Word: putin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ideologies and worldviews clashed. But when Barack Obama visits Moscow on July 6, it will be something of a rarity for the U.S. President: a rather dull trip. Obama will encounter no cheering crowds or overly excited local media. His hosts, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, will be no more than coolly polite. The end of the visit is unlikely to be marked by grand declarations of friendship or announcements of breakthrough deals. Indeed, experts on both sides say the area where progress is most likely is in negotiations on the reduction of nuclear arsenals...
...near abroad" - the territory of the old Soviet Union - and halt NATO's expansion to the east. More generally, Moscow would like some respect. "The Russians want to belong. They want to feel big," says Finland's Foreign Minister, Alexander Stubb, who has met with both Medvedev and Putin since Obama's Inauguration. "There's a sense of greatness in Russian history, and that's how they feel Russia should be treated...
Obama, President Barack • election of is absurdly credited to Michael Jackson by Rev. Al Sharpton • Politico mocks freakish insistence of on pronouncing names of people and nations correctly • Putin is met by without subsequent claim to have been able to look him in the eye and "get a sense of his soul" • Rahm Emanuel's implication that the White House is willing to cave on the public health care option is sort of disputed by while also being sort of confirmed by • Vice President Biden's gaffe - that is, his accidental blurt of truth - that...
Kireeva suggests a possible explanation for local apparatchiks rallying around the kind of memorial that Moscow rejects: political expediency. "Medvedev and Putin have the least support in the whole country in Murmansk," she says. "United Russia knows this." A little remembering might be the price the regime has to pay to keep the peace...
...Memorials in Soviet times were monuments to national greatness: towering monoliths like Lyosha, the 115-ft. (35 m) statue of a soldier down the road from the future Kursk memorial. These Soviet-era monuments were designed to inculcate belief in (and fear of) the regime. Like his Soviet predecessors, Putin has shown a distaste for acknowledging weakness or tragedy. "In the Russian mentality," says Anna Kireeva of the environmental group Bellona, which investigated the Kursk sinking out of concern that nuclear waste might seep from the submarine, "there is a joke: Rule 1 is the boss is always right. Rule...