biography putin

Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin served as president of Russia from 2000 to 2008 and was re-elected to the presidency in 2012, where he has stayed ever since. He previously served as Russia's prime minister.

1952-present

Latest News: Vladimir Putin Announces 2024 Russian Presidential Run

According to the Associated Press , the 71-year-old Putin, who was first elected president in March 2000, has twice amended the Russian constitution so that he could theoretically remain in power until 2036. He is already the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin .

Quick Facts

Early life and political career, president of russia: first and second terms, third term as president, chemical weapons in syria, 2014 winter olympics, invasion into crimea, syrian airstrikes, u.s. election hacks, fourth presidential term, invasion of ukraine, seeking fifth presidential term, personal life, who is vladimir putin.

In 1999, Russian president Boris Yeltsin dismissed his prime minister and promoted former KGB officer Vladimir Putin in his place. In December 1999, Yeltsin resigned, appointing Putin president, and he was re-elected in 2004. In April 2005, he made a historic visit to Israel—the first visit there by any Kremlin leader. Putin could not run for the presidency again in 2008, but was appointed prime minister by his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Putin was re-elected to the presidency in March 2012 and later won a fourth term. In 2014, he was reportedly nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

FULL NAME: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin BORN: October 7, 1952 BIRTHPLACE: Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Russia SPOUSE: Lyudmila Shkrebneva (1983-2014) CHILDREN: Maria, Yekaterina ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Libra

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia, on October 7, 1952. He grew up with his family in a communal apartment, attending the local grammar and high schools, where he developed an interest in sports. After graduating from Leningrad State University with a law degree in 1975, Putin began his career in the KGB as an intelligence officer. Stationed mainly in East Germany, he held that position until 1990, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Upon returning to Russia, Putin held an administrative position at the University of Leningrad, and after the fall of communism in 1991, he became an adviser to liberal politician Anatoly Sobchak. When Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad later that year, Putin became his head of external relations, and by 1994, Putin had become Sobchak’s first deputy mayor.

After Sobchak’s defeat in 1996, Putin resigned his post and moved to Moscow. There, in 1998, Putin was appointed deputy head of management under Boris Yeltsin’s presidential administration. In that position, he was in charge of the Kremlin's relations with the regional governments.

Shortly afterward, Putin was appointed head of the Federal Security Service, an arm of the former KGB, as well as head of Yeltsin’s Security Council. In August 1999, Yeltsin dismissed his prime minister, Sergey Stapashin, along with his cabinet, and promoted Putin in his place.

In December 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned as president of Russia and appointed Putin acting president until official elections were held, and in March 2000, Putin was elected to his first term with 53 percent of the vote. Promising both political and economic reforms, Putin set about restructuring the government and launching criminal investigations into the business dealings of high-profile Russian citizens. He also continued Russia's military campaign in Chechnya.

In September 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States, Putin announced Russia’s support for the U.S. in its anti-terror campaign. However, when the U.S.’s “war on terror” shifted focus to the ousting of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein , Putin joined German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French President Jacques Chirac in opposition of the plan.

In 2004, Putin was re-elected to the presidency, and in April of the following year made a historic visit to Israel for talks with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon—marking the first visit to Israel by any Kremlin leader.

Due to constitutional term limits, Putin was prevented from running for the presidency in 2008. (That same year, presidential terms in Russia were extended from four to six years.) However, when his protégé Dmitry Medvedev succeeded him as president in March 2008, he immediately appointed Putin as Russia’s prime minister, allowing Putin to maintain a primary position of influence for the next four years.

On March 4, 2012, Vladimir Putin was re-elected to his third term as president. After widespread protests and allegations of electoral fraud, he was inaugurated on May 7, 2012, and shortly after taking office appointed Medvedev as prime minister. Once more at the helm, Putin has continued to make controversial changes to Russia’s domestic affairs and foreign policy.

In December 2012, Putin signed into a law a ban on the U.S. adoption of Russian children. According to Putin, the legislation—which took effect on January 1, 2013—aimed to make it easier for Russians to adopt native orphans. However, the adoption ban spurred international controversy, reportedly leaving nearly 50 Russian children—who were in the final phases of adoption with U.S. citizens at the time that Putin signed the law—in legal limbo.

Putin further strained relations with the United States the following year when he granted asylum to Edward Snowden , who is wanted by the United States for leaking classified information from the National Security Agency. In response to Putin's actions, U.S. President Barack Obama canceled a planned meeting with Putin that August.

Around this time, Putin also upset many people with his new anti-gay laws. He made it illegal for gay couples to adopt in Russia and placed a ban on propagandizing “nontraditional” sexual relationships to minors. The legislation led to widespread international protest.

In September 2013, tensions rose between the United States and Syria over Syria’s possession of chemical weapons, with the U.S. threatening military action if the weapons were not relinquished. The immediate crisis was averted, however, when the Russian and U.S. governments brokered a deal whereby those weapons would be destroyed.

On September 11, 2013, The New York Times published an op-ed piece by Putin titled “A Plea for Caution From Russia.” In the article, Putin spoke directly to the U.S.’s position in taking action against Syria, stating that such a unilateral move could result in the escalation of violence and unrest in the Middle East.

Putin further asserted that the U.S. claim that Bashar al-Assad used the chemical weapons on civilians might be misplaced, with the more likely explanation being the unauthorized use of the weapons by Syrian rebels. He closed the piece by welcoming the continuation of an open dialogue between the involved nations to avoid further conflict in the region.

In 2014, Russia hosted the Winter Olympics, which were held in Sochi beginning on February 6. According to NBS Sports, Russia spent roughly $50 billion in preparation for the international event.

However, in response to what many perceived as Russia’s recently passed anti-gay legislation, the threat of international boycotts arose. In October 2013, Putin tried to allay some of these concerns, saying in an interview broadcast on Russian television that, “We will do everything to make sure that athletes, fans and guests feel comfortable at the Olympic Games regardless of their ethnicity, race or sexual orientation.”

In terms of security for the event, Putin implemented new measures aimed at cracking down on Muslim extremists, and in November 2013 reports surfaced that saliva samples had been collected from some Muslim women in the North Caucasus region. The samples were ostensibly to be used to gather DNA profiles, in an effort to combat female suicide bombers known as “black widows.”

Shortly after the conclusion of the 2014 Winter Olympics, amidst widespread political unrest in Ukraine, which resulted in the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych, Putin sent Russian troops into Crimea, a peninsula in the country’s northeast coast of the Black Sea. The peninsula had been part of Russia until Nikita Khrushchev, former Premier of the Soviet Union, gave it to Ukraine in 1954.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Yuriy Sergeyev, claimed that approximately 16,000 troops invaded the territory, and Russia’s actions caught the attention of several European countries and the United States, who refused to accept the legitimacy of a referendum in which the majority of the Crimean population voted to secede from Ukraine and reunite with Russia.

Putin defended his actions, insisting that the troops sent into Ukraine were only meant to enhance Russia’s military defenses within the country—referring to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which has its headquarters in Crimea. He also vehemently denied accusations by other nations, particularly the United States, that Russia intended to engage Ukraine in war.

He went on to claim that although he was granted permission from Russia's upper house of Parliament to use force in Ukraine, he found it unnecessary. Putin also wrote off any speculation that there would be a further incursion into Ukrainian territory, saying, “Such a measure would certainly be the very last resort.”

The following day, it was announced that Putin had been nominated for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.

In September 2015, Russia surprised the world by announcing it would begin strategic airstrikes in Syria. Despite government officials’ assertions that the military actions were intended to target the extremist Islamic State, which made significant advances in the region due to the power vacuum created by Syria's ongoing civil war, Russia's true motives were called into question, with many international analysts and government officials claiming that the airstrikes were in fact aimed at the rebel forces attempting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad's historically repressive regime.

In late October 2017, Putin was personally involved in another alarming form of aerial warfare when he oversaw a late-night military drill that resulted in the launch of four ballistic missiles across the country. The drill came during a period of escalating tensions in the region, with Russian neighbor North Korea also drawing attention for its missile tests and threats to engage the U.S. in destructive conflict.

In December 2017, Putin announced he was ordering Russian forces to begin withdrawing from Syria, saying the country’s two-year campaign to destroy ISIS was complete, though he left open the possibility of returning if terrorist violence resumed in the area. Despite the declaration, Pentagon spokesman Robert Manning was hesitant to endorse that view of events, saying, “Russian comments about removal of their forces do not often correspond with actual troop reductions.”

Months prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, multiple U.S. intelligence agencies unilaterally agreed that Russian intelligence was behind the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta, who had, at the time, been chairman of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

In December 2016 unnamed senior CIA officials further concluded “with a high level of confidence” that Putin was personally involved in intervening in the U.S. presidential election, according to a report by USA Today . The officials further went on to assert that the hacked DNC and Podesta emails that were given to WikiLeaks just before U.S. Election Day were designed to undermine Clinton’s campaign in favor of her Republican opponent, Donald Trump . Soon after, the FBI and National Intelligence Agency publicly supported the CIA’s assessments.

Putin denied any such attempts to disrupt the U.S. election, and despite the assessments of his intelligence agencies, President Trump generally seemed to favor the word of his Russian counterpart. Underscoring their attempts to thaw public relations, the Kremlin in late 2017 revealed that a terror attack had been thwarted in St. Petersburg, thanks to intelligence provided by the CIA.

Around that time, Putin reported at his annual end-of-year press conference that he would seek a new six-year term as president in early 2018 as an independent candidate, signaling he was ending his longtime association with the United Russia party.

Shortly before the first formal summit between Presidents Putin and Trump in July 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictments of 12 Russian operatives on charges relating to interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Regardless, Trump suggested he was satisfied with his counterpart’s “strong and powerful" denial in a joint news conference and praised Putin’s offer to submit the 12 indicted agents to questioning with American witnesses present.

In a subsequent interview with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, Putin seemingly defended the hacking of the DNC server by suggesting that no false information was planted in the process. He also rejected the idea that he had compromising information about Trump, saying that the businessman “was of no interest for us” before announcing his presidential campaign, and notably refused to touch a copy of the indictments offered to him by Wallace.

In March 2018, toward the end of his third term, Putin boasted of new weaponry that would render NATO defenses “completely worthless,” including a low-flying nuclear-capable cruise missile with “unlimited” range and another one capable of traveling at hypersonic speed. His demonstration included video animation of attacks on the United States.

Not long afterward, a two-hour documentary, titled Putin , was posted to several social media pages and a pro-Kremlin YouTube account. Designed to showcase the president in a strong yet humane light, the doc featured Putin sharing the story of how he ordered a hijacked plane shot down to head off a bomb scare at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, as well as recollections of his grandfather's days as a cook for Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin .

On March 18, 2018, the fourth anniversary of the country’s seizure of Crimea, Russian citizens overwhelmingly elected Putin to a fourth presidential term, with 67 percent of the electorate turning out to award him more than 76 percent of the vote. The divided opposition stood little chance against the popular leader, his closest competitor notching around 13 percent of the vote.

Little was expected to change regarding Putin’s strategies for rebuilding the country as a global power, though the start of his final term set off questions about his successor, and whether he would affect constitutional change in an attempt to remain in office indefinitely.

