Quotes About Putin

I'm sorry to say this, but Putin is spreading lies. He is doing this with the goal of removing Stalin's Russia responsibility for starting the war jointly with Nazi Germany. I assumed he is ashamed of that.

Putin wants to restore the Russian empire. That's his ambition; he's stated it many times.

As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Subjected

We never make editorial decisions with people who are working closely with Vladimir Putin, unless you consider myself a person who is working closely with Vladimir Putin.

Technically, Trump and Putin did appear on the same episode of '60 Minutes.' In two completely unrelated segments, that were shot in different cities, in different countries, on different continents.

After the global financial crisis of 2008, populist uprisings had sprouted across Europe. Putin and his strategists sensed the beginnings of a larger uprising that could upend the Continent and make life uncomfortable for his geostrategic competitors.

Director Oliver Stone says he's going to make a movie about Vladimir Putin. I can't believe anyone would want to work with that insane communist. And Putin is a little crazy as well.

Vladimir Putin was awarded an advanced degree by the St. Petersburg Mining Institute with the help of a dissertation that, as two Brookings researchers discovered, included sixteen stolen pages - and, remarkably, not a single set of quotation marks.

Vladimir Putin is infuriated by the Magnitsky case. Why is he infuriated by it? It's because he steals a lot of money himself. He ends up terrorizing people himself. And he keeps that money he's stolen offshore.

Putin underlined that one of the most disastrous consequences of the collapse of the USSR was that "for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory." And it is precisely this that Putin has begun to correct.

Andropov's KGB sought to change the course of history by rewriting it, to shape the policies of a foreign government and the thinking of its citizens by bending and warping them. It would steal an election when it was up for grabs, weaken the alliances of its enemies when it could, discredit foreign leaders and undermine their political institutions when it saw the opportunity. These stratagems were the core of the curriculum for Putin's education in the KGB.

Shortly after Putin began his third term, a shadowy organization called the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in Saint Petersburg financed by a Kremlin oligarch, began planning to target American voters, using techniques of disinformation and deception that it was already testing on Russian citizens and their neighbors in Eastern Europe.

Firtash was the Ukrainian middleman for Gazprom, the Russian state-run natural gas giant. Putin used the company as an instrument of statecraft and an engine of corruption. Firtash bought gas from Gazprom at a steep discount. He marked it up threefold when he sold it to Ukraine, pocketing $3 billion and paying pro-Russian politicians, chiefly Yanukovych, to do the Kremlin's bidding. Through the oligarch's largesse, the president paid Manafort his millions.

The United States did little in direct response to Putin's war on truth. "We had a massive information gap," Ambassador Nuland said. "We didn't have the kind of intelligence assets where we could prove that he was lying about Russian involvement.

Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically. Reality television must become most dramatic with each episode. If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth.

Putin's aim was not to fool Ukrainians but to create a bond of willing ignorance with Russians, who were meant to understand that Putin was lying but to believe him a

In July 2000, two months after his official election, Putin met in the Kremlin with some of the rich and powerful businessmen known by then as oligarchs. He very clearly laid down the new ground rules. They could retain their assets, but they were not to cross the line to try to become kingmakers or in other ways control political outcomes. Two of the oligarchs who did not listen closely were soon in exile.

announcement of the big deal—valued at $400 billion over thirty years. The contract would make China the second-largest market for Russian gas, after Germany. The Chinese would also provide the financing for a massive new $45 billion, thirteen-hundred-mile "Power of Siberia" gas pipeline. "This will be the biggest construction project in the world for the next four years, without exaggeration," Putin said after the signing.

The Yeltsin years considerably lowered the bar [of public expectations] for the country's next leader: Putin's specific policies and actions arguably matter far less than his reassuring symbolic function as "a real man" who can husband the nation's resources and promise a return to greatness. (2007: 227)

President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin.

Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate.

There are many facts showing that Putin's people enriched themselves by using power mechanisms so that's why for them losing power means losing their fortunes.

[Rex Tillerson] is gonna continue to work on [sanctions lifting]. This is important for him. He was there [in White House] because he negotiated the deal for Exxon with [Vladimir] Putin.

I think, clearly, we got to work closely with China to resolve the serious problems we have, and I worry about Putin and his military adventurism in the Crimea and the Ukraine.