. Lavrov’s account, was driven by an insatiable desire for global dominance. Europe, once the Cold War ended, should have built “the common European house” — a “free economic zone” from Lisbon to Vladivostok — rather than expand NATO eastward.

But not many people were listening. The United States and most of Europe — less so the states closest to Russia — glided on in the seldom-questioned belief that the Russian threat, while growing, was contained; that Mr. Putin was a rational man whose use of force involved serious cost-benefit analysis; and that European peace was assured. The oligarchs continued to make “Londongrad” their home; Britain’s Conservative Party was glad to take money from them. Prominent figures in Germany, France and Austria were happy to accept well-paid Russian sinecures. They included Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, and François Fillon, the former French prime minister. Russian oil and gas poured into Europe.

Prominent intellectuals, including Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, the perpetual secretary of the Académie Française and a specialist in Russian history, defended Mr. Putin strongly, even in the run-up to the war in Ukraine. “The United States applied itself to humiliating Russia,” she told a French TV interviewer, suggesting the simultaneous dissolution of NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have better served the world.

As for former President Donald J. Trump, he never had a critical word for Mr. Putin, preferring to believe him rather than his own intelligence services on the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

“With hindsight, we should have started long ago what we now need to do in a rush,” Mr. Bagger, the senior German diplomat, said. “Strengthen our military and diversify energy supplies. Instead we went along and expanded resource flows from Russia. And we dragged along a hollowed-out army.”

He added: “We did not realize that Putin had spun himself into a historical mythology and was thinking in categories of a 1,000-year empire. You cannot deter someone like that with sanctions.”

The War in Ukraine

The unthinkable can happen. Russia’s war of choice in Ukraine is proof of that. Watching it unfold, Ms. Bermann told me she had been reminded of lines from “The Human Stain” by Philip Roth: “The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.”

In the isolation of Covid-19, apparently redoubled by the germaphobia that has led the Russian leader to impose what Mr. Bagger called “extraordinary arrangements” for anyone meeting him, all Mr. Putin’s obsessions about the 25 million Russians lost to their motherland at the breakup of the Soviet Union seem to have coagulated.

“Something happened,” said Ms. Bermann, who was greeted by a smiling Mr. Putin when she presented her credentials as ambassador in 2017. “He speaks with a new rage and fury, a kind of folly.”

Ms. Rice was similarly struck. “Something is definitely different,” she said. “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.”

After President Emmanuel Macron of France met with Putin at opposite ends of a 20-foot table last month, he told journalists on his plane that he found him more stiff, isolated and ideologically unyielding than at their previous meeting in 2019. Mr. Macron’s aides described Mr. Putin as physically changed, his face puffy. “Paranoid” was the word chosen by the French president’s top diplomatic adviser to describe a speech by Mr. Putin just before the war.

That Ukraine got to Mr. Putin in some deeply disturbing way is evident in the 5,000-word tract on “The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” that he penned in his isolation last summer and had distributed to members of the armed forces. Marshaling arguments ranging back to the ninth century, he said that “Russia was robbed, indeed.” Ukraine was now home to “radicals and neo-Nazis” intent on effacing any trace of Russia.

“We will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia,” he wrote. “And to those who will undertake such an attempt, I would like to say that this way they will destroy their own country.”

His intent, in hindsight, was clear enough, many months before the invasion. It appeared so to Mr. Eltchaninoff, the French author. “The religion of war had installed itself,” he said. “Putin had replaced the real with a myth.”

But why now? The West, Mr. Putin had long since concluded, was weak, divided, decadent, given over to private consumption and promiscuity. Germany had a new leader, and France an imminent election. A partnership with China had been cemented. Poor intelligence persuaded him Russian troops would be greeted as liberators in wide swaths of eastern Ukraine, at least. Covid-19, Mr. Bagger said, “had given him a sense of urgency, that time was running out.”

Mr. Hollande, the former president, had a simpler explanation: “Putin was drunk on his success. In recent years, he has won enormously.” In Crimea, in Syria, in Belarus, in Africa, in Kazakhstan. “Putin tells himself, ‘I am advancing everywhere. Where am I in retreat? Nowhere!’”

That is no longer the case. In a single stroke, Mr. Putin has galvanized NATO, ended Swiss neutrality and German postwar pacifism, united an often fragmented European Union, hobbled the Russian economy for years to come, provoked a massive exodus of educated Russians and reinforced the very thing he denied had ever existed, in a way that will prove indelible: Ukrainian nationhood. He has been outmaneuvered by the agile and courageous Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a man he mocked.

“He has undone on a coin-flip the achievements of his presidency,” said Mr. Gabuev, the Carnegie Moscow senior fellow now in Istanbul. For Mr. Hollande, “Mr. Putin has committed the irremediable.”