On July 16, 2018, Putin met with President Trump in Helsinki, Finland, for the first formal talks between the two leaders. According to Russia, topics of the meeting included the ongoing war in Syria and “the removal of the concerns” about accusations of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The following April, Putin met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un for the first time. The two leaders discussed the issue of the North Korean laborers in Russia, while Putin also offered support of his counterpart’s denuclearization negotiations with the U.S., saying Kim would need “security guarantees” in exchange for abandoning his nuclear program.

The topic of whether Putin aimed to extend his hold on power resurfaced following his state-of-the-nation speech in January 2020, which included proposals for constitutional amendments that included transferring the power to select the prime minister and cabinet from the president to the Parliament. The entire cabinet, including Medvedev, promptly resigned, leading to the selection of Mikhail V. Mishustin as the new prime minister.

Despite Putin’s earlier remarks of further incursion into Ukraine being a last resort, in the spring of 2021, Russian military forces began forming near the borders of the neighboring country for what the Kremlin claimed were training exercises. According to Reuters , more than 100,000 troops had deployed by November.

On December 17, Russia released a list of security demands that included NATO pulling back forces and weaponry from its eastern flank and ceasing further expansion, including the possible addition of Ukraine into the alliance. If the demands were not met, a “military response” was promised.

Then on February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with missile and rocket strikes on Ukrainian cities and military installations. In a televised address, Putin—claiming that Russian speakers in Ukraine faced genocide—referred to the invasion as a “special military operation,” designed to “achieve the demilitarization and denazification" of the country. In the early hours, Russian forces took Chernobyl, site of the infamous 1986 nuclear disaster, but were held back from the capital city of Kyiv.

As the conflict dragged on with Western allies supporting Ukraine, Putin announced the “special mobilization” of more than 100,000 reserve troops in September 2022.

Ukrainian troops launched a counteroffensive in June 2023 and, as of December, the conflict is still ongoing. The U.S. estimated that August that around 500,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers had been wounded or killed.

In December 2023, Putin announced that he would seek a fifth term as president of Russia in the country's upcoming elections in March 2024. With a victory, he would be able to remain in power until at least 2030 and potentially run for another subsequent six-year term.

Putin is not expected to face any serious challengers and remains popular domestically. According to CNBC , a survey by Russian news agency Tass found that more than 78 percent of Russians trust Putin, and more than 75 percent approve of his activities.

In 1980, Putin met his future wife, Lyudmila, who was working as a flight attendant at the time. The couple married in 1983 and had two daughters: Maria, born in 1985, and Yekaterina, born in 1986. In early June 2013, after nearly 30 years of marriage, Russia’s first couple announced that they were getting a divorce, providing little explanation for the decision, but assuring that they came to it mutually and amicably.

“There are people who just cannot put up with it,” Putin stated. “Lyudmila Alexandrovna has stood watch for eight, almost nine years.” Providing more context to the decision, Lyudmila added, “Our marriage is over because we hardly ever see each other. Vladimir Vladimirovich is immersed in his work, our children have grown and are living their own lives.”

An Orthodox Christian, Putin is said to attend church services on important dates and holidays on a regular basis and has had a long history of encouraging the construction and restoration of thousands of churches in the region. He generally aims to unify all faiths under the government’s authority and legally requires religious organizations to register with local officials for approval.

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Vladimir Putin

By: History.com Editors

Published: September 25, 2023

Vladimir Putin (1952-) is a former KGB agent who has ruled Russia for more than two decades. Intent on restoring Russian might following the collapse of the Soviet Union , he has launched several military campaigns, including an invasion of Ukraine, and helped usher in what’s often described as a new Cold War . Meanwhile, he has steadily tightened his grip on power, persecuting political opponents, shuttering independent media outlets, and otherwise dismantling the country’s nascent democracy.

Putin's Early Years and Personal Life

Much about Vladimir Putin’s personal life remains murky. Born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1952, he has recalled growing up modestly in a rat-infested communal apartment building. His parents, who lost two children prior to his birth—one of whom died during the prolonged Nazi siege of Leningrad in World War II —apparently doted on him despite working long hours. As a youth, he practiced martial arts and is reputed to have gotten into many fist fights.

In 1983, Putin married a flight attendant, Lyudmila Shkrebneva, with whom he has two daughters. (The couple divorced around 2013.) He is rumored to have fathered other children as well. Throughout his time in office, Putin has kept his family out of the public eye.

Putin as a KGB Agent

After studying law at Leningrad State University, Putin joined the KGB , the Soviet counterpart of the CIA. In the mid-1980s, he was sent to the city of Dresden in East Germany, where, in his words, he gathered “political intelligence,” in part by recruiting sources. Putin remained in Dresden during the fall of the Berlin Wall , and, with a risky bluff , purportedly prevented a crowd of protestors from storming the local KGB headquarters.

Putin's Political Rise

Putin returned to Leningrad in 1990 and claimed to have resigned from the KGB the following year. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union affected him deeply; he later called it the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Around that time, he got his political start as an aide to Anatoly Sobchak , his former teacher who became his mentor and St. Petersburg’s mayor.

In 1996, Sobchak lost his bid for re-election and later fled abroad amid corruption allegations. Yet Putin continued his meteoric rise, moving to Moscow, Russia’s capital, and securing one Kremlin post after another (while also defending an economics dissertation he allegedly plagiarized ). By 1998, Putin led the KGB’s main successor organization, and the following year President Boris Yeltsin named him prime minister, the country’s second-highest office, thereby elevating him from obscurity to heir apparent.

When an ailing and increasingly unpopular Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, Putin took over as acting president. (Months later, he would win election to a full term.) Helped by rising oil and gas prices, the economy improved in the early 2000s and living standards rose. Many Russians saw him as bringing order and stability after the hyperinflation, tumultuousness, and perceived lawlessness of the Yeltsin years.

Putin's Consolidation of Power

In his first address as Russia’s president, Putin promised to protect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and property rights, and he likewise announced his commitment to democracy. Yet democratic backsliding began almost immediately under his leadership. The Kremlin brought independent television networks under state control and shut down other news outlets; abolished gubernatorial and senatorial elections; curtailed the judiciary; and restricted opposition political parties. When elections took place, outside observers noted widespread voter irregularities. Putin’s system was sometimes referred to as a “managed democracy.”

Because Russia’s constitution barred a third consecutive term, Putin stepped down in 2008, with his longtime confidante Dmitry Medvedev taking over as president. But Putin retained the role of prime minister and left little doubt about who was really in charge. When Medvedev’s term ended in 2012, the two swapped positions, and Putin once again became president. He has occupied the top job ever since, at one point signing a law that allows him to stay in power until 2036.

Putin has habitually placed his friends and old intelligence colleagues in key posts, several of whom became extravagantly wealthy, and he’s propagated a cult of personality. Perceived opponents have been called “scum” and “traitors” and dealt with harshly. Some, like oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have been jailed, whereas others have wound up dead. In 2006, for example, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down on Putin’s birthday, and that same year Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in England with radioactive polonium.

More recently, opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was banned from running for president, survived an assassination attempt , and was then imprisoned on what’s widely considered to be politically motivated charges. Yet another high-profile death occurred in 2023, when Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash after launching a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership.

Putin's Relationship with the West

Many Western leaders originally approved of Putin, with U.S. President George W. Bush saying he had “looked the man in the eye,” found him “very straightforward and trustworthy,” and gotten a “sense of his soul.” Putin was the first foreign leader to call Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11 , 2001. And though he opposed the Iraq War , Putin assisted in aspects of the so-called War on Terror . He moreover described Russia as a “friendly European nation” that desired “stable peace on the continent.”

Putin’s relationship with the West deteriorated, however, in part over NATO ’s 2004 expansion into seven Eastern European countries and over pro-Western revolutions that broke out in Georgia and Ukraine. Putin was furthermore irked by U.S. lobbying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and by its support for an independent Kosovo. In 2007, he accused the United States of overstepping “its national borders in every way.” Over time, Putin came to think of himself as a protector of traditional Russian values, standing up to a hypocritical and morally decadent West.

In 2014, as tensions escalated over Ukraine, Russia was expelled from the Group of Eight industrialized nations. Around that time, he granted asylum to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden . And, according to U.S. intelligence agencies , he interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election , greenlighting a computer hacking operation that infiltrated the campaign of Hillary Clinton .   

Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump maintained generally friendly ties. But the U.S.-Russian relationship reached arguably its lowest point in decades following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Since then, Russia has been hit with a slew of economic sanctions, Ukraine has received much Western military assistance, and U.S. President Joe Biden has called Putin a “thug,” a “murderous dictator,” and a “war criminal.”

Putin's Wars

During his more than two decades in office, Putin has used the military in increasingly aggressive ways.  Early in his tenure, he violently suppressed a separatist movement in the Russian republic of Chechnya. In 2008, he orchestrated a brief but large-scale invasion of Georgia , thus cementing Russian control of the breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Starting in 2015, he intervened in the Syrian civil war , among other things authorizing a prolonged bombardment of the city of Aleppo. Additionally, he has deployed Russian mercenaries in various African countries .

Putin’s most prolonged conflict has taken place in Ukraine . In 2014, when Ukrainian protestors ousted their Russian-backed president, Putin responded by annexing Crimea—which had been gifted from Russia to Ukraine during the Soviet era—and by backing a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Then, in 2022, he launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine, but failed to take Kiev, the capital. Heavy fighting has since claimed hundreds of thousands of lives . The Russian armed forces have been accused of purposely targeting civilians and committing torture and other atrocities, prompting the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for Putin’s arrest (though he is unlikely to stand trial).

The Man Without a Face : The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin , by Masha Gessen, published by Riverhead Books, 2012. The Strongman : Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia , by Angus Roxburgh, published by I.B. Tauris, 2012. First Person : An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin , 2000. ‘The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,’ by Steven Lee Myers. The New York Times , November 8, 2015. The Making of Vladimir Putin. The New York Times , March 26, 2022. Putin, Vladimir. Encyclopedia Britannica

HISTORY Vault: Vladimir Putin

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A life on the world stage, but scant biographical details: What we know of the life of Vladimir Putin

• He was born 1952 in what used to be Leningrad, USSR and is now St. Petersburg,, Russia.
• Over the last 20 years, Putin has consolidated his grip on power by transforming many Russian institutions.
• Because of his political longevity, Putin has seen five U.S. presidents come and four go.

MOSCOW – For as long as he's been in the public eye, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been a closed book, with relatively few confirmed facts about his real thinking on foreign affairs and what motivates his policy actions. His personal life, too, has been shrouded in mystery and controversy.

And now the Putin enigma is testing the world again because of fears he may launch an invasion of Ukraine, Russia's western neighbor, and what this could mean for Ukraine's fragile democracy and the broader U.S. and European security order in place on the continent for decades.

With the crisis deepening, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken are expected to meet for talks in Europe next week. But President Joe Biden, while leaving the door to diplomacy open, left no doubt Friday that he's "convinced" Putin has already made up his mind  to invade.  

Here are some basics of what is known about Putin. Subscribers can read a more in-depth story about Russia's longest-serving leader here .

Putin's early days

Putin was born 1952 in what used to be called Leningrad, USSR, and is now known as St. Petersburg, Russia. He served for 15 years in the KGB, the Soviet-era agency that was the counterpart to the CIA. The spy agency was a notorious symbol of the Cold War and became the focus of a slew of U.S. spy novels and movies.

During that time, in 1983, he married a flight attendant named Lyudmila. They had two daughters, Mariya and Katerina. Putin and Lyudmila divorced in 2013. He may have another child, possibly with former Russian gymnastics champion Alina Kabaeva. 

