Vladimir Putin, Russia’s war-mongering president

Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, has once again shown his warmongering side by ordering a massive military attack on Ukraine on Thursday.

Putin has been the head of the Russian State since 2012, although he had held the same position in the period 2000-2008.

In all these years, the country has had conflicts in neighboring regions and states, such as Chechnya, Georgia or Syria or Ukraine itself in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea.

The former head of the KGB, the Soviet secret service, was born on October 7, 1952 in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), where he graduated in Law.

Linked to the KGB since 1975, between 1985 and 1990 he worked for this organization in the German city of Dresden, where he rose through the ranks until he managed it and left with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Upon his return to St. Petersburg, he was appointed assistant to the dean of the State University of this city, while he was introduced to politics in the city council of his hometown at the hands of the mayor, Anatoli Sobchak, of whom he began as an advisor.

After being appointed deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in 1991, he worked under Sobchak until 1996, when he moved to Moscow, the center of power.

He served for a time as head of the Kremlin Quartermaster, and in 1997 he was already deputy director of the presidential cabinet; a year later, in July 1998, he was appointed director of the Federal Security Service, heir to the KGB.

From this appointment he made his way to the top of power. After holding the post of secretary of the Kremlin Security Council for a few months, in August 1999 the then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, appointed him head of government to bring order to Chechnya.

On December 31, 1999, he replaced Yeltsin after his resignation and on March 26, 2000 he was endorsed at the polls with 52.9% votes, assuming the Presidency on May 7.

Elected on January 25, 2000 at the head of the Council of Heads of State of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the leader of the ruling Unity party has always defended a “strong State”.

Winner of the elections of March 14, 2004, on May 7 he was inaugurated president for the second time.

After two consecutive mandates allowed by the Constitution, he could not stand for the 2008 presidential elections, but he could participate later in others. For this he secured his plot of power by choosing the technocrat successor Dmitri Medvedev.

On March 4, 2012, he again aspired to the Presidency in elections, from which the mandates are already six years, according to a constitutional reform.

In this way, the “strong man” of Russia returned to the Kremlin (from where, in reality, he had not left) by winning with 63.6%. But opposition and citizens denounced fraud.

In these years he has been in the international community’s sights for curtailing internal opposition, as happened, for example, with the case of the spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died of poison in London in 2006, or more recently with the imprisonment of the opposition leader Aleksey Navalny.

In March 2014, he once again gave evidence of his policy of a strong Russia by annexing Crimea, which belongs to Ukraine. The protests of citizens and the international community turned into a conflict that is now experiencing a second chapter, with the war on Ukraine.

His name has been linked to the Panama papers – in 2016, the godfather of his daughters, the cellist Sergey Rolduguin, had created opaque companies there with the help of Russian state companies – or to interference in the United States elections that Donald Trump won. .

He won the March 2018 elections again and on July 1, 2020, he promoted a constitutional reform that will allow him to continue in the Kremlin beyond 2024.

He also secured the passage of a law granting him immunity when he leaves the Kremlin, making it impossible for him to stand trial in Russia.

He has been married to Liudmila Putina, whom he divorced in 2013 and with whom he had two daughters.