President Biden has called Mr. Putin a “brute,” a “war criminal” and a “killer.” “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” he said in Poland on Saturday. Yet the Russian leader retains deep reserves of support in Russia, and tight control over his security services.

That power corrupts is well known. An immense distance seems to separate the man who won over the Bundestag in 2001 with a conciliatory speech and the ranting leader berating the “national traitors” seduced by the West who “can’t do without foie gras, oysters or the so-called gender freedoms,” as he put it in his scum-and-traitors speech this month. If nuclear war remains a remote possibility, it is far less remote than a month ago — a subject of regular dinner-table conversations across Europe as Mr. Putin pursues the “de-Nazification” of a country whose leader is Jewish.

It is as if, after a flirtation with a new idea — a Russia integrated with the West — Mr. Putin, who will be 70 this year, reverted to something deeper in his psyche: the world of his childhood after The Great Patriotic War had been won, with Russia in his head again liberating Ukrainians from Nazism, and Stalin restored to heroic stature.

With his assault on independent media completed, his insistence that the invasion is not a “war,” and his liquidation of Memorial International, the leading human rights organization chronicling Stalin-era persecution, Mr. Putin has circled back to his roots in a totalitarian country.

Mr. Röttgen, who stood to applaud Mr. Putin 21 years ago, told me: “I think at this point he either wins or he’s done. Done politically, or done physically.”

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz .

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified Russian armored vehicles. They were not tanks.

How we handle corrections

Roger Cohen is the Paris bureau chief of The Times. He was a columnist from 2009 to 2020. He has worked for The Times for 33 years and has served as a foreign correspondent and foreign editor. In 2023 he won a Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize as part of Times teams covering the war in Ukraine. Raised in South Africa and Britain, he is a naturalized American. More about Roger Cohen

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

At least 17 people were killed and scores more injured when three Russian missiles struck a busy downtown district of Chernihiv , north of Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said.

The top American military commander in Europe warned that Ukraine could lose the war with Russia  if the United States did not send more ammunition to Ukrainian forces, and fast.

Ukrainian lawmakers passed a mobilization law aimed at replenishing the nation’s exhausted and depleted fighting forces .

A U.S. Lawmaker Speaks Out : Representative Chuck Edwards, a Republican from North Carolina, has emerged as a vocal proponent of U.S. aid to Ukraine in a party that has grown hostile to it. He discussed his recent trip there  in a Q. and A.

Hollowing Out a Generation: Ukraine desperately needs new recruits, but it is running up against a critical demographic constraint long in the making: It has very few young men .

Conditional Support: Ukraine wants a formal invitation to join NATO, but the alliance has no appetite for taking on a new member  that would draw it into the biggest land war in Europe since 1945.

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions  to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

We monitor and authenticate reports on social media, corroborating these with eyewitness accounts and interviews. Read more about our reporting efforts .

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A life on the world stage, but scant biographical details: What we know of the life of Vladimir Putin

• He was born 1952 in what used to be Leningrad, USSR and is now St. Petersburg,, Russia.
• Over the last 20 years, Putin has consolidated his grip on power by transforming many Russian institutions.
• Because of his political longevity, Putin has seen five U.S. presidents come and four go.

MOSCOW – For as long as he's been in the public eye, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been a closed book, with relatively few confirmed facts about his real thinking on foreign affairs and what motivates his policy actions. His personal life, too, has been shrouded in mystery and controversy.

And now the Putin enigma is testing the world again because of fears he may launch an invasion of Ukraine, Russia's western neighbor, and what this could mean for Ukraine's fragile democracy and the broader U.S. and European security order in place on the continent for decades.

With the crisis deepening, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken are expected to meet for talks in Europe next week. But President Joe Biden, while leaving the door to diplomacy open, left no doubt Friday that he's "convinced" Putin has already made up his mind  to invade.  

Here are some basics of what is known about Putin. Subscribers can read a more in-depth story about Russia's longest-serving leader here .

Putin's early days

Putin was born 1952 in what used to be called Leningrad, USSR, and is now known as St. Petersburg, Russia. He served for 15 years in the KGB, the Soviet-era agency that was the counterpart to the CIA. The spy agency was a notorious symbol of the Cold War and became the focus of a slew of U.S. spy novels and movies.

During that time, in 1983, he married a flight attendant named Lyudmila. They had two daughters, Mariya and Katerina. Putin and Lyudmila divorced in 2013. He may have another child, possibly with former Russian gymnastics champion Alina Kabaeva. 

By 1994, Putin had become deputy mayor in the city of his birth, and by 1998, the director of the FSB, the KBG's domestic successor. A year later, Putin was prime minister, then president – one of two positions he's held ever since. 