By 1994, Putin had become deputy mayor in the city of his birth, and by 1998, the director of the FSB, the KBG's domestic successor. A year later, Putin was prime minister, then president – one of two positions he's held ever since. 

Trouble at home

Over the last two decades, Putin has consolidated his grip on power by transforming Russia's courts, media and other governance institutions to serve the whims of one person: himself. He has spent lavishly on the the military, banned or jailed opposition politicians and journalists and cultivated support from right-wing, nationalist groups. He changed Russia's constitution so he can stay in power until 2036, perhaps even longer. 

Putin has also presided over a growing Russian middle class, modernized some areas of Russia's economy such as in banking and technology and weathered successive financial crises because of Russia's enormous strategic oil and gas reserves. He has sought to crack down on dissent by banning restricting free speech on the Internet. 

On the world stage

Because of his political longevity, Putin has seen five U.S. presidents come and four go. During this time there has been cooperation on trade, nuclear and ballistic missile treaties, fighting terrorism and more.

There has also been sharp divergence – on human rights, on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, on the rule of law, on Moscow's apparent or at least tacit support for cyber-hackers, and on what countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, formed in the wake of the Soviet Union's break-up in 1991 , should be allowed to do in terms of carving out their own cultural and ideological destinies.

What is NATO?: Military alliance in spotlight as Russia tries to forbid Ukraine membership

Ukraine has aspirations to join the 30-nation NATO military alliance that was formed in the wake of World War II to help keep the peace in Europe. It seeks to lean west toward democracies in the European Union.

The NATO bloc's gradual encroachment east toward countries that border Russia is seen by Putin as a threat to Moscow's security and sphere of influence. It is this, partly, analysts believe, that underpinned Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Moscow's support for separatist rebels in Ukraine's Donbass region, where fighting has raged for eights years and is now the subject of an intense international spotlight because of what it could say about Putin's invasion plans. 

What the people want

Ordinary Russians, meanwhile, are more afraid today than they have been for 30 years that Putin could drag their country into a full-scale war with Ukraine, according to Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent research organization.

Some 62% of Russians surveyed by the Levada Center said they were worried Russia could be facing "World War III," Gudkov told USA TODAY.  

In Ukraine, a survey released Friday by research firm Rating Sociological Group found that 25% of respondents saw little-to-no threat of a Russian invasion; 19% of those surveyed said there was a "high" chance Moscow could invade. 

Biography of Vladimir Putin: From KGB Agent to Russian President

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Vladimir Putin is a Russian politician and former KGB intelligence officer currently serving as President of Russia. Elected to his current and fourth presidential term in May 2018, Putin has led the Russian Federation as either its prime minister, acting president, or president since 1999. Long considered an equal of the President of the United States in holding one of the world’s most powerful public offices, Putin has aggressively exerted Russia’s influence and political policy around the world.

Fast Facts: Vladimir Puton

• Full Name: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin
• Born: October 7, 1952, Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia) 
• Parents’ Names: Maria Ivanovna Shelomova and Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin
• Spouse: Lyudmila Putina (married in 1983, divorced in 2014)
• Children: Two daughters; Mariya Putina and Yekaterina Putina
• Education: Leningrad State University
• Known for: Russian Prime Minister and Acting President of Russia, 1999 to 2000; President of Russia 2000 to 2008 and 2012 to present; Russian Prime Minister 2008 to 2012.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia). His mother, Maria Ivanovna Shelomova was a factory worker and his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, had served in the Soviet Navy submarine fleet during World War II and worked as a foreman at an automobile factory during the 1950s. In his official state biography, Putin recalls, “I come from an ordinary family, and this is how I lived for a long time, nearly my whole life. I lived as an average, normal person and I have always maintained that connection.” 

While attending elementary and high school, Putin took up judo in hopes of emulating the Soviet intelligence officers he saw in the movies. Today, he holds a black belt in judo and is a national master in the similar Russian martial art of sambo. He also studied German at Saint Petersburg High School, and speaks the language fluently today.

In 1975, Putin earned a law degree from Leningrad State University, where he was tutored and befriended by Anatoly Sobchak, who would later become a political leader during the Glasnost and Perestroika reform period. As a college student, Putin was required to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but resigned as a member in December 1991. He would later describe communism as “a blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilization.”

After initially considering a career in law, Putin was recruited into the KGB (the Committee for State Security) in 1975. He served as a foreign counter-intelligence officer for 15 years, spending the last six in Dresden, East Germany. After leaving the KGB in 1991 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he returned to Russia where he was in charge of the external affairs of Leningrad State University. It was here that Putin became an advisor to his former tutor Anatoly Sobchak, who had just become Saint Petersburg’s first freely-elected mayor. Gaining a reputation as an effective politician, Putin quickly rose to the position of first deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg in 1994. 

Prime Minister 1999 

After moving to Moscow in 1996, Putin joined the administrative staff of Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin . Recognizing Putin as a rising star, Yeltsin appointed him director of the Federal Security Service (FSB)—the post-communism version of the KGB—and secretary of the influential Security Council. On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin appointed him as acting prime minister. On August 16, the Russian Federation’s legislature, the State Duma , voted to confirm Putin’s appointment as prime minister. The day Yeltsin first appointed him, Putin announced his intention to seek the presidency in the 2000 national election.

While he was largely unknown at the time, Putin’s public popularity soared when, as prime minister, he orchestrated a military operation that succeeded resolving the Second Chechen War , an armed conflict in the Russian-held territory of Chechnya between Russian troops and secessionist rebels of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, fought between August 1999 and April 2009. 

When Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned on December 31, 1999, under suspicion of bribery and corruption, the Constitution of Russia made Putin acting President of the Russian Federation. Later the same day, he issued a presidential decree protecting Yeltsin and his relatives from prosecution for any crimes they might have committed.    

While the next regular Russian presidential election was scheduled for June 2000, Yeltsin’s resignation made it necessary to hold the election within three months, on March 26, 2000. 

At first far behind his opponents, Putin’s law-and-order platform and decisive handling of the Second Chechen War as acting president soon pushed his popularity beyond that of his rivals.

On March 26, 2000, Putin was elected to his first of three terms as President of the Russian Federation winning 53 percent of the vote.

Shortly after his inauguration on May 7, 2000, Putin faced the first challenge to his popularity over claims that he had mishandled his response to the Kursk submarine disaster . He was widely criticized for his refusal to return from vacation and visit the scene for over two weeks. When asked on the Larry King Live television show what had happened to the Kursk, Putin’s two-word reply, “It sank,” was widely criticized for its perceived cynicism in the face of tragedy. 

October 23, 2002, as many as 50 armed Chechens, claiming allegiance to the Chechnya Islamist separatist movement, took 850 people hostage in Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater. An estimated 170 people died in the controversial special-forces gas attack that ended the crisis. While the press suggested that Putin’s heavy-handed response to the attack would damage his popularity, polls showed over 85 percent of Russians approved of his actions.

Less than a week after the Dubrovka Theater attack, Putting clamped down even harder on the Chechen separatists, canceling previously announced plans to withdraw 80,000 Russian troops from Chechnya and promising to take “measures adequate to the threat” in response to future terrorist attacks. In November, Putin directed Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov to order sweeping attacks against Chechen separatists throughout the breakaway republic.

Putin’s harsh military policies succeeded in at least stabilizing the situation in Chechnya. In 2003, the Chechen people voted to adopt a new constitution confirming that the Republic of Chechnya would remain a part of Russia while retaining its political autonomy. Though Putin’s actions greatly diminished the Chechen rebel movement, they failed to end the Second Chechen War, and sporadic rebel attacks continued in the northern Caucasus region.  

During the majority of his first term, Putin concentrated on improving the failing Russian economy, in part by negotiating a “grand bargain” with the Russian business oligarchs who had controlled the nation’s wealth since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Under the bargain, the oligarchs would retain most of their power, in return for supporting—and cooperating with—Putin’s government. 

According to financial observers at the time, Putin made it clear to the oligarchs that they would prosper if they played by the Kremlin rules. Indeed, Radio Free Europe reported in 2005 that the number of Russian business tycoons had greatly increased during Putin’s time in power, often aided by their personal relationships with him. 

Whether Putin’s “grand bargain” with the oligarchs actually “improved” the Russian economy or not remains uncertain. British journalist and expert on international affairs Jonathan Steele has observed that by the end of Putin’s second term in 2008, the economy had stabilized and the nation’s overall standard of living had improved to the point that the Russian people could “notice a difference.”

On March 14, 2004, Putin was easily re-elected to the presidency, this time winning 71 percent of the vote. 

During his second term as president, Putin focused on undoing the social and economic damage suffered by the Russian people during the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union, an event he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the Twentieth Century.” In 2005, he launched the National Priority Projects designed to improve health care, education, housing, and agriculture in Russia.

On October 7, 2006—Putin’s birthday— Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist and human rights activist, who as a frequent critic of Putin and had exposed corruption in the Russian Army and cases of its improper conduct in the Chechnya conflict, was shot to death as she entered the lobby of her apartment building. While Politkovskaya’s killer was never identified, her death brought criticism that Putin’s promise to protect the newly-independent Russian media had been no more than political rhetoric. Putin commented that Politkovskaya’s death had caused him more problems than anything she had ever written about him. 

In 2007, Other Russia, a group opposed to Putin led by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, organized a series of “Dissenters’ Marches” to protest Putin’s policies and practices. Marches in several cities resulted in the arrests of some 150 protestors who tried to penetrate police lines.

In the December 2007 elections, the equivalent of the U.S. mid-term congressional election, Putin’s United Russia party easily retained control of the State Duma, indicating the Russian people’s continued support for him and his policies.

The democratic legitimacy of the election was questioned, however. While some 400 foreign election monitors stationed at polling places stated that the election process itself had not been rigged, the Russian media’s coverage had clearly favored candidates of United Russia. Both the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe concluded that the elections were unfair and called on the Kremlin to investigate alleged violations. A Kremlin-appointed election commission concluded that not only had the election been fair, but it had also proven the “stability” of the Russian political system. 

With Putin barred by the Russian Constitution from seeking a third consecutive presidential term, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was elected president. However, on May 8, 2008, the day after Medvedev’s inauguration, Putin was appointed Prime Minister of Russia. Under the Russian system of government, the president and the prime minister share responsibilities as the head of state and head of the government, respectively. Thus, as prime minister, Putin retained his dominance over the country’s political system. 

In September 2001, Medvedev proposed to the United Russia Congress in Moscow, that Putin should run for the presidency again in 2012, an offer Putin happily accepted.

Third Presidential Term 2012 to 2018 

On March 4, 2012, Putin won the presidency for a third time with 64 percent of the vote. Amid public protests and accusations that he had rigged the election, he was inaugurated on May 7, 2012, immediately appointing former President Medvedev as prime minister. After successfully quelling protests against the election process, often by having marchers jailed, Putin proceeded to make sweeping—if controversial—changes to Russia’s domestic and foreign policy.  

In December 2012, Putin signed a law prohibiting the adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens. Intended to ease the adoption of Russian orphans by Russian citizens, the law stirred international criticism, especially in the United States, where as many as 50 Russian children in the final stages of adoption were left in legal limbo.   

