Word: mikhail
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...delay has angered Putin, believes Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Putin's second and final term as Russian President ends in 2008, and a successful reabsorption of Belarus would ensure his legacy as the first reunifier of the Slavic lands lost by his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Shevtsova also cites a more colorful theory: "Annexing Belarus could also create a legal way for Putin to stay on in the Kremlin." The constitution of the Russian Federation restricts any incumbent to two consecutive terms as President, but a new, expanded Federation could start with a clean...
...Allied State of Russia and Belarus" - proclaimed in 1997 - and to sign the Constitutional Act in 2007 that could lead to the formal inclusion of Belarus into the Russian Federation. That would make Putin the first reunifier of the Slavic lands lost by the previous leaders in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Annexing Belarus would also create a new legal option for Putin to stay on in the Kremlin, should he so choose: it would be his first constitutional term as President of a new state rather than the third unconstitutional one of the current Russian Federation...
...Litvinenko murder investigation, in fact, may have a profound effect on the image of President Vladimir Putin in the West - much like the Chechen war of 1999 did, or the dismembering the oil company Yukos and the imprisonment of its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or the Beslan terror tragedy. Each time, Putin chose a course of action that benefited his regime in short term, but deeply hurt his country's interests in the long term...
Dmitrievsky and others are seeking to protect and reclaim freedoms won in the final years of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his policy of glasnost, or greater openness. Later, in the immediate post-Soviet era, Boris Yeltsin presided over a scrappy, imperfect democratic flowering. Activists say that, since he took office in 2000, Putin has tried to bottle up the explosion of interest in human rights, free speech and democratic accountability that took place in the 1990s. Says Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independents in parliament: "The regime has achieved a state of total manipulation...
...Mikhail Khodorkovsky Founder and former chairman, Yukos Oil Once one of Russia's richest men, he fell afoul of the Kremlin by taking an independent political stand and lost everything. Yukos has been dismembered, and Khodorkovsky, 43, who is serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian jail on fraud charges he vigorously disputes, has become a symbol of the political nature of Russian justice. Before being jailed, he spoke to a newspaper about the aspirations of his compatriots: "They need democracy, because these are people who don't want to feel uncomfortable when talking to the police, these...