Trouble at home

Over the last two decades, Putin has consolidated his grip on power by transforming Russia's courts, media and other governance institutions to serve the whims of one person: himself. He has spent lavishly on the the military, banned or jailed opposition politicians and journalists and cultivated support from right-wing, nationalist groups. He changed Russia's constitution so he can stay in power until 2036, perhaps even longer. 

Putin has also presided over a growing Russian middle class, modernized some areas of Russia's economy such as in banking and technology and weathered successive financial crises because of Russia's enormous strategic oil and gas reserves. He has sought to crack down on dissent by banning restricting free speech on the Internet. 

On the world stage

Because of his political longevity, Putin has seen five U.S. presidents come and four go. During this time there has been cooperation on trade, nuclear and ballistic missile treaties, fighting terrorism and more.

There has also been sharp divergence – on human rights, on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, on the rule of law, on Moscow's apparent or at least tacit support for cyber-hackers, and on what countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, formed in the wake of the Soviet Union's break-up in 1991 , should be allowed to do in terms of carving out their own cultural and ideological destinies.

What is NATO?: Military alliance in spotlight as Russia tries to forbid Ukraine membership

Ukraine has aspirations to join the 30-nation NATO military alliance that was formed in the wake of World War II to help keep the peace in Europe. It seeks to lean west toward democracies in the European Union.

The NATO bloc's gradual encroachment east toward countries that border Russia is seen by Putin as a threat to Moscow's security and sphere of influence. It is this, partly, analysts believe, that underpinned Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Moscow's support for separatist rebels in Ukraine's Donbass region, where fighting has raged for eights years and is now the subject of an intense international spotlight because of what it could say about Putin's invasion plans. 

What the people want

Ordinary Russians, meanwhile, are more afraid today than they have been for 30 years that Putin could drag their country into a full-scale war with Ukraine, according to Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent research organization.

Some 62% of Russians surveyed by the Levada Center said they were worried Russia could be facing "World War III," Gudkov told USA TODAY.  

In Ukraine, a survey released Friday by research firm Rating Sociological Group found that 25% of respondents saw little-to-no threat of a Russian invasion; 19% of those surveyed said there was a "high" chance Moscow could invade. 

Biography Online

Vladimir Putin Biography

Vladimir  Putin (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician who served as Russian President from 2000 to 2008, and from 2012 onwards. Between 2008-2012, he served as Russian Prime Minister making him the most powerful and de facto leader in Russia during this time in office. Since 2012 he has served as Russian President and has embarked on efforts to strengthen “Russia’s strategic interests” culminating in the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Putin studied Law at Leningrad State University, writing a PhD thesis on the importance of energy policy for future Russian economic success. After graduating in 1975, he joined the KGB. He was involved in monitoring foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad. From 1985 to 1990 he was posted to Dresden, East Germany. On the collapse of the East German government, he returned to Leningrad where he was involved in surveillance of the student body.

In August 1981, there was an attempted coup by Communist hard-liners with links to military and KGB against Mikhail Gorbachev . On the second day of the putsch, Putin resigned from the KGB and sought to pursue a political career. Putin said the decision to resign from the KGB was hard, but he didn’t support the direction of the coup and the hard-liners.

In 1997, Boris Yeltsin appointed him to the position of deputy chief of the Presidential staff. In 1999, with the backing of Yeltsin, he was voted as Prime Minister of Russia. When Yeltsin, unexpectedly resigned a few months later, Putin became the default President of Russia.

During the early years of his Presidency, Putin gained substantial popular backing because of his hard-line on military issues (such as the war in Chechnya) and overseeing a return to economic stability. He cultivated a macho ‘action man’ image of fearless leader and sportsman, helped by his sporting and KGB past. This image was attractive to voters. After a decade of inflation and falling living standards, during the 2000s, Russia embarked on a sustained period of economic growth, falling unemployment and rising living standards. The strong performance of the economy was attributable to the rising price of oil and gas (increasing value of Russia’s exports) and strong macroeconomic management.

Early in his leadership, he came to an arrangement with the new Russian ‘oligarchs’ powerful businessmen who had gained control of formerly state-owned industries. Putin made a deal where they agreed to start paying tax and avoiding politics, in return for leaving them free to pursue their business interests. This helped raise revenue for the government and reduced the political influence of the Oligarchs.

In 2008, unable to run for a third term as President, he ran for Prime minister, with his dual political aid Medvedev becoming President. However, it was Putin who remained the most powerful figure.

In 2012, Putin was re-elected for a third term as President, however, for the first time, this led to widespread protests at the lack of democracy in Russia. Increasingly, Putin’s regime has been criticised for being dictatorial and avoiding a true democracy.

