Word: vladimires
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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...
...victim had no doubt where the search for his killer would lead: on his deathbed, he said his death had been ordered by Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. Russian officials have denied that as a malicious provocation. Not surprisingly, Britain is being punctilious about amassing sufficient evidence before it points a finger in any direction. But if some shadowy figures close to the Kremlin turn out to be responsible for Litvinenko's death, it would be the most astonishing indictment of just how ruthless the modern Russian state...
...telling the truth, and if so, was that his sole motivation for grabbing the limelight? Later, two of the officers in the episode claimed the stunt was bought and paid for by Berezovsky, which probably only heightened the rage of the man who had become the FSB's chief--Vladimir Putin. To Putin, a former KGB officer, what Litvinenko had done "was a major act of treason," says former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, now an exile in the U.S. after having written about Russia's tilt toward authoritarianism. In his book The Lubyanka Gang, Litvinenko, for his part, said...
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...
...Litvinenko murder investigation, in fact, may have a profound effect on the image of President Vladimir Putin in the West - much like the Chechen war of 1999 did, or the dismembering the oil company Yukos and the imprisonment of its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or the Beslan terror tragedy. Each time, Putin chose a course of action that benefited his regime in short term, but deeply hurt his country's interests in the long term...