Word: yakunin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sure what the answer is, to be honest. But I do know this: the anger fueling Russia's behavior now is very real, and I know exactly where it comes from. Just a 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...
...Yakunin practically leaped out of his chair. "You were right," he said emphatically, and he recounted what for him was a particularly humiliating moment in the national memory of many Russians: when then President Yeltsin had gone to Berlin to participate in a ceremony with his German counterpart, Helmut Kohl. At a lunch, Yeltsin had gotten infamously drunk, and when he went outside after the meal was over, he cheerfully began conducting a German military band on hand for the occasion...
Suffice to say that Vladimir Yakunin - and no doubt his friend, the Prime Minister - didn't approve, and that disgraceful moment sticks in his craw to this day. The Russians are back - and they are not buffoons, thank you. Now, oil and gas wealth plus increasing military might are going to right what they perceive as the humiliations of the recent past. The New Cold War, as Ed Lucas writes...