For example, former Russian President Gorbachev, who was initially a supporter of Putin said he was disappointed by the increased disrespect for democracy and authoritarian tendencies. In 2007, Gorbachev said Putin had ‘pulled Russia out of chaos’. But, in 2011 criticised Putin for seeking a third term as President. Gorbachev was severely critical of the 2011 elections. “The results do not reflect the will of the people,” Mr Gorbachev said at the time. “Therefore I think they [Russia’s leaders] can only take one decision – annul the results of the election and hold new ones.” ( Gorbachev calls on Putin to resign )

On July 28, 1983, Putin married Lyudmila Shkrebneva. They have two daughters, Maria Putina (born 1985) and Yekaterina (Katya) Putina (born 1986 in Dresden). Putin himself is a practising member of the Russian Orthodox Church. His religious awakening followed the serious car crash of his wife in 1993 and was deepened by a life-threatening fire that burned down their dacha in August 1996. Right before an official visit to Israel, his mother gave him his baptismal cross telling him to get it blessed “I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.”

Putin has been hailed by Patriarch Alexius II of the Russian Orthodox Church as instrumental in healing the 80-year schism between it and the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia in May 2007. Putin was supportive of the Russian Orthodox church in supporting the imprisonment of members of ‘Pussy Riot’ the pop group who protested about Putin and the Church. However, the decision to imprison members of Pussy Riot was widely condemned across the world for breaching human rights.

In March 2014, in the wake of turmoil in Ukraine, Putin authorised the use of Russian troops to enter the region of Crimea. Shortly after, a referendum was organised where a majority of people voted to leave the Ukraine and rejoin Russia. There was criticism over the legitimacy of the referendum, but Crimea has effectively left Ukraine for Russia. The issue over Ukraine has led to increased tension between Russia and the West.

2016 US election

During the 2016 US election, it was alleged that Russian operators sought to influence the 2016 Presidential election by posting social media items which helped Donald Trump and hindered Hilary Clinton. Similar allegations were made with regard to the UK vote on Brexit. Although Putin denies influencing elections, there is evidence Russian foreign policy is geared towards destabilising Western democracies and weakening the NATO alliance. A long-standing grievance of Putin is the eastward expansion of NATO after the end of the cold war.

Under Trump, the NATO alliance was weakened, with Trump being the most pro-Russian president in modern times. However, later actions in the Ukraine had the effect of uniting the west and made NATO membership for Finland and Sweden appear more attractive.

2018 Russian election

In 2018, Putin won a fourth Presidential term, with 76% of the vote. Political opponents argue the system is rigged with opposition candidates placed under arrest or prevented from actively campaigning. Putin has suggested he will not run again in 2024, but his party United Russia have a powerful monopoly on local and national elections, and it is not certain when this will be ended. Putin’s regime has become increasingly authoritarian with opposition leaders being given the choice of ‘go west or go east’ – West meant to leave the country, east means to the Siberian prison camps. Notable opposition leader Alexei Navalny survived an attempted poisoning but on surviving choose to return to Europe where he was arrested on trumped up charges.

2022 Ukraine invasion

In early 2022, Russian troops massed on the border of Ukraine, with US and UK authorities warning an invasion of Ukraine was imminent. This was denied by the Kremlin but on 25 February Russian armoured units entered Ukraine. Putin claimed it was a ‘special military operation’ but heavy fighting and shelling began on Ukraine’s major cities Kyiv and Kharkiv. In response to the illegal invasion, western countries imposed severe economic sanctions on Russia, which led to a sharp drop in the Ruble and Russian stock market. Many  analysts were surprised at the reckless gamble taken by Putin as it leaves the country increasingly isolated and an international pariah after being excluded from major sporting and cultural events as well as economic sanctions.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Vladimir Putin” , Oxford, UK.  www.biographyonline.net Published 23rd May 2012. Last updated 1 March 2022.

Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft

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Vladimir Putin Biography

Born: October 1, 1952 Leningrad, Russia Russian president

When Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister of Russia, very little was known about his background. This former Soviet intelligence agent entered politics in the early 1990s and rose rapidly. By August of 1999, ailing President Boris Yeltsin (1931–) appointed him prime minister. When Yeltsin stepped down in December of 1999, Putin became the acting president of Russia, and he was elected president to serve a full term on March 26, 2000.

Early life and education

Vladimir Putin was born on October 1, 1952, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia. An only child, his father was a foreman in a metal factory and his mother was a homemaker. Putin lived with his parents in an apartment with two other families. Though religion was not permitted in the Soviet Union, the former country which was made up of Russia and other smaller states, his mother secretly had him baptized as an Orthodox Christian.