The following year, Putin again strained his relationship with the U.S. by granting asylum to Edward Snowden, who remains wanted in the United States for leaking classified information he gathered as a contractor for the National Security Agency on the WikiLeaks website. In response, U.S. President Barack Obama canceled a long-planned August 2013 meeting with Putin. 

Also in 2013, Putin issued a set of highly controversial anti-gay laws outlawing gay couples from adopting children in Russia and banning the dissemination of material promoting or describing “nontraditional” sexual relationships to minors. The laws brought worldwide protests from both the LGBT and straight communities.  

In December 2017, Putin announced he would seek a six-year—rather than four-year—term as president in July, running this time as an independent candidate, cutting his old ties with the United Russia party. 

After a bomb exploded in a crowded Saint Petersburg food market on December 27, injuring dozens of people, Putin revived his popular “tough on terror” tone just before the election. He stated that he had ordered Federal Security Service officers to “take no prisoners” when dealing with terrorists.

In his annual address to the Duma in March 2018, just days before the election, Putin claimed that the Russian military had perfected nuclear missiles with “unlimited range” that would render NATO anti-missile systems “completely worthless.” While U.S. officials expressed doubts about their reality, Putin’s claims and saber-rattling tone ratcheted up tensions with the West but nurtured renewed feelings of national pride among Russian voters. 

On March 18, 2018, Putin was easily elected to a fourth term as President of Russia, winning more than 76 percent of the vote in an election that saw 67 percent of all eligible voters cast ballots. Despite the opposition to his leadership that had surfaced during his third term, his closest competitor in the election garnered only 13 percent of the vote. Shortly after officially taking office on May 7, Putin announced that in compliance with the Russian Constitution, he would not seek reelection in 2024. 

On July 16, 2018, Putin met with U.S. President Donald Trump in Helsinki, Finland, in what was called the first of a series of meetings between the two world leaders. While no official details of their private 90-minute meeting were published, Putin and Trump would later reveal in press conferences that they had discussed the Syrian civil war and its threat to the safety of Israel, the Russian annexation of Crimea , and the extension of the START nuclear weapons reduction treaty. 

On February 23, 2022, Putin launched an unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine, which had officially declared itself an independent country on August 24, 1991. Putin justified the act with the false narrative that Ukraine was not a real country. That it “belongs” to Russia as part of a “Great Russia” and the “Russian World,” and that there is, according to Putin, no Ukrainian people, no Ukrainian language, and no separate Ukrainian history. 

After Russia launched its 2022 invasion, the United States, the European Union (EU), and other NATO member nations condemned Putin, substantially increased military, humanitarian, and economic assistance to Ukraine, and imposed a series of increasingly crippling financial and economic sanctions on Russia. In addition, hundreds of U.S. and other companies withdrew, suspended, or curtailed operations in or with Russia.

On February 8, 1994, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ) accepted Ukraine into its Partnership for Peace, a collaborative arrangement open to all non-NATO European countries and post-Soviet states. Russia became a NATO member in June 1994 and conducted various cooperative activities with NATO, including joint military exercises, until 2014, when NATO formally suspended ties with the country. As the Cold War ended, Russia opposed the eastern expansion of NATO. However, thirteen former Soviet partnership members eventually joined the alliance.

Ukraine is not a NATO member. However, Ukraine is a NATO partner country, which means that it cooperates closely with NATO but it is not covered by the security guarantee in the Alliance’s founding treaty.

The invasion seemed to tarnish Putin’s image among the Russian people, as young citizens, along with middle-aged and even retired people, took to the streets to speak out against a military conflict ordered by their President—a decision in which, they claimed, they had no say.

Putin responded by shutting down public dissent against the attack on Ukraine. By the end of July 2022, a total of over 7,624 protesters had been detained or arrested to 7,624 since the invasion began, according to an independent organization that tracks human rights violations in Russia.

During Putin’s third presidential term, allegations arose in the United States that the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 

A combined U.S. intelligence community report released in January 2017 found “high confidence” that Putin himself had ordered a media-based “influence campaign” intended to harm the American public’s perception of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton , thus improving the electoral chances of eventual election winner, Republican Donald Trump . In addition, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating whether officials of the Trump campaign organization colluded with high ranking Russian officials to influence the election. 

While both Putin and Trump have repeatedly denied the allegations, the social media website Facebook admitted in October 2017 that political ads purchased by Russian organizations had been seen by at least 126 million Americans during the weeks leading up to the election.

Vladimir Putin married Lyudmila Shkrebneva on July 28, 1983. From 1985 to 1990, the couple lived in East Germany where they gave birth to their two daughters, Mariya Putina and Yekaterina Putina. On June 6, 2013, Putin announced the end of the marriage. Their divorce became official on April 1, 2014, according to the Kremlin. An avid outdoorsman, Putin publicly promotes sports, including skiing, cycling, fishing, and horseback riding as a healthy way of life for the Russian people. 

While some say he may be the world’s wealthiest man, Vladimir Putin’s exact net worth is not known. According to the Kremlin, the President of the Russian Federation is paid the U.S. equivalent of about $112,000 per year and is provided with an 800-square foot apartment as an official residence. However, independent Russian and U.S. financial experts have estimated Putin’s combined net worth at from $70 billion to as much as $200 billion. While his spokespersons have repeatedly denied allegations that Putin controls a hidden fortune, critics in Russia and elsewhere remain convinced that he has skillfully used the influence of his nearly 20-years in power to acquire massive wealth. 

A member of the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin recalls the time his mother gave him his baptismal cross, telling him to get it blessed by a Bishop and wear it for his safety. “I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since,” he once recalled. 

As one of the most powerful, influential, and often-controversial world leaders of the past two decades, Vladimir Putin has uttered many memorable phrases in public. A few of these include: 

• “There is no such thing as a former KGB man.”
• “People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves.”
• “Russia doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. It destroys them.”
• “In any case, I’d rather not deal with such questions, because anyway it’s like shearing a pig—lots of screams but little wool.”
• “I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days.” 
• “ Vladimir Putin Biography .” Vladimir Putin official state biography
• “ Vladimir Putin – President of Russia .” European-Leaders.com (March 2017)
• “ First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin .” The New York Times (2000)
• “ Putin’s Obscure Path From KGB to Kremlin .” Los Angeles Times (2000)
• “ Vladimir Putin quits as head of Russia's ruling party .” The Daily Telegraph (2002)
• “ Russian lessons .” Financial Times. September 20, 2008
• “ Russia: Bribery Thriving Under Putin, According To New Report .” Radio Free Europe (2005)
• Steele, Jonathan. “ Putin’s legacy is a Russia that doesn't have to curry favour with the west .” The Guardian, September 18, 2007
• Bohlen, Celestine (2000). “ YELTSIN RESIGNS: THE OVERVIEW; Yeltsin Resigns, Naming Putin as Acting President To Run in March Election .” The New York Times.
• Sakwa, Richard (2007). “Putin : Russia's Choice (2nd ed.).” Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. ISBN 9780415407656.
• Judah, Ben (2015). “Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell in and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin.” Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300205220.
• Boris Yeltsin: First President of the Russian Federation
• Political Parties in Russia
• Who Were the Democratic Presidents of the United States?
• A Brief History of the KGB
• The Truth Behind 14 Well-Known Russian Stereotypes
• The "Deep State" Theory, Explained
• Geography and History of Finland
• Geography of Moscow, Russia
• 12 Russian Authors Every Language Learner Should Read
• The Duma in Russian History
• NATO Member Countries
• What Is Sectionalism? Definition and Examples
• The Reagan Doctrine: To Wipe Out Communism
• Essential Facts About Russia's 21 Republics
• 16 Classic Russian Jokes
• Russian History in Architecture

Biography Online

Vladimir Putin Biography

Vladimir  Putin (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician who served as Russian President from 2000 to 2008, and from 2012 onwards. Between 2008-2012, he served as Russian Prime Minister making him the most powerful and de facto leader in Russia during this time in office. Since 2012 he has served as Russian President and has embarked on efforts to strengthen “Russia’s strategic interests” culminating in the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Putin studied Law at Leningrad State University, writing a PhD thesis on the importance of energy policy for future Russian economic success. After graduating in 1975, he joined the KGB. He was involved in monitoring foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad. From 1985 to 1990 he was posted to Dresden, East Germany. On the collapse of the East German government, he returned to Leningrad where he was involved in surveillance of the student body.

In August 1981, there was an attempted coup by Communist hard-liners with links to military and KGB against Mikhail Gorbachev . On the second day of the putsch, Putin resigned from the KGB and sought to pursue a political career. Putin said the decision to resign from the KGB was hard, but he didn’t support the direction of the coup and the hard-liners.

In 1997, Boris Yeltsin appointed him to the position of deputy chief of the Presidential staff. In 1999, with the backing of Yeltsin, he was voted as Prime Minister of Russia. When Yeltsin, unexpectedly resigned a few months later, Putin became the default President of Russia.

During the early years of his Presidency, Putin gained substantial popular backing because of his hard-line on military issues (such as the war in Chechnya) and overseeing a return to economic stability. He cultivated a macho ‘action man’ image of fearless leader and sportsman, helped by his sporting and KGB past. This image was attractive to voters. After a decade of inflation and falling living standards, during the 2000s, Russia embarked on a sustained period of economic growth, falling unemployment and rising living standards. The strong performance of the economy was attributable to the rising price of oil and gas (increasing value of Russia’s exports) and strong macroeconomic management.

Early in his leadership, he came to an arrangement with the new Russian ‘oligarchs’ powerful businessmen who had gained control of formerly state-owned industries. Putin made a deal where they agreed to start paying tax and avoiding politics, in return for leaving them free to pursue their business interests. This helped raise revenue for the government and reduced the political influence of the Oligarchs.

In 2008, unable to run for a third term as President, he ran for Prime minister, with his dual political aid Medvedev becoming President. However, it was Putin who remained the most powerful figure.

In 2012, Putin was re-elected for a third term as President, however, for the first time, this led to widespread protests at the lack of democracy in Russia. Increasingly, Putin’s regime has been criticised for being dictatorial and avoiding a true democracy.

For example, former Russian President Gorbachev, who was initially a supporter of Putin said he was disappointed by the increased disrespect for democracy and authoritarian tendencies. In 2007, Gorbachev said Putin had ‘pulled Russia out of chaos’. But, in 2011 criticised Putin for seeking a third term as President. Gorbachev was severely critical of the 2011 elections. “The results do not reflect the will of the people,” Mr Gorbachev said at the time. “Therefore I think they [Russia’s leaders] can only take one decision – annul the results of the election and hold new ones.” ( Gorbachev calls on Putin to resign )

On July 28, 1983, Putin married Lyudmila Shkrebneva. They have two daughters, Maria Putina (born 1985) and Yekaterina (Katya) Putina (born 1986 in Dresden). Putin himself is a practising member of the Russian Orthodox Church. His religious awakening followed the serious car crash of his wife in 1993 and was deepened by a life-threatening fire that burned down their dacha in August 1996. Right before an official visit to Israel, his mother gave him his baptismal cross telling him to get it blessed “I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.”

Putin has been hailed by Patriarch Alexius II of the Russian Orthodox Church as instrumental in healing the 80-year schism between it and the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia in May 2007. Putin was supportive of the Russian Orthodox church in supporting the imprisonment of members of ‘Pussy Riot’ the pop group who protested about Putin and the Church. However, the decision to imprison members of Pussy Riot was widely condemned across the world for breaching human rights.

