Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who is serving as the current president of Russia since 2012, previously being in the office from 1999 until 2008. He was also prime minister from 1999 to 2000 and again from 2008 to 2012. As of 2021, Putin is the second-longest serving European president, after Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.
United Russia is the ruling political party of Russia. United Russia is the largest party in Russia, and as of 2021 it holds 336 of the 450 seats in the State Duma, having constituted the majority in the chamber since 2007.
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about Marxism–Leninism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
Russian oligarchs are business oligarchs of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth during the era of Russian privatization in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The failing Soviet state left the ownership of state assets contested, which allowed for informal deals with former USSR officials as a means to acquire state property. Historian Edward L. Keenan has drawn a comparison between the current Russian phenomenon of oligarchs and the system of powerful boyars which emerged in late-Medieval Muscovy.
The nuclear-powered Project 949A Antey submarine Kursk sank in an accident on 12 August 2000 in the Barents Sea, during the first major Russian naval exercise in more than ten years, and all 118 personnel on board were killed. The crews of nearby ships felt the initial explosion and a second, much larger, explosion, but the Russian Navy did not realise that an accident had occurred and did not initiate a search for the sub for more than six hours. Because the submarine's emergency rescue buoy had been intentionally disabled during an earlier mission, it took more than 16 hours to locate the sunken boat.
Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent. He has written books about Russian,Central and Eastern European communist and post-communist politics.
Peter Derek Truscott, Baron Truscott is a British petroleum and mining consultant, independent member of the House of Lords and writer. He was a Labour Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 1994 to 1999 and was elevated to the peerage in 2004. He has written on Russia, defence and energy, and works with a variety of companies in the field of non-renewable resource extraction.
David A. Satter is an American journalist who writes about Russia and the Soviet Union. He has authored books and articles about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of post-Soviet Russia. Satter was expelled from Russia by the government in 2013. He is perhaps best known as the first researcher who claimed that Vladimir Putin and Russia's Federal Security Service were behind the 1999 Russian apartment bombings and is particularly critical of Putin's rise to the Russian presidency.
Vladimir Valerianovich Pribylovsky was a Soviet and Russian political scientist, historian, journalist, human rights activist, and author of internet database Anticompromat.org on biographies of Russian politicians. He also authored more than 40 books.
Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB is a book written by Alexander Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko about the life and death of her husband, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned by the radioactive element polonium in London in November 2006.
Vladimir Putin has served three terms and is currently in a fourth as President of Russia and was Acting President from 1999 to 2000, succeeding Boris Yeltsin after Yeltsin's resignation. Putin was also Prime Minister for three months in 1999 and served a full term from 2008 to 2012. During Putin's presidency, he has been a member of the Unity party and the United Russia party. He is also affiliated with the People's Front, a group of supporters that Putin organized in 2011 to help improve the public's perception of United Russia. His political ideology, priorities and policies are sometimes referred to as Putinism.
Peter Eleftherios Baker is an American journalist and author who is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC. He covers President Joe Biden, the fifth president he has covered after Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
A potential superpower is a state or a political and economic entity that is speculated to be—or to have the potential to soon become—a superpower.
Gunvor Group Ltd is a Cypriot-domiciled multinational commodity trading company registered in Cyprus, with its main trading office in Geneva, Switzerland. Gunvor also has trading offices in Singapore, the Bahamas, and Dubai, with a network of representative offices around the globe. The company operates in the trade, transport, storage and optimization of petroleum and other energy products, as well as having investments in oil terminal and port facilities. Its operations consist of securing crude oil upstream and delivering it to market via pipelines and tankers.
Angus Roxburgh is a British journalist, broadcaster, former PR adviser to the Russian government, and singer-songwriter.
Putin is a masculine Russian surname. Its feminine counterpart is Putina.
Putinism is the political system of Russia formed during the leadership of Vladimir Putin. It is characterized by the concentration of political and financial powers in the hands of "siloviks"—current and former "people with shoulder marks", coming from a total of 22 governmental enforcement agencies, the majority of them being FSB, Police, Army and national guard of the Russian Federation. According to columnist Arnold Beichman, "Putinism in the 21st century has become as significant a watchword as Stalinism was in the 20th".
Events in the year 2018 in Russia.
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is a 2012 book by Masha Gessen about Vladimir Putin and his rise to power and reign. It intertwines both a psychological and conspiratory approach written in clear and engaging language. Gessen is a Moscow native who understands the culture and psychology of Russia. Their family left Russia when they were a teenager, but they returned for a 10-year stay as an independent journalist. Gessen's analysis of Putin is mostly speculative, but they carefully investigate his own revealing accounts of his life, and they use interviews with people who knew Putin, before he rose to power, to form their conclusions.
Putin: The New Tsar is 2018 a documentary produced by OxfordFilms/BBC and directed by Patrick Forbes, airing on BBC2. It discusses Vladimir Putin's rise to power. Interview subjects include politicians and non-politicians, with some being Russian and others being foreigners.
