Word: putin
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There was never any doubt that Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, would raise his international profile in 2006. His schedule for the year included an official visit to China in March, chairing the G-8 summit in his hometown of St. Petersburg in July, and an invitation to be the guest of honor at a meeting of European Union leaders in Finland in October. Yet the way he dominated headlines around the world for much of the year - for better and for worse - may have come as a surprise even to the canny former kgb man, who has been...
Russia's vast reserves of oil and gas stand it in good stead at a time of high oil prices and growing international concern about future energy supplies. In 2006, Putin made use of them to bolster Russia's position in the world to the strongest it has been since the cold war ended more than 15 years ago. "He's using the advantage of high oil prices to make Russia count," says Margot Light, a Russia expert at the London School of Economics...
...Putin's use of those energy resources, combined with his continuing crackdown on free speech and civil society in Russia itself, have provoked some dismay and led many observers at home and abroad to wonder in what direction he is taking his country. In January, the Kremlin briefly cut off gas supplies to neighboring Ukraine, ostensibly because of a dispute over prices. Ukraine saw the move as an attack on its pro-Western leader, President Viktor Yushchenko. That sent a chill through Europe and brought a public rebuke from U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. In December, Russia threatened...
...Putin, who might want Litvinenko dead? Plenty. Russian Mafia bosses whose networks he was still prying into, for example, or rogue FSB officers who had been paid to rub him out by those who wanted to hurt Berezovsky. Perhaps the culprit was someone who wanted to frame Putin, or a member of the many factions maneuvering to succeed him when his term expires in 2008. One particularly dark theory making the rounds in Moscow was that Litvinenko organized his own death in a bizarre politically motivated suicide. Julia Svetlichnaja, a Russian postgraduate student who met with Litvinenko several times over...
Meanwhile, there is the light--uncomfortably glaring--that the case sheds on modern Russia. Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few independent liberals left in the Duma, says, "The point is not whether Putin is responsible for these concrete murders. The point is that he is responsible for having created a system that is ruled by fear and violence." Ryzhkov claims that the armed forces, Interior Ministry, FSB and those who have retired from them to join private security services "are running this country, own its economy and use violence and murder as habitual management techniques." A U.S. businessman in Moscow...