In March 2014, in the wake of turmoil in Ukraine, Putin authorised the use of Russian troops to enter the region of Crimea. Shortly after, a referendum was organised where a majority of people voted to leave the Ukraine and rejoin Russia. There was criticism over the legitimacy of the referendum, but Crimea has effectively left Ukraine for Russia. The issue over Ukraine has led to increased tension between Russia and the West.

2016 US election

During the 2016 US election, it was alleged that Russian operators sought to influence the 2016 Presidential election by posting social media items which helped Donald Trump and hindered Hilary Clinton. Similar allegations were made with regard to the UK vote on Brexit. Although Putin denies influencing elections, there is evidence Russian foreign policy is geared towards destabilising Western democracies and weakening the NATO alliance. A long-standing grievance of Putin is the eastward expansion of NATO after the end of the cold war.

Under Trump, the NATO alliance was weakened, with Trump being the most pro-Russian president in modern times. However, later actions in the Ukraine had the effect of uniting the west and made NATO membership for Finland and Sweden appear more attractive.

2018 Russian election

In 2018, Putin won a fourth Presidential term, with 76% of the vote. Political opponents argue the system is rigged with opposition candidates placed under arrest or prevented from actively campaigning. Putin has suggested he will not run again in 2024, but his party United Russia have a powerful monopoly on local and national elections, and it is not certain when this will be ended. Putin’s regime has become increasingly authoritarian with opposition leaders being given the choice of ‘go west or go east’ – West meant to leave the country, east means to the Siberian prison camps. Notable opposition leader Alexei Navalny survived an attempted poisoning but on surviving choose to return to Europe where he was arrested on trumped up charges.

2022 Ukraine invasion

In early 2022, Russian troops massed on the border of Ukraine, with US and UK authorities warning an invasion of Ukraine was imminent. This was denied by the Kremlin but on 25 February Russian armoured units entered Ukraine. Putin claimed it was a ‘special military operation’ but heavy fighting and shelling began on Ukraine’s major cities Kyiv and Kharkiv. In response to the illegal invasion, western countries imposed severe economic sanctions on Russia, which led to a sharp drop in the Ruble and Russian stock market. Many  analysts were surprised at the reckless gamble taken by Putin as it leaves the country increasingly isolated and an international pariah after being excluded from major sporting and cultural events as well as economic sanctions.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Vladimir Putin” , Oxford, UK.  www.biographyonline.net Published 23rd May 2012. Last updated 1 March 2022.

Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft

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The Making of Vladimir Putin

Tracing Putin’s 22-year slide from statesman to tyrant.

President Vladimir Putin during a New York Times interview in 2003. Credit... James Hill for The New York Times

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By Roger Cohen

• Published March 26, 2022 Updated June 22, 2023

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PARIS — Speaking in what he called “the language of Goethe, Schiller and Kant,” picked up during his time as a K.G.B. officer in Dresden, President Vladimir V. Putin addressed the German Parliament on Sept. 25, 2001. “Russia is a friendly European nation,” he declared. “Stable peace on the continent is a paramount goal for our nation.”

The Russian leader, elected the previous year at the age of 47 after a meteoric rise from obscurity, went on to describe “democratic rights and freedoms” as the “key goal of Russia’s domestic policy.” Members of the Bundestag gave a standing ovation, moved by the reconciliation Mr. Putin seemed to embody in a city, Berlin, that long symbolized division between the West and the totalitarian Soviet world.

Norbert Röttgen, a center-right representative who headed the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee for several years, was among those who rose to their feet. “Putin captured us,” he said. “The voice was quite soft, in German, a voice that tempts you to believe what is said to you. We had some reason to think there was a viable perspective of togetherness.”

Today, all togetherness shredded, Ukraine burns, bludgeoned by the invading army Mr. Putin sent to prove his conviction that Ukrainian nationhood is a myth. More than 3.7 million Ukrainians are refugees; the dead mount up in a month-old war; and that purring voice of Mr. Putin has morphed into the angry rant of a hunched man dismissing as “scum and traitors” any Russian who resists the violence of his tightening dictatorship.

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• World Biography

Vladimir Putin Biography

Born: October 1, 1952 Leningrad, Russia Russian president

When Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister of Russia, very little was known about his background. This former Soviet intelligence agent entered politics in the early 1990s and rose rapidly. By August of 1999, ailing President Boris Yeltsin (1931–) appointed him prime minister. When Yeltsin stepped down in December of 1999, Putin became the acting president of Russia, and he was elected president to serve a full term on March 26, 2000.

Early life and education

Vladimir Putin was born on October 1, 1952, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia. An only child, his father was a foreman in a metal factory and his mother was a homemaker. Putin lived with his parents in an apartment with two other families. Though religion was not permitted in the Soviet Union, the former country which was made up of Russia and other smaller states, his mother secretly had him baptized as an Orthodox Christian.

Work in the KGB

At Leningrad State University, Putin graduated from the law department in 1975 but instead of entering the law field right out of school, Putin landed a job with the KGB, the only one in his class of one hundred to be chosen. The branch he was assigned to was responsible for recruiting foreigners who would work to gather information for KGB intelligence.

In the early 1980s Putin met and married his wife, Lyudmila, a former teacher of French and English. In 1985 the KGB sent him to Dresden, East Germany, where he lived undercover as Mr. Adamov, the director of the Soviet-German House of Friendship, a social and cultural club. Putin appeared to genuinely enjoy spending time with Germans, unlike many other KGB agents, and respected the German culture.

Around the time Putin went to East Germany, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–) was beginning to introduce economic and social reforms (improvements). Putin was apparently a firm believer in the changes. In 1989 the Berlin Wall, which stood for nearly forty years separating East from West Germany, was torn down and the two united. Though Putin supposedly had known that this was going to happen, he was disappointed that it occurred amid chaos and that the Soviet leadership had not managed it better.

Russian politics

In 1990 Putin returned to Leningrad and continued his undercover intelligence work for the KGB. In 1991, just as the Soviet Union was beginning to fall apart, Putin left the KGB with the rank of colonel, in order to get involved in politics. Putin went to work for Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg, as an aide and in 1994 became deputy mayor.

During Putin's time in city government, he reportedly helped the city build highways, telecommunications, and hotels, all to support foreign investment. Although St. Petersburg never grew to become the financial powerhouse that many had hoped, its fortunes improved as many foreign investors moved in, such as Coca-Cola and Japanese electronics firm NEC.

On to the Kremlin

In 1996, when Sobchak lost his mayoral campaign, Putin was offered a job with the victor, but declined out of loyalty. The next year, he was asked to join President Boris Yeltin's "inner circle" as deputy chief administrator of the Kremlin, the building that houses the Russian government. In March of 1999, he was named secretary of the Security Council, a body that advises the president on matters of foreign policy, national security, and military and law enforcement.

In August of 1999, after Yeltsin had gone through five prime ministers in seventeen months, he appointed Putin, who many thought was not worthy of succeeding the ill president. For one thing, he had little political experience; for another, his appearance and personality seemed boring. However, Putin increased his appeal among citizens for his role in pursuing the war in Chechnya. In addition to blaming various bombings in Moscow and elsewhere on Chechen terrorists, he also used harsh words in criticizing his enemies. Soon, Putin's popularity ratings began to soar.

Acting president of Russia

In December of 1999, Russia held elections for the 450-seat Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament (governing body). Putin's newly-formed Unity Party came in a close second to the Communists in a stunning showing. Though Putin was not a candidate in this election, he became the obvious front-runner in the upcoming presidential race scheduled for June of 2000.

On New Year's Eve in 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly stepped down as president, naming Putin as acting president. Immediately, Western news media and the U.S. government scrambled to create a profile of the new Russian leader. Due to Putin's secretive background as a KGB agent, there was little information. His history as a spy caused many Westerners and some Russians as well to question whether he should be feared as an enemy of the free world.

In Putin's first speech as acting president, he promised, "Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, the right to private property—these basic principles of a civilized society will be protected," according to a Newsweek report. In addition, Putin removed several of Yeltsin's loyalists and relatives from his cabinet.

Elected President

On March 26, 2000, Russians elected Putin out of a field of eleven candidates. After his election, Putin's first legislative move was to win approval of the Start II arms reduction treaty from the Duma. The deal, which was negotiated seven years earlier, involved decreasing both the Russian and American nuclear buildup by half. Putin's move on this issue was seen as a positive step in his willingness to develop a better relationship with the United States. In addition, one of Putin's earliest moves involved working with a team of economists to develop a plan to improve the country's economy. On May 7, 2000, Putin was officially sworn in as Russia's second president and its first in a free transfer of power in the nation's eleven-hundred-year history.

Putin, a soft-spoken and stone-faced man, keeps his personal life very private. In early 2000, an American publishing company announced that in May it would release an English-language translation of his memoirs, First Person, which was banned from publication in Russia until after the March 26 presidential election.

Putin has made great efforts to improve relations with the remaining world powers. In July 2001, Putin met with Chinese President Jiang Zemin (1926–) and the two signed a "friendship treaty" which called for improving trade between China and Russia and improving relations concerning U.S. plans for a missile defense system. Four months later, Putin visited Washington, D.C. to meet with President George W. Bush (1946–) over the defense system. Although they failed to reach a definite agreement, the two leaders did agree to drastically cut the number of nuclear arms in each country. Early in 2002, Putin traveled to Poland and became the first Russian president since 1993 to make this trip. Representatives of the two countries signed agreements involving business, trade, and transportation.

For More Information

Putin, Vladimir. First Person. New York: PublicAffairs, 2000.

Shields, Charles J. Vladimir Putin. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002.

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Putin: The man and his motives - what we know about the Russian dictator

Why is Vladimir Putin so afraid of being assassinated? And what will happen to him if he loses the war? We spoke to experts to paint a picture of the man who invaded Ukraine.

Live news reporter @EmilyMeeSky

Tuesday 15 August 2023 07:56, UK

Vladimir Putin is the man who brought war back to Europe, by sending his tanks into Ukraine on 24 February last year.

Little is known about the murky workings of the Kremlin and of Mr Putin's state of mind - to his citizens, he is both "the old man" and the symbol of Russia . To his Kremlin associates, he offers a means of clinging to power and wealth.

In our Ukraine live blog this week we ran an eight-part series posing questions to experts about what the Russian president's motivations are.

Here's what they said.

Part one: How has Putin's early life impacted his career?

Vladimir Putin grew up in the ruins of post-war Leningrad - now known as St Petersburg - and from a young age was running with street gangs.

His childhood experience was "relatively rough" and left him "constantly looking for security" with an awareness of "actually how dangerous and precarious life can be", said Mark Galeotti, principal director of Mayak Intelligence and a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

He was left wanting to join the "biggest gang in town", and so after he left university he joined the KGB - the security service for the then Soviet Union.

The young Putin was also described by Philip Short, journalist and author of Putin: His Life And Times, as a "bit of a tearaway" and a "young hooligan" - although "not quite so much as he later made out".

Even as a youth, he would play his cards close to his chest and "never gave very much away about himself or what he was thinking", Mr Short said - traits he has carried on into his presidency.

"He was actually quite bright and surprised his classmates by the way he understood difficult Russian writers like Gogol," the author said.

Then there was also his propensity for taking "crazy risks".

"When he became older, he was aware of that and compensated by being extremely cautious," Mr Short said.

