Word: putin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...several Georgian provinces: Abkhazia, Ajaria and, of course, South Ossetia. It has sponsored rebellious governments in these territories, armed their forces and even bestowed Russian citizenship on the secessionists. These efforts have intensified since the emergence in Georgia of a democratic, pro-Western government. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's resentment toward Georgia and its President, the U.S.-educated Mikheil Saakashvili, has seemingly become a personal obsession...
...Russia's aggression toward Georgia should not be viewed as an isolated incident. The fact is, Putin and his associates in the Kremlin don't accept the post-Soviet realities. Putin was sincere when he declared some time ago that in his view, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century." Independent democracies like Georgia and Ukraine, for the Putin regime, are not only historical anomalies, but also represent a direct political threat...
...couple of months ago, in Moscow, I sat in the office of Vladimir Yakunin, whose official public role is chairman of the state-owned Russian Railroad company. That sounds like a pretty innocuous job, but it's misleading in this sense: Yakunin is an old St. Petersburg crony of Putin's and, like the Prime Minister, is widely believed to have been a career KGB field officer, including serving as resident at the Soviet U.N. mission in New York. Then came the revolution, and Boris Yeltsin, and the demise of the country that men like Yakunin had served for most...
...much for that theory. The proper question to ask now of Putin's Russia is the one framed perfectly by journalist Edward Lucas, Central Europe correspondent for the Economist, in his recent book The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West. "The less resistance Russia meets, the more assertive it becomes. The limits of the tolerable are constantly changing, and in one direction only. The uncomfortable but unavoidable question is, Where will this...
...because Russia is a huge energy exporter at a moment when demand for oil and gas has skyrocketed, driving prices up and filling the Kremlin's coffers. Eastern and Western Europe are heavily dependent on gas from state-owned giant Gazprom (whose former chairman happens to be Dmitri Medvedev, Putin's puppet President.) Russia's oil exports are critical at a time when the world has no spare capacity for crude. How tough, seriously, can the West be with an aggressive Russia at this moment in history...