Vladimir Putin
President of Russia

Vladimir Putin is the President of Russia. He has been ranked as Forbes most powerful person in the world for the past four years. In Putin’s time as both prime minister and president, he has become one of the longest-serving leaders in post-czarist Russian history. With power and wealth at the helm one of America’s greatest adversaries, Vladimir Putin is armed with the tools and know-how to exert Russia’s influence across a wide range of global affairs.

President Putin’s official biography on the web page of the Russian Presidential Executive Office is designed to paint a picture of an ordinary man that built his own path to the presidency through focus, hard work, and an undying commitment to mother Russia. He aspired to an intelligence career as a teenager, later gaining a degree in law from Leningrad State University. Less than a year after his first posting out of college, he gained the attention of intelligence officials who put him into a KGB program at Andropov Red Banner Institute, where he learned KGB intelligence tactics including how to manipulate individuals to become spies against their own countries. He was then posted in Dresden in East Germany where he was tasked with monitoring East German political developments. After nearly two decades of work in intelligence, Putin was named Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB; the KGB’s domestic successor) by then-President Boris Yeltsin. Putin’s training at the Red Banner Institute and his 16 years monitoring East German political developments made him well attuned to understanding how to read and influence the global political sphere.

During his first two terms as president, Putin began wielding his global influence to form new strategic relationships. In April 2005, he became the first Russian leader to ever visit Israel, later that year he became the first Russian leader to visit sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of his second term, Putin had been named Time’s 2007 Person of the Year. In 2008, while Putin served as prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s tensions with the Baltic nation of Georgia escalated into war as Russian forces drove Georgian troops out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, recognizing both as independent states following the turmoil.

Following two early terms as president from 2000-2008 and a term as prime minister from 2008-2012, Putin was elected to his third term as president following a hotly protested election cycle in 2012, a stark departure from his landslide victory during his second term. After facing widespread pushback both nationally and internationally in the 2012 Russian election, Putin claimed that the election was being influenced by “foreign money,” and that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had incited unrest to stoke political instability. A mere four years later Putin would be on the receiving side of accusations for a contested election influenced by foreign actors.

Putin began consolidating power during his third term following widespread protests during his election. He had hundreds arrested, changed laws to force NGOs to identify as ‘foreign agents,’ and jailed dissent groups including members of the band Pussy Riot. As the US spoke out on Russia’s human rights abuses, Putin pushed back by banning Americans from adopting Russia children in 2012, criticizing Barack Obama in a New York Times op-ed published on September 11, 2013, and signed a 2014 decree to ban agricultural imports from countries imposing sanctions on Russia. In 2014, following the Russian invasion of Crimea, Ukraine, Putin asserted that Russia’s stance on Ukraine was defensive as a result of NATO’s continued expansion and military spending. In January 2016, Putin signed an official document repositioning Russia’s national security posture by declaring that the United States and NATO were a “threat to national security.”

Following an unprecedented cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 US presidential election, Russia was implicated by lawmakers and the US intelligence community as the force behind the hack. In January 2017, the US intelligence community released a declassified report revealing that Putin ordered a campaign to target Hillary Clinton as part of an effort to help Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

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