Word: vladimires
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...decry the system that produces people like him, to live among the powerful while lambasting those who lord it over others. Before the global downturn, which Lebedev says has cost him $1 billion, he was a predictable, if persistent, critic of former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, routinely calling for an independent legislature, a free press and free elections, and a crackdown on corruption. Improving his image has been the Moscow tabloid he co-owns, Novaya Gazetta, which is known for publishing stories on the war in Chechnya, bribe-seeking officials and the nation's abysmal public services...
...says dismissively, referring to Boris Berezovsky, the former oil and media magnate who prospered during Yelstin's rule but fled Russia facing accusations of fraud after Putin took charge. For most of that decade, between five and 10 businessmen (most notably Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin and Vladimir Gusinsky) ruled Russia. Their power reached its height at Yeltsin's re-election as President in 1996 - the same oligarchs who financed Yeltsin's campaign went on to buy lucrative state assets at knock-down prices. When he took power in 2000, Putin immediately set out to rein...
Berezovsky, whose star rose under Boris Yeltsin and plummeted when Vladimir Putin came to power, alleges that Abramovich persuaded him and Patarkatsishvili to part with their interests in both companies at knockdown prices by warning them that the Kremlin would otherwise seize their assets and they would get nothing at all for them. Berezovsky had already been forced to surrender his media enterprises in Russia and fled the country for Britain in 2001. Berezovsky claims that Abramovich also promised to intercede on behalf of Nikolai Glushkov, a former associate of Berezovsky's who had been arrested on fraud charges...
...reset of relations with Russia or indulging Saakashvili's request. "It is a huge political mistake to support Saakashvili. By giving him weapons, the U.S. would be putting guns in the hands of a criminal," Sergei Markov, a Duma deputy and one of the chief ideologists of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party, told TIME in a phone interview from the Georgian breakaway republic of Abkhazia. (See the top 10 Joe Biden gaffes...
...voice of the 72-year-old Prime Minister may make it harder for the public to believe his version of events. A male voice, which sounds like Berlusconi, speaks intimately with the woman, telling her to wait in the "big bed" - apparently a reference to a gift from Vladimir Putin - while he goes to take a shower. When the same man calls D'Addario the next morning, she reports that she's losing her voice. "And we didn't scream," the man says. There is also a recording of the two people having breakfast, in which the man asks...