But of course, there have been major exceptions - not least the war in Ukraine, which he is now "personally invested" in.

Part two: How did the fall of the Soviet Union impact Putin?

The Soviet Union - made up of 15 republics, including Russia, Ukraine and Belarus - was once the largest nation in the world, occupying nearly a sixth of the Earth's land surface.

When it fell and dissolved in 1991, it was a major shock to those living under its rule.

"It was a huge transition which people in most countries don't go through. From being part of a superpower which had enormous political and geopolitical reach, to suddenly finding you were part of Russia," said Mr Short.

For Russians, it meant that many of the assumptions they grew up with were now said to be false, he said.

"It was extremely difficult - a really terrible period that they had to go through in the 1990s," he continued.

Dr Alan Mendoza, founder and executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, said this "clearly affected [Putin] very significantly".

"I'm not sure Putin was necessarily a believer in communism but he was a believer in the system, that much was evident," he said.

Mr Putin, who would likely have wanted to work his way up the KGB, would have seen his aspirations "torn apart", Dr Mendoza said.

He saw the "chaos" of the 1990s in Russia, and for the last 20 years has been trying to restore the "lost empire".

Dr Mendoza added Mr Putin's long-held sense of Russian nationalism and imperialism - reflected in his view of Ukrainians not being "real people" - goes all the way back to "that trauma of the lost Soviet Union".

Part three: Why is Putin so afraid of being assassinated?

Repeated reports have emerged that Mr Putin is scared of being assassinated - and it's tricky to say how much is paranoia, and how much could be grounded in evidence.

"I think once you've been in power for as many years as Putin has, your natural state is paranoia," said Dr Mendoza.

He added: "You see it in that you don't know where the guy is at any given time, [and he's] meeting people with extreme distances between them. There's clearly a sense that people are out to get him - it's on his mind, very much so.

"Some people probably are out to get him. After 25 years at the top, you do amass enemies along the way - but part of it is imagined."

Professor David Lewis, an expert in global politics at the University of Exeter, thinks it may go back further.

"Putin has always had a strong sense of insecurity, perhaps stemming from his background in the KGB and his experience of the collapse of the USSR," he said.

The Russian president believes it is his mission to "break the dominance of the West in international politics and 'make Russia great again'" - so it is "not surprising" he believes Western security services, Ukrainian intelligence and Russian rivals are all plotting against him.

It could also be the "inevitable result of being the absolute ruler of a rather cannibalistic system", said Mr Galeotti.

"Putin encourages his various underlings to compete against each other. And I think that's in part because he assumes that frankly, that's the natural order."

Part four: Does Putin care about what ordinary Russians think?

For Mr Galeotti, there are two reasons why Mr Putin actually does care about how he looks to Russian citizens.

Mr Putin is "clearly thinking about his historical legacy and how future generations will remember him", he said.

But also, on a more pragmatic level, "the most successful police states are the ones in which those who are being controlled don't realise it, or actually end up backing the regimes exploiting them".

For Russians, he said, there are two Putins - and it's reflected in the fact his approval ratings tend to be about 80%, while his trust ratings lean closer to 30%.

So why would Russians approve of someone they don't trust?

"There's Putin, the icon of Russia - that becomes a representation ... If people are asked if they approve of Putin, it's whether you approve or not of Russia.

"There's also Putin the politician, the human being, and I think that is reflected by the trust rating."

Still, Mr Galeotti said there is now increasingly a sense that Mr Putin's "sell-by date has come and gone".

"I remember last time I was travelling in Russia, before I was banned, I was eavesdropping hearing people refer to him as the 'old man'."

Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia, says there is a level of apathy from Russians.

"They'd rather not think about it. This is actually quite typical. If you go back to the way they look back at Stalin times and Soviet times, there are all sorts of things they'd rather not think about," he said.

Sir Andrew added: "So the way [Mr Putin] portrays it as a time of triumph and Russia was great, they won the war in 1945, they take that as absolutely fine. It proves that they're great people, but they don't think about the number killed in the camps, the number of people killed on the battlefield. They don't like to think about that because it's too hurtful."

Part five: What does Putin's close circle in the Kremlin think of him?

This can be a difficult question to answer, even for those who have studied Russia for many years.

Sir Andrew said one of Mr Putin's main characteristics is to "speak to as few people as he can" - meaning there are few people in the Kremlin, and even fewer in the close circle around him.

John Foreman, who was recently Britain's defence attaché in Moscow, said the close circle would have been together for 25 to 30 years.

Russia has a "very different nature of power" based on "personality, friendships and old links", he said.

"These decisions are taken by blokes who used to go to school together, to chat with each other, or play Judo and so on."

Mr Foreman continued: "They all know that they rely on Putin for power and wealth. So when they have private thoughts about Putin, they would never express those in public when they know the consequences of moving against each other and being seen to be disloyal."

They are not "stupid people" and they are aware of what is happening with the war, he said, but "at this stage they have calculated that it's better to stick with who you know than risk a change of leadership" - and face losing their positions, and possibly their lives.

Professor Lewis agrees Mr Putin's close circle has an "enormous amount to lose" if he is ousted from power.

But he also thinks many of those around Mr Putin share his worldview - with some taking an even more extreme position - believing the West is a "hostile force" that is "using Ukraine as a proxy to attack Russia".

Sir Andrew believes Mr Putin's close circle is now focusing only on the war, with most of the institutions that normally make up a government now abolished.

"At the beginning, he did have a government. He did have people who could advise him on the economy," he said.

But those with local authority across Russia have "all been effectively sent out", so the decisions Mr Putin makes now are "very much based on what he believes", Sir Andrew said.

Part six: Why would Putin meet Prigozhin for tea after branding him a 'traitor'?

The Russian private mercenary group Wagner, led by its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, staged a short-lived rebellion against Moscow's military leaders in June.

Soon after, it emerged Prigozhin - who Mr Putin had branded a "traitor" - had gone for tea with the Russian president.

And last month, he appeared at a summit between Russia and African leaders. So, what is going on?

"The meeting makes more sense if you think of Putin's Russia as similar to a mafia organisation," said Professor Lewis.

"There is no rule of law, but only informal agreements among rival groups brokered by Putin as a kind of godfather figure."

He said it would have made sense for Mr Putin to broker an "informal deal" to keep Prigozhin alive and a small Wagner force intact, but keep it under the heel of the Kremlin so it can do Moscow's bidding in parts of Africa and elsewhere.

Mr Short, the author and journalist, agrees that Mr Putin "still sees a role" for Prigozhin, at least for now.

He says that when Mr Putin was deputy mayor of St Petersburg, he "had to deal with criminal types like Prigozhin and he found ways of dealing with them, ways of making use of them".

"The system that he's built as president relies on playing off one faction against another, one group against another, so that no group can become too powerful and can actually threaten the central power," Mr Short added.

Mr Foreman said the Russian president had appeared "disturbed" and "upset" as the rebellion took place.

But Prigozhin's meeting with Mr Putin would have been like the warlord "bending knee before its master, begging for forgiveness, and pledging his loyalty".

Still, it appears Prigozhin's future prospects likely hang in the balance.

"He has powerful enemies, Prigozhin, and what happens to him in the medium term I think is different to what happens to him in the short term," Mr Foreman said.

Professor Lewis added: "In any case, Prigozhin should not relax too much. Putin's career suggests that he firmly believes the old adage - that revenge is a dish best served cold."

Part seven: Will Putin ever back down in Ukraine?

The "myth of [Putin's] power has been tarnished" over more than 500 days of war, said Mr Foreman - but that doesn't mean he will back down.

"I still think he's all into his mission. I think he thinks his mission is very historic ... it's part of his personal legacy," he said.

Mr Foreman said the Russian president will be acutely aware of the consequences for him personally if he fails in Ukraine, and therefore there is "no price [Russia] won't pay".

"There's no cost in either national wealth or people they won't pay. Nobody's spoken in public against it, he's got no opposition at home."

Mr Putin views the West as "utterly weak", Mr Foreman said, so it will take Russia being defeated on the battlefield for Moscow's troops to be pulled out, in his view.

"I think the only hope for Russia is the Ukrainians manage to kick the Russians out," he said, although this is "looking less likely this year".

Dr Mendoza, founder and executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, said Putin will also be aware of the historical context.

The last Soviet leader to gamble with such high stakes was Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis - a 13-day showdown between the US and Russia widely considered to be the closest the world has come to nuclear Armageddon.

Dr Mendoza said the same question was posed during that crisis: "Can Khrushchev back down?"

"And it turns out that he could back down but the parole was up and, of course, he was removed from power afterwards."

Therefore it's possible Mr Putin may back down, but Dr Mendoza said: "He'll be fully aware of the Khrushchev comparison."

He added: "Having basically staked his whole life's work on winning this war, it's very difficult to see how [Putin] could back down and then survive the repercussions."

Part eight: What happens to Putin if he loses the war in Ukraine?

It's worth remembering that Russia has occupied parts of Ukrainian territory, in Crimea and in the Donbas region, since 2014.

While Ukraine's goal is to recapture all territory taken by Russia since then - not just areas occupied since the 2022 invasion - military analysts believe this will be extremely difficult to achieve.

Therefore, it's tricky to say when exactly Russia has "lost" the war.

"Russia only loses the war when Putin says so. Even if the Ukrainian military inflicts a major defeat on Russian troops and forces them to withdraw from most Ukrainian territory, Russia could still fight on in Crimea and the Donbas and continue to attack Ukrainian cities with missiles," said Professor Lewis.

"Russia's powerful propaganda machine would try to sell defeat as victory."

Mr Short said the Russian president would be able to claim victory if Moscow were able to hold onto anything more than it had at the beginning of the 2022 invasion.

He said the Russian president would use this against the West, which is supporting Ukraine, to say: "All of them came in and backed Ukraine, and we still managed to get more than we had before. They hadn't been able to prevent us."

But Professor Lewis said if Ukraine managed to keep its pre-2022 territory, Mr Putin's credibility would be "severely damaged" and Russia's political elites "would probably decide that Putin had become a liability and look for a change".

"A far-right militaristic regime might emerge that would seek revenge for Russia's defeat," he said.

"But it is more likely that Putin would be replaced by a figure from his current entourage, who would look for a deal with the West to end the war.

"All scenarios are in play, including a period of chaos as different factions struggle for power."

Mr Foreman, the recent British defence attaché to Moscow, said Mr Putin "spent the pandemic sitting in one of his bunkers reading history" and knows that in Russian history, dictators can and have been replaced.

"So he's well aware, but whether he's allowed to retire to a dacha [second home] or whether he's killed… Russian transitions of power are normally associated with some form of blood. I think he clings on because he knows what will happen to him."

Still, Mr Short believes it is highly unlikely the Russian army can be pushed totally out of Ukraine - and therefore Mr Putin's position is "secure" - for the foreseeable future, at least.

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The Ukraine conflict and Syrian intervention

• Silencing critics and actions in the West
• Salisbury Novichok attack and relationship with Trump
• Constitutional change and the poisoning of Navalny
• The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Prigozhin’s mutiny

• Why is Vladimir Putin still in power?
• How has Vladimir Putin changed Russia?
• What’s the background to Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine in 2022?
• What is the Syrian Civil War?
• How did the Syrian Civil War begin?

