Quotes About Putin

On August 9, 1999, Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin prime minister of Russia. A week later he was confirmed in that position by a wide majority of the Duma: he proved just as likable, or at least unobjectionable, as Yeltsin had intuited.

The same day, Putin made one of his first television appearances. "We will hunt them down," he said of the terrorists. "Wherever we find them, we will destroy them. Even if we find them in the toilet. We will rub them out in the outhouse.

Still, I couldn't shake the fear that Putin's way of doing business had more force and momentum than I cared to admit, that in the world as it was, many of these hopeful activists might soon be marginalized or crushed by their own government—and there'd be very little I could do to protect them.

In 2008, Putin's message was, 'We aren't like a Central Asian republic, we aren't going to build a personalistic regime, we will have institutions.' This is all abolished now. The very idea of a governing party and party career, as you have in China, that didn't work.

The capital city of Grozny in Chechnya was reduced completely to rubble, and Putin thought this was worthwhile because it kept the state together.

Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.

President Vladimir Putin's grandfather was a chef at one of Stalin's houses and revealed nothing to his grandson: 'My grandfather kept pretty quiet about his past life.' As a boy, he recalled bringing food to Rasputin. He then cooked for Lenin. He was clearly Russia's most world-historical chef since he served Lenin, Stalin and the Mad Monk.

I love to negotiate things, I do it really well, and all that stuff. But it's possible I won't be able to get along with Putin.

I think Putin will have to find a way to signal, even if it's a modest signal, an openness to dialogue.

If you read anything I've written about Putin, heard anything I've said about Russia since I left in 2000, you'd know that I'm not Vladimir Putin's image consultant.

Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.

I was a political journalist for a long time. I wrote a book about Putin. I made all kinds of trouble.

Before any American points a finger at President Putin and calls him nasty names, they should recognize that a lot of Americans agree with Putin on his stance against homosexual and transgender people.

In 2012, Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency after a four-year, constitutionally imposed hiatus. It wasn't the smoothest of transitions. To his surprise, in the run-up to his inauguration, protesters filled the streets of Moscow and other major cities to denounce his comeback.

So to confirm by seeking more than one source, a search for "Putin+Rothschild+bank" yields numerous reports going back as far as 2013. It appears that Putin is definitely battling the New World Order.

That's exactly what [Donald] Trump says, Putin is a great leader. We should love Putin. He has a high popular and everybody oh, fine, you guys - oh, that's terrific.

Putin has a lot at stake here and restoring the relationship with the United States, and there are already signs as Sandy mentioned that he's moving in the right direction to begin to ascertain that their trade with Iran is not used for the production of nuclear weapons.

The Magnitsky law has proven to be a powerful tool. While asset freezes and travel bans against corrupt officials may sound incidental, they have shaken the Putin kleptocracy right down to the core.

Putin's treatment of Chechnya became a cautionary tale of what would happen to rebels and terrorists - and indeed to entire groups of people - if they threatened the Russian state.

Putin is very - not the smartest guy in the world.

There aren't a lot of things that are extraordinary about Putin, but his greed is truly extraordinary.

Trump's alliance with Russia's Vladimir Putin, in defiance of America's own intelligence community, the Department of Justice, and the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, forces us to face that the fundamental principles of our nation are under attack.

I am talking about strategies that were developed, working with the Trump campaign. I really do believe that much of what you saw coming out of Trump's mouth was a play from Putin's playbook.

It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.