Foreign Relations of Russia during Vladimir Putin Presidency

Putin, Vladimir

Russian statesman Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), in the former Soviet Union on October 7, 1952. He graduated from the State University, where he studied law, in 1975. From 1975 to 1990 Putin was a spy for the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency. In 1990 he left the KGB and took a job in the administration of Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg. There he served as head of the St. Petersburg foreign relations committee (1991-1994), deputy mayor, and head of external relations (1994-1996). In 1996 Boris Yeltsin, then president of the Russian Federation, invited Putin to work for him. Putin rose quickly in Yeltsin's government. He was appointed chief of staff in 1997 and then moved in succession from head of the Federal Security Service (1998) to secretary of the Security Council (March 1999) to prime minister (August 1999), and finally to acting president (December 1999). On March 26, 2000, Putin was elected president of Russia, winning almost 53 percent of the vote. In March 2004, Putin was re-elected, this time winning 71 percent of the vote (Politkovskava, 46-79).

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the new Russian Federation was faced with myriad domestic problems. Crime and corruption were rampant, the economy reached a state of near-collapse, and a large portion of the population was impoverished. Moreover, the government waged an intermittent and inconclusive war with Chechen separatists on its southwest border. When Putin came to power, he made it a priority to address these issues, beginning with rebuilding and stabilizing the Russian economy. One of the measures he undertook was land reform; in October 2001 he signed a law allowing Russians to purchase land for the first time. In an attempt to fight corruption, he proposed the creation of a task force to deter money-laundering operations. In November 2001 Putin reversed his previous hard-line stance on the situation in Chechnya, and took the unprecedented step of initiating talks with Chechen separatists. Putin's gesture of diplomacy suggested a new willingness to end the conflict and at the same time to improve Russia's image in the West. The Russian government had been widely criticized by other countries, including the United States, and human rights groups for its use of harsh and abusive practices in its attempts to put down the rebellion. Chechen violence flared again in 2002 and 2004, however, ending talks. In 2002 Chechen rebels held 800 people hostage in a Moscow theater. The Russian rescue effort resulted in the death of 117 hostages. Two years later rebels seized a school in Belsan. The two-day standoff left over 350 people dead, almost half of them children, and over 700 wounded. Citing the United States' preemptive policy against terrorists, Putin announced he was "seriously preparing to act preventively against terrorists (Robert, 45-78)."

Putin's desire to court the West's favor may have influenced some of his decisions, but to an extent, the West has also sought ...