Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who is the president of Russia. Putin has held continuous positions as president or prime minister since 1999: as prime minister from 1999 to 2000 and from 2008 to 2012, and as president from 2000 to 2008 and since 2012. He is the longest-serving Russian or Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin.
The modern history of Russia began with the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union gaining more political and economical autonomy amidst the imminent dissolution of the USSR during 1988–1991, proclaiming its sovereignty inside the Union in June 1990, and electing its first President Boris Yeltsin a year later. The Russian SFSR was the largest republic of the Soviet Union, but it had no significant independence before, being the only Soviet republic to not have its own branch of the Communist Party.
The president of the Russian Federation is the executive head of state of Russia. The president is the chair of the Federal State Council and the supreme commander-in-chief of the Russian Armed Forces. It is the highest office in Russia.
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, also known as Platon Elenin, was a Russian business oligarch, government official, engineer and mathematician and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He had the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
LDPR — Liberal Democratic Party of Russia is a Russian ultranationalist and right-wing populist political party in Russia. It succeeded the Liberal Democratic Party of the Soviet Union (LDPSU) in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The party was led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky since its inception until his death in April 2022. Opposing both communism and capitalism of the 1990s, the party scored a major success in the 1993 Duma elections with almost 23% of the vote, giving it 64 seats of the 450 seats in the State Duma. In the 2021 elections, the party received 7.55% of the vote, giving it 21 seats.
Presidential elections were held in Russia on 26 March 2000. Incumbent prime minister and acting president Vladimir Putin, who had succeeded Boris Yeltsin after his resignation on 31 December 1999, sought a four-year term in his own right and won in the first round.
Sergei Borisovich Ivanov is a Russian senior official and politician who has been serving as the Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation on the Issues of Environmental Activities, Ecology and Transport since 12 August 2016. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
Russian oligarchs are business oligarchs of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth in the 1990s via the Russian privatisation that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. 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.
Russia and the United States maintain one of the most important, critical and strategic foreign relations in the world. Both nations have shared interests in nuclear safety and security, nonproliferation, counterterrorism, and space exploration. Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, relations became very tense after the United States imposed sanctions against Russia. Russia placed the United States on a list of "unfriendly countries", along with South Korea, Taiwan, European Union members, NATO members, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Micronesia, Japan and Ukraine.
A diverse variety of informal political groups emerged since the presidency of Vladimir Putin starting in 1999. They include remnants of the Yeltsin family, Saint Petersburg lawyers and economists, and security-intelligence elements called the siloviki.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as President of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990. He later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism.
The political career of Vladimir Putin concerns the career of Vladimir Putin in politics, including his current tenure as President of Russia.
The Normandy Format, also known as the Normandy contact group, is a grouping of states who met in an effort to resolve the war in Donbas and the wider Russo-Ukrainian War. The four countries who make up the group—Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and France—first met informally in 2014 during the 70th anniversary of D-Day celebrations in Normandy, France.
Putinism is the social, political, and economic system of Russia formed during the political 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 the Federal Security Service (FSB), Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, Armed Forces of Russia, and National Guard of Russia. According to Arnold Beichman, "Putinism in the 21st century has become as significant a watchword as Stalinism was in the 20th."
The first inauguration of Vladimir Putin as the president of Russia took place on Sunday, May 7, 2000. The ceremony was held for the first time in the Grand Kremlin Palace and lasted exactly one hour.
Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, died of cardiac arrest on 23 April 2007, twelve days after being admitted to the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow. Yeltsin was the first Russian head of state to be buried in a church ceremony since Emperor Alexander III, 113 years prior.
There have been several rounds of peace talks to halt the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022–present) and end the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014–present) in an armistice. The first meeting was held four days after the start of the invasion, on 28 February 2022, in Belarus. It concluded without result, with delegations from both sides returning to their capitals for consultations. A second and third round of talks took place on 3 and 7 March 2022, on the Belarus–Ukraine border, in an undisclosed location in the Gomel region of Belarus. A fourth and fifth round of talks were respectively held on 10 and 14 March in Antalya, Turkey.
On 30 August 2022, Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader and president of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, died after a long illness at the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital in Russia. Gorbachev was the last living Soviet leader following the death of Georgy Malenkov in 1988, was the only one to have been born during the Soviet Union's existence, and the only one to have died after its dissolution. At the age of 91 years old, Gorbachev is the longest-lived ruler of Russia to date, having lived longer than Alexander Kerensky and Vasili Kuznetsov, who both died at 89 years old. On 3 September, a funeral was held for Gorbachev, and he was buried later that day.
On March 26, 2022, roughly a month after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, U.S. president Joe Biden delivered a speech at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Poland.