Work in the KGB

At Leningrad State University, Putin graduated from the law department in 1975 but instead of entering the law field right out of school, Putin landed a job with the KGB, the only one in his class of one hundred to be chosen. The branch he was assigned to was responsible for recruiting foreigners who would work to gather information for KGB intelligence.

In the early 1980s Putin met and married his wife, Lyudmila, a former teacher of French and English. In 1985 the KGB sent him to Dresden, East Germany, where he lived undercover as Mr. Adamov, the director of the Soviet-German House of Friendship, a social and cultural club. Putin appeared to genuinely enjoy spending time with Germans, unlike many other KGB agents, and respected the German culture.

Around the time Putin went to East Germany, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–) was beginning to introduce economic and social reforms (improvements). Putin was apparently a firm believer in the changes. In 1989 the Berlin Wall, which stood for nearly forty years separating East from West Germany, was torn down and the two united. Though Putin supposedly had known that this was going to happen, he was disappointed that it occurred amid chaos and that the Soviet leadership had not managed it better.

Russian politics

In 1990 Putin returned to Leningrad and continued his undercover intelligence work for the KGB. In 1991, just as the Soviet Union was beginning to fall apart, Putin left the KGB with the rank of colonel, in order to get involved in politics. Putin went to work for Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg, as an aide and in 1994 became deputy mayor.

During Putin's time in city government, he reportedly helped the city build highways, telecommunications, and hotels, all to support foreign investment. Although St. Petersburg never grew to become the financial powerhouse that many had hoped, its fortunes improved as many foreign investors moved in, such as Coca-Cola and Japanese electronics firm NEC.

On to the Kremlin

In 1996, when Sobchak lost his mayoral campaign, Putin was offered a job with the victor, but declined out of loyalty. The next year, he was asked to join President Boris Yeltin's "inner circle" as deputy chief administrator of the Kremlin, the building that houses the Russian government. In March of 1999, he was named secretary of the Security Council, a body that advises the president on matters of foreign policy, national security, and military and law enforcement.

In August of 1999, after Yeltsin had gone through five prime ministers in seventeen months, he appointed Putin, who many thought was not worthy of succeeding the ill president. For one thing, he had little political experience; for another, his appearance and personality seemed boring. However, Putin increased his appeal among citizens for his role in pursuing the war in Chechnya. In addition to blaming various bombings in Moscow and elsewhere on Chechen terrorists, he also used harsh words in criticizing his enemies. Soon, Putin's popularity ratings began to soar.

Acting president of Russia

In December of 1999, Russia held elections for the 450-seat Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament (governing body). Putin's newly-formed Unity Party came in a close second to the Communists in a stunning showing. Though Putin was not a candidate in this election, he became the obvious front-runner in the upcoming presidential race scheduled for June of 2000.

On New Year's Eve in 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly stepped down as president, naming Putin as acting president. Immediately, Western news media and the U.S. government scrambled to create a profile of the new Russian leader. Due to Putin's secretive background as a KGB agent, there was little information. His history as a spy caused many Westerners and some Russians as well to question whether he should be feared as an enemy of the free world.

In Putin's first speech as acting president, he promised, "Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, the right to private property—these basic principles of a civilized society will be protected," according to a Newsweek report. In addition, Putin removed several of Yeltsin's loyalists and relatives from his cabinet.

Elected President

On March 26, 2000, Russians elected Putin out of a field of eleven candidates. After his election, Putin's first legislative move was to win approval of the Start II arms reduction treaty from the Duma. The deal, which was negotiated seven years earlier, involved decreasing both the Russian and American nuclear buildup by half. Putin's move on this issue was seen as a positive step in his willingness to develop a better relationship with the United States. In addition, one of Putin's earliest moves involved working with a team of economists to develop a plan to improve the country's economy. On May 7, 2000, Putin was officially sworn in as Russia's second president and its first in a free transfer of power in the nation's eleven-hundred-year history.

Putin, a soft-spoken and stone-faced man, keeps his personal life very private. In early 2000, an American publishing company announced that in May it would release an English-language translation of his memoirs, First Person, which was banned from publication in Russia until after the March 26 presidential election.

Putin has made great efforts to improve relations with the remaining world powers. In July 2001, Putin met with Chinese President Jiang Zemin (1926–) and the two signed a "friendship treaty" which called for improving trade between China and Russia and improving relations concerning U.S. plans for a missile defense system. Four months later, Putin visited Washington, D.C. to meet with President George W. Bush (1946–) over the defense system. Although they failed to reach a definite agreement, the two leaders did agree to drastically cut the number of nuclear arms in each country. Early in 2002, Putin traveled to Poland and became the first Russian president since 1993 to make this trip. Representatives of the two countries signed agreements involving business, trade, and transportation.

For More Information

Putin, Vladimir. First Person. New York: PublicAffairs, 2000.

