Word: putin
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...Vladimir Putin's election as president has produced a new antihero in Russian politics. Gleb Pavlovsky, an owlish political consultant with a taste for casual clothes and an abiding reputation for dirty tricks, is being hailed as a genius by the winners and a cynical villain by the losers. The communists, who claim the March 26 polls were corrupted, say Pavlovsky fixed Putin's first-round win, just as a few months ago aides to Yevgeni Primakov accused Pavlovsky of a devastating smear campaign against their man and his main ally, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. His admirers are equally categorical...
...seizes a Russian oil tanker in the Persian Gulf on suspicion that it is carrying Iraqi oil. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking the clock had been turned back two decades to the height of the Cold War - and that's exactly the spin President Vladimir Putin's government wants to put on its relations with the West. The U.S. Navy announced Friday that its forces maintaining a blockade of Iraq were holding a Russian tanker pending tests to establish the origin of the oil on board, prompting a furious reaction from Moscow. The incident came the same...
...Putin, for his part, did his best to underscore his man-of-action hawkish image Thursday by going down in a submarine to take part in missile test-firings in the Arctic. Unlike Boris Yeltsin, who tried to project himself as a cantankerous but ultimately cuddly pal of the West, Putin has unashamedly staked out nationalist credentials, making it clear that no matter how economically interdependent it becomes with the West, Russia's national interest is primary and will be aggressively defended. The Council of Europe vote is part of a wider effort to apply international human rights standards...
...Cheri Leberknight, who was reportedly caught trying to obtain military secrets from a Russian citizen, was simply expelled, Captain Pope (if that really is his name) could face a lengthy jail term if convicted. The arrest also appears to be a calculated attempt by Russia?s new president, Vladimir Putin, to send out a political signal both at home and abroad. "This reeks of an effort to make political capital," says Meier. "It's illustrative of a new mood in official Moscow which maintains that Russia has its national interests, and those will be aggressively defended. Five years ago this...
That seems a premature judgment about Putin, who is still very much a secret self. "He's a blank sheet of paper," says Duma Deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin. Deliberately maintaining the mystery gives him maximum maneuvering room. Putin knows he wants to be powerful; he wants Russia to be strong, and he wants to preside over its comeback. But he does not know how to do that. Maybe he is too small a man for the job. Maybe even his galvanic will cannot deliver in the face of Russia's enormous failures: his paper powers are vast, but the necessary institutions...