Quotes About Putin

Roldugin, who has been a friend of Putin since the 1970s, is said to be the person who introduced the Russian president to his former wife. He is the godfather of Putin's daughter Maria. These connections, rather than any evident business skill, allowed him to amass a tremendous fortune.

President Putin has been a stealthy reformer yearning for consensus.

Gazprom's new management was little better than the Vyakhirev-era elite.63 The company was widely alleged to facilitate corruption through its procurement deals. Many companies that supply Gazprom are owned by long-time friends of Putin's

Russia's oil industry would be dominated by Putin and his allies. This policy had clear costs in terms of deterring foreign investment and reducing efficiency

Putin himself publicly emphasized the importance of political stability to energy investment. "I worked in Saint Petersburg on a great many different projects," Putin explained in an interview in 2000. "If we're going from one putsch to another, and no one knows when the next putsch is coming and how it will end, then who will invest?

Putin has made a habit of supporting far-right candidates who undermine his foes in Europe; perhaps he never could have imagined such a character taking root on American soil. Trump's reasons for aligning with Putin have been more innocent, if no less dangerous.

President Trump understands that President Putin does not like to be insulted. Putin takes it very personally. He harbors a grudge. He doesn't forget. And he will find some way of getting some degree of revenge as a result of that.

I don't have a lot of hope for Russia when Putin goes, because I think that the kind of damage that has been done to that country hasn't been understood. We've never seen a country that has been this battered.

There's no prospect that the Russians are going to send Snowden back. Snowden is in the land of spy swaps now. Putin is not going to give this guy up for nothing.

True, Putin's Russia does not dream of joining the E.U., but Russia's stability depends on preserving the European nature of its regime.

Putin must stand as the guarantor of media freedom.

You don't have to be a brilliant historian to know that in Europe, messing with countries' borders, messing with their self-determination, their ability to choose their own futures, this is extremely dangerous, and that's why I think it is important to stand up to Putin.

To present me as the main face of the opposition movement is completely incorrect. I'm not a person who is 'against Putin.' I'm just a person who is standing up for a fair society, for free elections.

Fear has also been used to carry out a redistribution of wealth—which is to say back under the control of the state, where Putin is chief among a collection of officials whose roles more closely resemble those of Mafia dons than public servants.

Putin probably, almost certainly, thinks that one of the great disasters of the 20th century was the demise of the Soviet Union. It's very obvious that he's trying to work its way back and maintain something similar to that sort of institution.

'Make America great again,' is not that different from Putin's nostalgia for the Soviet Union or tsarist Russia.

There is a view of Russian exceptionalism, that they are a unique civilisation, a view right since Ivan the Terrible that Russia is a special civilisation with a special culture. Putin is pushing that now.

Since 2012, Putin has made it perhaps his largest foreign policy priority to have the Magnitsky Act repealed. But none of his efforts have worked. Not only has it not been repealed, it's spread to six additional countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, the Baltic states and Gibraltar.

The United States must look beyond Mr. Putin. His regime may appear imposing, but it is rotting inside. His Russia is not a great power on par with America. It is a gas station run by a corrupt, autocratic regime.

A desire to contain extremism is a major reason why Putin offered help to the United States in battling the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. It is also why Russia maintains close relations with Shia Iran, which acts as a counterweight to Sunni powers.

Putin has built a mobilisation society, his sky high popularity numbers, which Donald Trump so envies, are fully dependent on being able to mobilise the population against an enemy and that imagined enemy is the United States.

I returned to the United States after Putin ascended in 2000.

Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion.

Russia does not and cannot have any political choice but democracy. I want to say, and even stress, that we share those universal democratic principles taken around the whole world.