Shields, Charles J. Vladimir Putin. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002.

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Putin, The Early Years

And yet, in his early years on the political stage, Putin did not stand out as a “rising star” whose rise to power was somehow preordained. Many in the U.S. government saw him, during his stint as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, as someone who was tough on crime and potentially helpful to U.S. interests. After Putin’s unforeseen rise to the presidency in May 2000, President George W. Bush famously said in June 2001 that he had looked in Putin’s soul and found him trustworthy. Though Bush was later criticized for the remark, Putin was cooperative in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. His vigor, sobriety, and firm hand stood in stark contrast to the intoxicated chaos of Boris Yeltsin and he became very popular among the Russian populace. The honeymoon with the West faded as Putin’s rule became authoritarian and his foreign policy more confrontational.

Thomas Pickering was Ambassador to Russia from 1993-96. John M. Evans served in the Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) for Russia and the Former Soviet States from 1999-2002; and as Director of the Office of Russian Affairs  from 2002-2004.   David J. Kramer served in the Office of Policy Planning for Russia and Eurasia from 2003-2005 and later as Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL). They were all interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy, Pickering beginning April 2003, Evans in October 2009, and Kramer in January 2011.

Go here to read other Moments on Russia/Soviet Union , including Russia’s role in Transnistria .

“He didn’t seem like a rising star”

Thomas Pickering, Ambassador to Russia, 1993-96

I suppose what one could have said — you know, [he’s the] kind of typical intelligence agent to talk to a foreign ambassador — he answered questions — I suspect not as fully as we would have liked. We all saw him as basically a kind of former KGB guy from a European posting who had come back and done reasonably well.

His approach to things was in those days was that he aligned with a liberal constitutionalist, Anatoly Sobchak, who was at heart a Jeffersonian and as a result was “part of the reform movement”. There were others in the consulate who had suspected that, in fact, he was also the source of major harassment of the consulate. We were never able I think, quite clearly to pin it on Putin, although he seemed to be the highest-ranking guy from the old bad days still around.

So more fingers were pointed toward him than I think probably evidence justified at the time, although there were people in the consulate who swore he was, in fact, the root cause of all of their difficulties and even in those days felt that he was “a bad actor.” My conversations with him didn’t give me any feeling one way or other, he didn’t say much….

He didn’t seem like a rising star…although people said that he was capable. People in the Western business community said that he was not a problem for them, that he helped them on occasion, and that he had not made noises about being paid off or anything of that sort, which sometimes was the major interest of people at Putin’s level on the bureaucracy in those days.

“Putin emerged as very much a crime fighter in those days”

John M. Evans, INR, Russia and Former Soviet States, 1999-2002; Director, Office of Russian Affairs              2002-2004  

That was also the year in which Mayor Sobchak ran for reelection in St. Petersburg; Vladimir Putin, his deputy, ran his campaign, and another one of the Deputy Mayors bolted from the Sobchak camp and opposed him. This was Vladimir Yakovlev. He was accused by Sobchak and Putin of stabbing Sobchak in the back but in the end Sobchak lost and it was that loss that precipitated Vladimir Putin’s eventual move to Moscow.

When Putin was Deputy Mayor — and he was first Deputy Mayor in St. Petersburg — one of the things he did was to deal with the very serious problem of organized crime in St. Petersburg. We had a young officer who was very good at getting just one degree away from some of these criminal figures and finding out what was going on, and there was a big battle among crime groups in the St. Petersburg region for control of territory and assets, and during Putin’s time that was at least controlled and brought to a tenable position. Putin emerged as very much a crime fighter in those days….

But I want to mention another thing. The most interesting Russian politician to come out of St. Petersburg, of course, was Vladimir Putin. As Deputy Mayor I mentioned that he was primarily a crime fighter and on one occasion we had some young Americans from California who had invested in a restaurant operation at a very nice location on the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg and their Russian partner, after a certain time, decided that he didn’t need the Americans, he had learned how to run the business, had all the know-how and locked the Americans out and then threatened them with serious harm.

These Americans fled, literally pursued by a Mafia SUV and found refuge in our consulate building. And that was one occasion when I had to call Vladimir Putin on the phone and ask for his intervention, and he did intervene.

But it was interesting. The first thing he wanted to know, when we told him about this problem: he wanted to see the contract. He was trained at the legal faculty at Leningrad State University, where Sobchak had been professor of law, and his instincts were very much those of someone trained in the law, despite the fact that he had spent a good bit of his life in the KGB; he had this legal mindset. He didn’t resolve the entire problem but he, at least, by the end of that day, had stabilized the situation to such an extent that the Americans were safe to leave, they went to Finland, and eventually the legal tangle was straightened out…

“We had a much better impression of Putin”

And then of course we all remember on New Year’s Eve of the millennium, Boris Yeltsin abdicated and asked Vladimir Putin to be candidate for the presidency of Russia….

