Word: putin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...VLADIMIR PUTIN Russian President gets Barak and Arafat on Middle East peace party line. Carter stews quietly...
Back in the Cold War days, Washington and Moscow pored over the world map like a chessboard; it was then folded by Boris Yeltsin, who had no appetite for the game. President Vladimir Putin, however, wants to play. And under the tutelage of such old pros as former foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov, Putin's no slouch when it comes to geopolitics. That much was clear earlier this year when the Russian president outflanked Washington among its own NATO allies in the diplomatic battle over U.S. plans for a missile defense system. Since then, he's managed, quite improbably, to revive...
...Viewed in the big picture, Putin's decision is hardly surprising - weapons remain the most viable export of the somnambulant Russian economy, and while the rampant corruption of the Yeltsin years has slowed Western aid and investment to a trickle, Tehran's weapons order alone is equivalent to more than 10 percent of Russia's annual budget. Add on recent weapons orders worth $3 billion from India and $1 billion from China, and it becomes clear that there's considerable material incentive for Moscow to ignore Washington's objections. Indeed, a case can be made that even Russia's efforts...
...Washington. Moscow's military establishment looked on with alarm throughout the '90s as Yeltsin compromised their strategic interests in exchange for financial handouts from the West. The seditious grumbling over NATO's expansion onto Russia's eastern European doorstep reached a crescendo during last year's Kosovo campaign. President Putin built his election campaign around the military's brutal assault on Chechnya - a hapless attempt to restore its lost honor - and vowed to restore Russian power. Despite such humiliations as the Kursk submarine disaster, Putin has set about modernizing his armed forces by cutting their size while increasing their budget...
...Putin remains publicly neutral, but privately he is more worried about a Bush presidency than about AL GORE's occupying the Oval Office. "Moscow is very frustrated about Bush's position on national missile defenses," says a Russian official. Putin is trying to derail U.S. anti-ballistic missiles. Bush wants to rush to build a large system, while Putin believes Gore would be more cautious and perhaps postpone the defenses if the technology wasn't ripe...