Third presidential term of Vladimir Putin

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Putin’s first year back in office as president was characterized by a largely successful effort to stifle the protest movement. Opposition leaders were jailed, and nongovernmental organizations that received funding from abroad were labeled as “foreign agents.” Tensions with the United States flared in June 2013, when U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden sought refuge in Russia after revealing the existence of a number of secret NSA programs. Snowden was allowed to remain in Russia on the condition that, in the words of Putin, he stop “bringing harm to our American partners.” After chemical weapons attacks outside Damascus in August 2013, the U.S. made the case for military intervention in the Syrian Civil War . In an editorial published in The New York Times , Putin urged restraint, and U.S. and Russian officials brokered a deal whereby Syria’s chemical weapons supply would be destroyed.

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Putin commemorated the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the post-Soviet constitution in December 2013 by ordering the release of some 25,000 individuals from Russian prisons . In a separate move, he granted a pardon to Mikhail Khodorkovsky , the former head of the Yukos oil conglomerate who had been imprisoned for more than a decade on charges that many outside Russia claimed were politically motivated.

In February 2014, when the government of Ukrainian Pres. Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown after months of sustained protests, Yanukovych fled to Russia . Refusing to recognize the interim government in Kyiv as legitimate , Putin requested parliamentary approval to dispatch troops to Ukraine to safeguard Russian interests. By early March 2014 Russian troops and pro-Russian paramilitary groups had effectively taken control of Crimea , a Ukrainian autonomous republic whose population was predominantly ethnic Russian. In a popular referendum held on March 16, residents of the Crimea voted to join Russia, and Western governments introduced a series of travel bans and asset freezes against members of Putin’s inner circle. On March 18 Putin, stating that the Crimea had always been part of Russia, signed a treaty incorporating the peninsula into the Russian Federation. Over subsequent days, still more of Putin’s political allies were targeted with economic sanctions by the U.S. and the European Union (EU). After ratification of the treaty by both houses of the Russian parliament, on March 21 Putin signed legislation that formalized the Russian annexation of Crimea.

In April 2014, groups of unidentified gunmen outfitted with Russian equipment seized government buildings throughout southeastern Ukraine , sparking an armed conflict with the government in Kyiv . Putin referred to the region as Novorossiya (“New Russia”), evoking claims from the imperial era, and, although all signs pointed to direct Russian involvement in the insurgency, Putin steadfastly denied having a hand in the fighting. On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 , carrying 298 people, crashed in eastern Ukraine, and overwhelming evidence indicated that it had been shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile fired from rebel-controlled territory. Western countries responded by tightening the sanctions regime , and those measures, combined with plummeting oil prices, sent the Russian economy into a tailspin. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) estimated that more than 1,000 Russian troops were actively fighting inside Ukraine when Russian and Ukrainian leaders met for cease-fire talks in Minsk , Belarus , on September 5. The cease-fire slowed, but did not stop, the violence, and pro-Russian rebels spent the next several months pushing back Ukrainian government forces.

On February 12, 2015, Putin met with other world leaders in Minsk to approve a 12-point peace plan aimed at ending the fighting in Ukraine. Although fighting slowed for a period, the conflict picked up again in the spring, and by September 2015 the United Nations (UN) estimated that some 8,000 people had been killed and 1.5 million had been displaced as a result of the fighting. On September 28, 2015, in an address before the UN General Assembly, Putin presented his vision of Russia as a world power, capable of projecting its influence abroad, while painting the United States and NATO as threats to global security. Two days later Russia became an active participant in the Syrian Civil War , when Russian aircraft struck targets near the cities of Homs and Hama. Although Russian defense officials stated that the air strikes were intended to target troops and matériel belonging to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria , the actual focus of the attacks seemed to have been on opponents of Syrian president and Russian ally Bashar al-Assad .

Vladimir Putin Biography

Birthday: October 7 , 1952 ( Libra )

Born In: Saint Petersburg, Russia

Vladimir Putin is the current President of Russia. He is considered an autocrat with little respect for human rights and has been accused of ordering assassinations of his critics and opponents. Besides being the President, he has also served as the Prime Minister and was a foreign intelligence officer before entering politics. He was born in a middle class family and had a dream of becoming an intelligence officer since childhood. He realized this dream when he entered KGB , the Russian intelligence agency. He was posted in various places as an undercover agent. For a large part of his life, he served at the agency. Eventually, he got involved in political affairs of the country and resigned from KGB. He then, diligently worked for the welfare of the country and its people, which soon earned him recognition. Finally, when the then President of Russia Boris Yeltsin decided to step down from his post, he found no better successor than Vladimir Putin and appointed him as the President of the country. A few months later, the elections took place and there too, he emerged as the winner. The deft handling of issues with admirable efficiency led to his re-election for a second term to the office of President of Russia. Since as per Russian constitution, he was ineligible to run for presidency for the third consecutive term, Dmitry Medvedev ran for the office of the President and Putin became the Prime Minister. In 2012, when Medvedev's term ended, Vladimir Putin once again became the President for the third time. In 2018, he was re-elected for his fourth term as President.

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Also Known As: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

Age: 71 Years , 71 Year Old Males

Spouse/Ex-: Lyudmila Putina (1983–2014)

father: Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin

mother: Maria Ivanovna Shelomova

siblings: Albert Putin, Viktor Putin

children: Mariya Putina , Yekaterina Putina

Born Country: Russia

Quotes By Vladimir Putin Presidents

political ideology: Political party - Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1975–1991), Our Home-Russia (1995–1999), Unity (1999–2001), Independent (1991–1995; 2001–2008), United Russia (2008–present)

Notable Alumni: Saint Petersburg Mining Institute

City: Saint Petersburg, Russia

Founder/Co-Founder: United Aircraft Corporation, State Council

education: Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg Mining Institute

awards: 2007 - Time's Person of the Year 2011 - Confucius Peace Prize

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Vladimir Putin was born to Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Putina on 7th October, 1952, in Saint Petersberg, Soviet Union.

During 1960-68, he attended the Primary School No. 193 located at Baskov Lane. He then joined the High School No. 281 , and even took interest in sports like sambo (a martial art form) and judo.

In 1970, he enrolled at the Leningrad State University Law Department, and as a student he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. During the same time, he encountered the Russian politician Anatoly Sobchak.

He worked on his thesis entitled The Most Favored Nation Trading in International Law , and in 1975, he graduated from the university.

Soon after graduating from law school, Vladimir Putin entered the government-run intelligence agency KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti). At the beginning of 1980s, he was trained at the KGB School No. 1, Moscow.

He worked for the KGB agency’s Directorate Secretariat and then was employed at the Counterintelligence Division. He was again sent for training by KGB to Andropov Red Banner Institute to prepare him for his trip to Germany.

During the period 1985-90, he operated in the Dresden city of East Germany as an undercover agent. Vladimir’s hard work earned him the position of lieutenant colonel and eventually he became the senior assistant to the head of the department in the intelligence office.

In 1990, he traveled back to Leningrad and was appointed to the Leningrad State University as the rector, in which capacity he handled international relations.

He chaired the Committee for International Relations at St. Petersburg City Hall in 1991. A few years later, he joined the St. Petersburg City Government as the Deputy Chairman. Soon after joining the City Hall , he resigned from his post at the KGB.

He shifted to Moscow in the year 1996, along with his family, and there he was appointed to the Presidential Property Management Directorate as the Deputy Chief. The following year, he joined the Presidential Executive Office as the Deputy Chief of Staff and also Chief of Main Control Directorate.

He became the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office in 1998, and the same year, he joined office as the Director of the Federal Security Service. The following year, he became the Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation.

He was chosen as the Prime Minister of Russia by the then President of Russia Boris Yeltsin in 1999. By the end of that year, the then President stepped down, nominating Vladimir Putin as his successor for the post.

In March 2000, he was elected as the President of Russia and also served a second term after being re-elected to the office in 2004.

As per Russian constitution, he was ineligible to run for presidency for the third consecutive term. Hence, in 2008, Dmitry Medvedev ran for the office of the President and won the election. Medvedev appointed Vladimir Putin as the Prime Minister of Russia.

In 2011, the presidential term was extended from four years to six years. In 2012, Putin once again contested the presidential election and won by polling 64% of vote.

In 2018, he was re-elected for the fourth term as the President. He got 76% of votes and will be in office till 2024.

The 2010 Russian Wildfire had a huge aftermath. Crops were destroyed and thousands died due to the smog that was created by the fire. The President took special care to help people overcome this situation and he himself took charge of the reconstruction of homes and provided compensation to the victims.

In 2014, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian army into Ukrainian territory and annexed Crimea after a disputed referendum in which Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation. As a result of this, many countries slapped economic sanctions against Russia.   

In 2015, on request of the Syrian government, Vladimir Putin authorized the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War to help Syrian government in their fight against rebel and jihadist groups.

Putin has been accused by America of meddling in the 2016 American presidential elections. He has been accused of personally ordering a campaign to denigrate Hillary Clinton and to harm her electoral chances. But Putin has denied any interference in the American presidential election.

He received the Bronze Medal for Faithful Service to the National People’s Army issued by the German Democratic Republic in the year 1989.

In 2006, he was felicitated with the Grand-Croix (Grand Cross) by the President of France, Jacques Chirac. The following year, he was named Person of the Year by Time magazine.

Vladimir Putin was the recipient of the King Abdul Aziz Award in 2007 by Saudi King Abdullah. The same year, he was awarded with the Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan Award by the president of the UAE.

In 2011, he was awarded with an honorary doctorate by the University of Belgrade.

On 28th July 1983, Vladimir Putin married Lyudmila Shkrebneva after a courtship of about three years. The couple was blessed with two daughters, Maria and Yekaterina.

Over the years, Vladimir Putin has been romantically linked to several women, but these are regarded as rumors and Putin has denied such allegations. Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Shkrebneva announced their separation in 2013 and within a year, their divorce was finalized.

A street in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, has been named after him as Vladimir Putin Avenue . A peak in Tian Shan Mountains has also been named after this politician as Vladimir Putin Peak.

Vladimir Putin is known for his love of animals, particularly his black Labrador retriever named Konni.

Putin is a skilled judo practitioner and has been practicing the martial art since he was a teenager.

Despite his tough image, Putin has a playful side and has been known to showcase his sense of humor in public appearances.

Putin has a passion for adventure and has been photographed engaging in various outdoor activities such as fishing, horseback riding, and swimming.

Putin is multilingual and is fluent in several languages, including German and English.

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How a Texan Trolling for Putin Met His End

Russell Bentley left Round Rock for a breakaway Ukrainian statelet and found stardom on Russian TV, before he died under mysterious circumstances.

Russell Bonner Bentley III intended to devote the afternoon of April 8 to the banal task of picking up some new health insurance documents. The 63-year-old Texan and his wife, Lyudmila, had driven to the shabby, four-story Soviet-era municipal building flanked by spruce trees in the Petrovsky District on the western outskirts of Donetsk, a city in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas that has been a war zone for the past ten years. At the top of the building’s façade hung a black, blue, and red flag and the white double-headed eagle of the Donetsk People’s Republic, an unrecognized breakaway statelet of Ukraine that was formally annexed by Russia in 2022. 