I remember taking Ambassador Pickering to visit him once and probably DCM [Deputy Chief of Mission] Jim Collins as well. But we knew him; we had a much better impression of Putin than other people did because he had helped us out in these situations where the Mafia was going after our investors and we saw him as a crime fighter. He was not one of those who had lined his pockets, so far as we knew, by his involvement in official affairs. He had a very modest dacha; actually, his dacha burned down during those years but he was not seen as one who had robbed the state treasury on his own behalf. He was very modest.

He also was a fanatical adherent of a Russian form of judo and there’s a whole philosophy that comes with this type of judo; it’s a philosophy derived from Eastern rituals and so on in which the contestants are very respectful of each other, they always bow to each other, and the trick is to use the weight of your opponent and the strength of your opponent for your own ends.

And it also goes with a philosophy of…almost an ascetic philosophy in which one does not drink to excess; one is always in control of one’s physical and mental being and so I think these characteristics have come through in Putin’s presidency and [then] prime ministership.

In contrast to the old sort of bibulous Yeltsin who was seen as a kind of an old fool, a clumsy old fool in his later days, Putin was sharp, he’s well spoken, he’s focused, he does not drink. My wife observed this very carefully; he is not a teetotaler but he tends to just take a sip. He doesn’t mind anybody else drinking but he is not a boozer and he seems to have acquired a taste for beer while in Germany rather than just the Russian staple of vodka….

[A] couple of weeks before the new president, President George Bush, met Putin for the first time in Ljubljana, Slovenia, I found myself writing a memo entitled “Vladimir Putin: a Heterodox View,” because all the briefing materials were very critical of Putin for one reason or another, that he wasn’t of sufficient stature, that he was transitional, that he was ex-KGB and on and on and on.

And I wrote this memo trying to make the point that Putin was not transitional, that he was a serious figure, that he was a man who believed in keeping his word and that he was well spoken and so on and so forth. Now, I distributed that memo to the White House and CIA and Defense Department.

I don’t know what fate it met at the hands of the staff people there, but I did get a call from deep in the depths of the CIA’s analytical side, from a colleague who said “John, thank you for writing that memo. Over here we wouldn’t dare say such things but we think you’re right about Putin.”

Seeing Putin’s soul

A few weeks later…this would have been June of 2001 , when President Bush had been elected and inaugurated and was meeting Putin for the first time. Now, at that time you may remember President Bush was asked what he thought of Mr. Putin and he made that famous statement that he’d “looked into his eyes and seen his soul.”

I had dealt with him perfectly effectively and satisfactorily in St. Petersburg; he had pulled some of our chestnuts out of the fire; he was not anti-American; he was not a Communist; he was for a new Russia; and George Bush also sensed this was a guy he could deal with.

The other thing that struck me was that that’s not the way George Bush from Texas talks about people generally, and that he must have…picked that up from some staffer who might have advised him and it might have been [National Security Advisor] Dr. [Condoleezza] Rice, somebody had talked about the “Russian soul” and that was the last thing that stuck in his head…

Because of the nature, the concentrated personal nature, of the Russian regime, the fact that Vladimir Putin was really in charge at that time, he was a president with very high popularity, and because he liked George Bush personally, they got along well, they both had teenaged daughters.

Putin, I think, won George Bush’s heart by showing him the cross that he wore around his neck that his grandmother had had blessed in Jerusalem. So there were these connections and I think, despite Russian public opinion, which was getting more and more anti-American and had, during the Serbian war, turned a lot of Russians away from better feelings towards America, that Putin was sure that he and George Bush were going to have a great relationship and I think that made a difference in the case of Russia.

You may remember the famous quotation of Condoleezza Rice — or attributed to Condoleezza Rice — the formula “Punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia.” And what that derived from was the fact that Jacques Chirac had not played it straight with President Bush about France’s attitude towards the impending Iraq war. Gerhard Schröder in Germany had made anti-Americanism a plank of his re-election campaign, but Vladimir Putin had basically said “George, we think you’re making a mistake but we have no reason to want you to fail, so we will not do anything that will undermine you; we still think it’s a mistake.”

And because Putin was perhaps a bit blunt but at least played it straight with George Bush and George Bush was the kind of man who appreciated straight talk, the Russians came out of it fairly unscathed in that sense….

You know, we were always, it seems to me, in an expectation of disaster because with the news from Russia one never knows. But I felt, actually, that we kept things pretty well balanced during those years, that even if it was only George Bush and I who had a positive view of Mr. Putin, that was maybe enough. And that we were getting along alright.

