Russian president vladimir putin biography the kgb
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He cultivated a macho ‘action man’ image of fearless leader and sportsman, helped by his sporting and KGB past. Encyclopedia Britannica
In 2012, Putin was re-elected for a third term as President, however, for the first time, this led to widespread protests at the lack of democracy in Russia.
“Therefore I think they [Russia’s leaders] can only take one decision – annul the results of the election and hold new ones.” (Gorbachev calls on Putin to resign)
On July 28, 1983, Putin married Lyudmila Shkrebneva. Relations with the UK soured when a former KGB agent and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London using radioactive polonium-210.
However, later actions in the Ukraine had the effect of uniting the west and made NATO membership for Finland and Sweden appear more attractive.
2018 Russian election
In 2018, Putin won a fourth Presidential term, with 76% of the vote. The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia, by Angus Roxburgh, published by I.B.
Tauris, 2012. Putin claimed it was a ‘special military operation’ but heavy fighting and shelling began on Ukraine’s major cities Kyiv and Kharkiv. Additionally, he has deployed Russian mercenaries in various African countries.
Putin’s most prolonged conflict has taken place in Ukraine. Putin remained in Dresden during the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, with a risky bluff, purportedly prevented a crowd of protestors from storming the local KGB headquarters.
Putin's Political Rise
Putin returned to Leningrad in 1990 and claimed to have resigned from the KGB the following year.
Putin said the decision to resign from the KGB was hard, but he didn’t support the direction of the coup and the hard-liners.
In 1997, Boris Yeltsin appointed him to the position of deputy chief of the Presidential staff. From 1985 to 1990 he was posted to Dresden, East Germany. He moreover described Russia as a “friendly European nation” that desired “stable peace on the continent.”
Putin’s relationship with the West deteriorated, however, in part over NATO’s 2004 expansion into seven Eastern European countries and over pro-Western revolutions that broke out in Georgia and Ukraine.
After a decade of inflation and falling living standards, during the 2000s, Russia embarked on a sustained period of economic growth, falling unemployment and rising living standards. The Kremlin brought independent television networks under state control and shut down other news outlets; abolished gubernatorial and senatorial elections; curtailed the judiciary; and restricted opposition political parties.
Political opponents argue the system is rigged with opposition candidates placed under arrest or prevented from actively campaigning.
They have two daughters, Maria Putina (born 1985) and Yekaterina (Katya) Putina (born 1986 in Dresden). On the collapse of the East German government, he returned to Leningrad where he was involved in surveillance of the student body.
In August 1981, there was an attempted coup by Communist hard-liners with links to military and KGB against Mikhail Gorbachev.
Summoning them to the Kremlin, he said they could keep their money as long as they kept out of politics and backed him.
He acted fast against those who didn't, such as Russia's then-wealthiest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested at gunpoint and jailed in Siberia.
Russia's president had something of a honeymoon with the West.