Bentley had moved to the Donbas from Round Rock, just north of Austin, nine years and four months before to fight alongside the pro-Russian rebels there. I traveled to Donetsk to interview him in 2017 —an attempt to understand what fueled him. A communist, he viewed Russia as the heir to the Soviet Union and saw the conflict purely through the Kremlin’s lens. “I felt a responsibility to come here and show the people of Donbas and the world that not everyone in the United States supports the fascist government of the United States that supports the Nazi government of Ukraine,” he said shortly after taking up arms. After six months in combat at the front he realized that using a grenade launcher is a young man’s game and threw himself into the “information war” against the West. By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he had become an influential propagandist for the Kremlin, releasing a torrent of videos and posts filled with disinformation about the conflict and regularly appearing on Russian state media channels. Bentley was widely known in Donetsk as the “Donbass Cowboy” (employing the Russian spelling of the region) and by his call sign, Texas (pronounced Tejas in Russian), and was granted Russian citizenship in 2021.

That overcast April afternoon he and his wife planned to trade in some of their documents from the Donetsk People’s Republic for new ones issued by the Russian Federation. But shortly after they arrived at the building, an incoming volley of Ukrainian shells struck nearby. Bentley, wearing  a black T-shirt and moss-colored camouflage pants, rushed out of the building toward the smoke to see if there were any civilians who needed help. Instead of the low ponytail he had maintained for most of his time in Donetsk, his white hair was cut short. Lyudmila, a local English teacher whom he married in 2017, stayed behind to shelter in the building as the shelling continued. 

Several hours passed, and Bentley did not return to the municipal building or answer his wife’s repeated calls. Lyudmila set out looking for him, eventually finding their white Lada Niva parked at a service station nearby. Inside the car rested Russell’s hat and glasses, and his shattered cellphone lay on the ground beside the vehicle. But there was no trace of Bentley, his bag, or his car keys. Eyewitnesses later told Lyudmila that five men in military uniforms had blindfolded a man matching Bentley’s description before hustling him away. When Lyudmila returned the next day, the car was gone, apparently taken by two Russian soldiers. 

“Russell was brutally detained on April 8,” Lyudmila wrote on her husband’s Telegram channel, an encrypted instant messaging service, identifying his captors as members of Russia’s 5th Tank Brigade. “I CALL ON EVERYONE to do EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to save my husband, our ‘Texas.’ ” 

But Lyudmila, who did not respond to an interview request, could uncover few concrete details about Bentley’s kidnappers and what may have motivated them to take him. Early reports said he might have been mistaken for a spy because of his less-than-fluent command of the Russian language and his proximity to the front line. One of the local investigators told Lyudmila that “most likely” Russell was murdered after being captured, but declined to share what informed that assessment. She appealed to Russian president Vladimir Putin for “maximum assistance” to either help her locate her husband alive or have his body returned to her. Shortly thereafter, a military investigator was dispatched from Moscow to look into the case, but no further details about the status of the investigation have been released. 

Then in late April, a white Niva was found near an abandoned brick factory close to the front line, according to a Telegram post from Vlad Filin, a disabled veteran turned pro-war blogger based in Donetsk. Inside was a burned body. The remains found in the vehicle are undergoing a forensic medical examination, according to Roman Ivlev, Lyudmila’s lawyer. He insists that Russian soldiers killed Bentley. “The scoundrels who committed this crime . . . wear epaulets,” the lawyer said. 

On May 6 an official Russian organ, the state-run news agency RIA Novosti, finally characterized Bentley’s death as a murder. In that piece , Dmitry Kiselev, the head of Rossiya Segodnya who is known as Putin’s chief propagandist , called for the perpetrators to be punished. “This is our military correspondent,” Kiselev said . “The crime should be investigated, there is a principle of inevitability of punishment. Everyone is equal before the law.” 

This end was a long way from Beverly Drive in Highland Park, where Bentley spent his early years . In a photo from the early sixties, Bentley stands in front of a hedge on the green lawn of his family’s home with his hands on his hips. He can’t be more than four years old, and he’s dressed in a button-down shirt and a large cowboy hat. A leather holster looped through his belt holds a toy gun.

Bentley’s life story had a cinematic sweep, as he would often note himself. His family was wealthy thanks to his great-grandfather, who patented a new form of asphalt and paved roads throughout Texas in the early twentieth century. When Bentley was eight, the family moved to Houston, living in River Oaks and Memorial. There, he discovered the writings of Che Guevara and Karl Marx and began acting out at school. 

As a teen he spent three years at a wilderness camp for “emotionally disturbed adolescents” outside of Bryan. He joined the Army at age twenty, spending three years as a combat engineer, and when he finished his service waited tables at the Pantry and Grill Room, a restaurant his parents had opened on South Padre Island. In 1990, Bentley moved north to Minnesota, and began smuggling marijuana from Matamoros—the Mexican city across the river from Brownsville—to Minneapolis. That same year, he adopted the nickname “Bongo” and joined the Grassroots Party, which advocated for the legalization of cannabis, and mounted a run for U.S. Senate. He came in a distant third behind the Democrat and Republican candidates, winning some 29,820 votes. 

Six years later, Bentley was arrested and sentenced to five years and three months in federal prison for drug smuggling. A few months prior to his release, he absconded from the halfway house where he was finishing his sentence and spent the next almost eight years as a fugitive on the run from the U.S. Marshals. After he was caught, he served a final year at a maximum security prison in Seattle, walking out in 2008 with a sturdy dislike for the feds. “The American government, and the Ruling Class that owns it, are the greatest threats to the future of the Human Race that the world has ever known,” he wrote on Facebook in 2009.

Bentley moved back to the Austin area, where he was born, and began working as an arborist. In his spare time, he read a range of Kremlin-friendly fringe websites, slowly coming to view the “Russian world” as superior in all regards. Bentley believed President Barack Obama was a fascist and lionized strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. He felt increasingly disaffected with life in the United States and began to think about how to imbue his life with purpose. “51 years—longer than I ever expected to be around, but I still have a few more grand adventures on my agenda,” he wrote in June 2011.

When Gaddafi was killed by a mob following NATO’s intervention in Libya that October, Bentley felt the need to do something. So he bought a bottle of spray paint and drove to Burnet Road, where he climbed up a billboard featuring a line of solemn U.S. Marines and the words “For Honor and Country” and wrote “F— NATO” in shaky block letters over it. The defaced billboard stayed up ten days before it was taken down. 

From his home in Round Rock, Bentley watched the 2013 Euromaidan protests unfold online. Students had taken to the streets of Kyiv to protest Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally. After a crackdown by riot police, a wider swath of society came out and Yanukovych eventually fled to Russia. Putin dubbed this a “coup” carried out by “neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites.” Bentley agreed, declaring in breathless Facebook posts that the protesters in the streets of Kyiv were “U.S.-backed Nazis.” He followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the ensuing separatist conflict in Donetsk and Lugansk closely. After seeing a photo of a dying woman who had lost her legs in a Ukrainian airstrike, he felt compelled to take action beyond graffiti. He uprooted his life in Texas to join the fight, setting up a GoFundMe that November to pay for his plane ticket. 

Bentley crossed the border from Russia into the Donetsk People’s Republic in December and quickly found a spot in the Russian-backed Vostok battalion. He was skeptical he would survive his first winter fighting at the front, and after his first six months at the front he redirected his efforts from armed combat to propaganda, declaring in a YouTube video, “My words are my bullets now, and they have a range that goes all the way around the world.” 

As the years ticked by, the range of Bentley’s words was severely limited: he was banned from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. He turned to Telegram to disseminate his content, amassing some 22,000 followers there, and posted prolifically on VKontakte, a Russian social media site. He became a valuable player in the propaganda space, as there are few Americans (and even fewer Texans) who are willing to support Putin’s view of the world so unfailingly. He regularly appeared on Russian news programs , shot footage himself around Donetsk, was a frequent commentator on fringe vlogs and podcasts, and even spoke in Moscow last December at an event celebrating “the real heroes of modern Russia.” “Heading west with the Liberators of Ukraine. We may stop in Kiev, we may stop on the English Channel. We may liberate the USA,” Russell wrote on VKontakte in February 2022, four days after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He later wrote that “[t]he only cure for the US government is fire.”

In 2023, Bentley served as an official correspondent for Sputnik, a Russian state-owned news agency. In March, in one of his final videos for the outlet, he invited viewers along with him as he went to vote for Putin at a polling place in Donetsk. “I’ve come to do my civic duty . .  .to vote for the real democracy of the Russian Federation,” he says, pointing out his paper ballot and the clear ballot box as indicators of the fairness of the process, which was viewed by the outside world as a sham election . 

In his almost ten years in Donetsk, Bentley became a local celebrity, and he also was widely known in Russia itself, aided in part by his magnetic personality and a creative streak. His folk song, “Sweet Home Novorossiya,” which he sings in English and Russian , played on the radio there.

Donetsk is a real cool city, And you know, it’s my new home.  My brothers here—they’re cool and heavy,  And we’re all loved by the finest girls, oh yeah!  Sweet home, Novorossiya, Donetsk, Lugansk . . . Slavyansk!  Gorlovka, Saur-Mogila,  From Kharkov to Odessa—this is our motherland! 

Clips from Russell and Lyudmila’s 2017 wedding made their way onto prime-time state television throughout Russia. But he achieved his viral breakthrough with the broader world in March 2022, when he, wearing a leather jacket and a gray Lenin cap, appeared near the front line accompanying a battalion as they pressed south from Donetsk toward Mariupol a few days after the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Speaking in front of a column of tanks spray painted with Zs—a Russian military symbol used to indicate support for the war against Ukraine—Bentley appeared jubilant. “This is Tejas on the front line with the de-Nazifiers and the liberators of Ukraine. . . . These guys are gonna save and liberate all the good people in Ukraine and the bad people, boom, kick their ass,” he said, kicking the air behind him for dramatic flourish. The video amassed more than a million views on Bentley’s YouTube channel before it was taken down.  

Bentley’s apparent murder has enraged Russian military bloggers and others who knew him. “TEXAS HAS BEEN MURDERED! LIKE THEY KILLED MANY OF OUR BROTHERS! AS THEY KILLED PRIGOZHIN AND ALL THOSE WHO SPEAK THE TRUTH AND HONESTLY STAND UP FOR RUSSIA!” Yegor Guzenko, a former Russian soldier turned military blogger, posted on his Telegram channel. He called for the killers to be held to account. “LET THEM SHOW THOSE WHO KILL THEIR OWN! SHOW THEM TO THE PEOPLE!” 

Alexander Korobko, a producer of an upcoming Al Jazeera documentary about Russell titled A Diary of a Fighter , came to consider him a dear friend. (Bentley was slated to attend the film’s premiere in Doha, Qatar, this June.) Korobko, the coauthor of a biography of Putin published in 2012, told me he first met Bentley in 2018 when he was in Donetsk filming a documentary with American actor Peter von Berg. “I didn’t characterize Russell according to his political agenda. I looked at him the way Leo Tolstoy taught us to look at people at war—the human side. I saw a great character,“ he said. “For me his strength lay not in his being political, but in his almost universal empathy.”

Bentley seemed to have found a sense of purpose and peace in Donetsk. “I have a small house with a big garden,” he shared in many recent interviews, calling his adopted city “the coolest, most beautiful place I have ever been.” Part of that purpose, as he understood it, included the likelihood of an early death. “I came here to give my life to a cause,” Bentley told me in 2017 as we sat in one of his favorite bars in Donetsk. “I didn’t think I would be famous or any of that, I never expected that, but I hope that what I have done can be a lesson and an example. Courage is the key to happiness.”

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