After 9/11 when Putin called and offered to help, there was a good long period during which we tried to work together on terrorism. But that effort foundered on, first of all our inability to see the Chechens the way the Russians saw the Chechens.

A children’s theater with a pretty big audience there, and then the Russians tried a tactic — they put some kind of a soporific gas into the auditorium, hoping to put everyone to sleep and then pick out the bad ones and revive the innocent.

But it went badly awry with a couple dozen people killed, including the terrorists. But it of course was very poorly received here and we did have consultations with the Russians in which they didn’t tell the truth, didn’t come clean about what they had done and that of course was very bad for the climate….

Wearing down our trust

Another event took place during the first weeks of the invasion of Iraq and that was that, one way or another, a column of Russian diplomats trying to evacuate from Baghdad came under fire and in this case people were hurt, and we got in to a big argument with the Russians, with the Pentagon saying that they had been warned not to take a certain road but instead to take another road, they had disobeyed their instructions and that’s why it happened and that’s all we’re going to say about it. Now, the Russians came back again and again and again, asking for more clarification of what had happened and why; we did not give it to them.

And yes, the one personality, John Bolton (pictured), had been brought into General [Colin] Powell’s State Department against his will, apparently. He was not Powell’s pick to be Under Secretary for Security Affairs but Bolton was advocating policies that put us at loggerheads not only with the Russians but virtually with the rest of the world. They included his advocacy of a very aggressive seizure policy on the high seas, which the Russians did not agree with.

We, of course, took our signature back on the statute of the International Criminal Court so as to shield our own warriors and contractors from any danger of being hauled into court by another country, and of course we had taken back our signature also on Kyoto [ Protocol on Climate Change ].

So altogether the policies of the Bush Administration gradually wore down that initial trust that Vladimir Putin and George Bush had had at the beginning, and, although they still speak kindly of each other, that personal relationship was not strong enough to hold back the resentment that grew at Washington’s ignoring of Russia’s interests.

“An eye-opening experience”

David J. Kramer, Office of Policy Planning for Russia and Eurasia, 2003-2005

KRAMER:. Bush invested a fair amount of time in developing his relationship with Putin. I do think that the arrest of [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky in October of 2003 did have an effect on Bush’s perception.

Khodorkovsky (pictured) was the richest Russian oligarch. He had acquired assets in the 1990’s through what’s called Loans for Shares. He became very rich. He ran the Yukos Oil Company. In the period when Putin became President he tried to launch reform of the corporate community and he was also talking to people in the opposition. He was talking about selling a stake in his company to foreign investors. He was talking about building a pipeline to Asia.

He was rather defiant of Vladimir Putin and to make a long story short for probably a number of reasons, Putin decided in October 2003 to arrest him. He was seized on his own private jet with guys with guns boarding his plane, thrown in jail and has been in jail ever since. He has been convicted now twice on charges that many people think are rigged through a court process that many people think has been fraudulent.

It was important as the President started thinking about further enlargement of NATO and it was important when the President was also dealing with missile defense and trying to create a missile defense system. Lastly, it was important when it came to Iran….

I had already moved on to the DRL [Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor] Bureau at that point but in 2008 when it invaded Georgia…

I think there was a tendency to inflate Russia’s importance in that whole period. That may not have been a very healthy thing to have done.

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Vladimir Putin not welcome at French ceremony for 80th anniversary of D-day

France says Russia can be represented but president will not be invited because of war in Ukraine

Russia will be invited to send representatives to an international ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-day – but not Vladimir Putin , the French organisers have announced.

The Élysée is reported to have accepted that the country should be represented but said its leader is not welcome because of Moscow’s ongoing war on Ukraine .

“In view of the circumstances, President Putin will not be invited to take part in the commemorations of the Normandy landings,” the Liberation Mission organising committee said.

“Russia will, however, be invited to be represented so that the importance of the commitment and sacrifices of the Soviet peoples, as well as its contribution to the victory of 1945, can be honoured.”

It added: “Unlike the Kremlin regime, France does not pursue a policy of historical revisionism.”

No other information was given and the Russian embassy in Paris and the Kremlin did not react to the statement or indicate whether the invitation would be accepted.

The Soviet Union lost more than 27 million people during the war – with 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths.

Putin was invited to and attended the ceremony to mark 70th anniversary of the D-day landings despite Russia’s annexation of Crimea a few months earlier.

At the time, the then French president, François Hollande, said: “You can have differences of opinion with Vladimir Putin but I have never forgotten and never will forget that the Russian people gave millions of lives.”

After the June 2014 commemorations, Putin and the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, met at the Élysée for talks after Moscow backed a pro-Russian insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

Putin was not invited to the 75th commemorations attended by Donald Trump but the Élysée said this was not unusual as Russia was invited to the major decade commemorations.

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