Vladimir Putin

1 . Putin's expected election triumph will set him up to be president for life. It's true that during his presidency and his tenure as prime minister, Putin has ruled Russia like a latter-day czar. He has ended direct elections for regional governors , subdued unruly oligarchs , marginalized political opposition, and neutered the judiciary, the news media and Russia's legislature, the Duma. But Putin's neo-czarist system has been sputtering for some time. Slower economic growth, crime, corruption and a bloated bureaucracy have led...

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin pulled off one of his most audacious pieces of stagecraft, attending a ballet with his rarely seen wife, then emerging smiling and announcing their marriage is over. The end of the marriage of the Russian president and Lyudmila Putina less than two months shy of their 30th anniversary came on state television after a Thursday evening that started out like a model of domestic contentment — a devoted husband taking his wife out for an artsy interlude. After the...

T here is one incontestably great actor on the world stage today, and he has no interest in following our script. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — soon to be Russia's president again — has proven remarkably effective at playing the weak strategic hand he inherited, chalking up triumph after triumph while confirming himself as the strong leader Russians crave. Not one of his international peers evidences so profound an understanding of his or her people, or possesses Putin's canny ability to size up counterparts.

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin and wife announce on state TV they are divorcing. Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin — the tiger sedater, the skin-diving archeologist, the motorcycle rider, the bare-chested horseman — has tried on another role: mother hen. Russia's president, perpetually on the lookout for the photogenic natural adventure, stopped at an Arctic peninsula on his way to a summit in Vladivostok and used a motorized hang glider to lead a flock of captive-raised red cranes, the Interfax news agency reported early...

IN A SPEECH to the National Democratic Institute last month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talked frankly about the challenges of balancing U.S. support for democracy and human rights with the "complex interests" of a superpower: "We'll always have to walk and chew gum at the same time," she said. Ms. Clinton has sometimes tripped while trying to pull that off — as when she appeared to dismiss human rights concerns about China, or when she assured the world on Jan. 25 that the Egyptian...

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Vladimir Putin gave the first major international speech of his new presidency Thursday, telling an audience of influential businessmen, government officials and economists everything they wanted to hear. But instead of applauding Putin's assurances that he was building democracy, fighting corruption and creating trustworthy courts, they listened in silence. They had heard it before. Even in the same forum last year . This year, the mood was wait and see. Polite...

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin's decision to skip the Group of Eight summit at Camp David next week suggests that Russia's strong-man president has encountered unfamiliar challenges in the first days of his new term, compelling him to hunker down and demonstrate here and abroad who is in charge. Only Putin himself really knows why he chose to send Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to the long-planned summit in his place, but the fast-moving and unpredictable events in Moscow over the past few days have clearly...

Early in this study of Vladimir Putin, journalist Masha Gessen recalls the cloud of uncertainty that enveloped the Kremlin in 1999. President Boris Yeltsin was ailing, near the end of his term, and his inner circle was desperate to find a successor. "A tiny group of people, besieged and isolated, were looking for someone to take over the world's largest landmass, with all its nuclear warheads and all its tragic history," Gessen writes, "and the only thing smaller than the pool of candidates seems to have been...

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin took the presidential oath of office for the third time Monday, swearing to uphold the Russian Constitution as his hand rested on a red-bound copy of the document in the splendid Grand Kremlin Palace. Outside, the streets were mostly empty, except for knots of would-be demonstrators who were hustled off to police vans. As soon as he was sworn in, Putin signed a dizzying number of decrees. After a long winter of discontent, and with no sign that protests are...

At a cafe on the Place des Vosges, Natalia Gevorkyan is picking at a salade verte and thinking about betrayal. It's a central theme in the worldview of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president and a man who once spent many hours telling her of his life and his credo. It was natural for a KGB officer to suspect betrayal all around him, she says, and although Putin left the agency nearly two decades ago, he has never shaken its particular view of human nature. Yet today, an air of suspicion...

SOCHI, Russia — The vice president of Russia's Olympic Committee was fired Thursday after a public roasting and ritual humiliation by Vladimir Putin, who was in a pique because the Olympic ski jump was behind schedule. With one year to go before the Opening Ceremonies on Feb. 7, 2014, the Russian president spent Wednesday inspecting venues for the Sochi Games and showing off Russia's progress to Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, and Jean-Claude Killy, chairman of the coordination...

Habits instilled by fear are slow to fade but can be rapidly relearned. That is one lesson Vladimir Putin is teaching us. Roaming through Russia just after the Soviet Union dissolved, I kept in my pocket a copy of the new U.S.-Russia treaty that opened the country to free travel. As I drove down highways until recently off-limits, my license plate identifiable as a foreign reporter's, highway police would pull me over and demand to know who had given me permission. "Your foreign minister," I would say, handing...

MOSCOW — Hold the Botox! The latest rumors swirling around the Kremlin suggest Vladimir Putin needs a makeover, dropping his macho, macho man refrain in favor of some crinkly-eyed gravitas. Putin's usual sky-high ratings have been slipping, the people around him are constantly pestered with questions about his health and gossip persists that powerful behind-the-scenes string-pullers, known as the elite, are locked in an ugly struggle over the country's direction. What's a 60-year-old president to do?

As dictatorships collapsed toward the end of the last century and into this one, many people assumed that history moves in only one direction. The tide of freedom had lifted East Asia and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and Indonesia. In an era of global trade and communications, the rest of the world surely would follow. Academics and think tanks studied democratization, often presuming that it could be observed and predicted like any other natural process — that the democratic West didn't have to do much but...

MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin's ruling party decisively swept regional elections, according to results tabulated Monday, paradoxically confronting his top-down authoritarian system with a serious challenge. Since December's parliamentary vote, when large numbers of demonstrators unexpectedly began protesting rigged elections, Putin and his allies have been trying to regain what had been an undisputed grip on power. Sunday's election would appear to confirm they had done so. The...

At a cafe on the Place des Vosges, Natalia Gevorkyan is picking at a salade verte and thinking about betrayal. It's a central theme in the worldview of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president and a man who once spent many hours telling her of his life and his credo. It was natural for a KGB officer to suspect betrayal all around him, she says, and although Putin left the agency nearly two decades ago, he has never shaken its particular view of human nature. Yet today, an air of suspicion...

MOSCOW – Less than two weeks before presidential elections, Vladimir Putin laid out his ambitious plans Monday for modernizing and strengthening Russia's defense forces over the next decade, in the face of a threatening world and a powerful United States. "For Russia to feel secure and for our partners to listen carefully to what our country has to say," he wrote, Moscow must spend about $775 billion by 2022 for new armaments and a more professional military. "We see zones of instability and artificially...

MOSCOW — Soviet leaders used to prefer Republicans to Democrats, in the belief that Republicans were tough but more sincere and, once they made a promise, were more likely to deliver on it. There has been a whiff of that old way of thinking in recent remarks by President Vladimir Putin, even though plenty has changed in Russia's relations with the United States. Speaking to reporters last week, Putin said he appreciates GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's bluntness in his denunciations of Russia...

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin — the tiger sedater, the skin-diving archeologist, the motorcycle rider, the bare-chested horseman — has tried on another role: mother hen. Russia's president, perpetually on the lookout for the photogenic natural adventure, stopped at an Arctic peninsula on his way to a summit in Vladivostok and used a motorized hang glider to lead a flock of captive-raised red cranes, the Interfax news agency reported early...