Quotes About Putin

I don't think Mr. Putin has our best interests at heart.

I interviewed Putin himself in 2000, shortly after he took over as president.

Putin wants nothing less than to return Russia to the center of global politics by challenging the primacy that the United States has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War.

I am not afraid of Putin, so I go and challenge him on the elections.

A united, confident America should easily be able to counter Putin's whataboutism.

We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again.

Mr. Putin seems to be playing on every chessboard, from what Russia calls its 'near abroad' to the Middle East, from Europe to America.

You cannot compare any leaders in our country to what Vladimir Putin has done.

The post-Cold War order in Europe is finished, with Vladimir Putin its executioner. Russia's invasion of Georgia only marked its passing. Russia has emerged as a born-again 19th-century power determined to challenge the intellectual, moral and institutional foundations of the order.

Leaders' like Maduro, Erdogan and Putin hate freedom because it gives filthy peasants too much say and power over their own lives.

The idea is that Putin-Trump would be a win-win for the Kremlin, as they have mutual interests and alliances.

The problem with Russia is not corruption per se, or even Putin per se. Russian government is not corrupt because Vladimir Putin has absolute power. Russian government has been corrupt and will always be as long as anyone has absolute power.

Putin's calculation is simple: a Ukraine with a permanent war in its eastern region will never be fully welcomed by Europe or the rest of the world.

Another time, after failing to get my attention as I participated in a White House conference call on Russia sanctions, Declan stomped away, muttering, "Putin, Putin, Putin . . . When is it going to be Declan, Declan, Declan

Unless one is willing to believe that the Putin regime acted out of purely altruistic motives in exfiltrating this American intelligence worker to Moscow, the only plausible explanation for its actions in Hong Kong was that it recognized Snowden's potential as an espionage source.

Many comfort themselves that Trump's victory was an accident delivered by the dying gasp of America's white majority – and abetted by Putin. History will resume normal business after a brief interruption. How I wish they were right. I fear they are not.

I really can't abide conspiracy theories, because I believe that everything in the world stems from idiocy and incompetence. That's certainly true of most of what's happened in Russia under Putin.

Russia is a part of European culture. Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

VLADIMIR BYKOVSKY, Chuvashia: "Do you allow yourself emotions?" PUTIN: "Unfortunately, I do." DOBROSLAVA

Shortly after the elections, Putin went so far as to inform us that Parliament was a place not for debate, but for legislative tidying up. He was pleased that the new Duma would not be given to debating.

Most meetings of democrats end with the incantation, 'Let's complain to Europe.' Europe, unfortunately, is tired of hearing how wicked Putin is. It would prefer to be fooled and to hear how good he is.

Sparing Putin any serious penalty for his assault on our democracy doesn't just encourage further aggression, it tells the victims and potential victims of Russian aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, the Baltics, Poland, Moldova, and Montenegro, and in Russia itself, that the United States, the greatest power in the world, couldn't be relied on to defend its own democracy.

Both Trump and Putin use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it's not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when. This makes it impossible to negotiate with them and very difficult for journalists to cover them.