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In Response To: PUTIN ? (rumormillnews@yahoogroups)
An interesting man ...worthy of study this weekend.
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: From: "nadia staniewska"
: Date: Sat Jul 12, 2003 5:48 am
: Subject: most dangerous man on the planet
: PUTIN ? : australia
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EXCERPTS:
The Sunday Times (UK)
June 22, 2003
Profile: Vladimir Putin
Juvenile delinquent with a will to power
As a teenager, Vladimir Putin once impressed his friends by hanging upside-down from the balcony railings of his parents’ rat-infested flat in Leningrad. The flat was on the fourth floor, but the dare-devil climbed out on the ledge and dangled there to win a bet.
Whatever the temptation, the made-over Russian president can be counted on to avoid the Buckingham Palace balconies when he meets the Queen this week. There was no such confidence in his predecessor, the perpendicularly challenged Boris Yeltsin, which is probably why the royal carpet always passed him by.
Is Putin an old-style autocrat in sheep’s clothing or a good democrat? It is hard to credit that the enigmatic president, the first Russian leader to pay an official state visit to Britain since 1874, was barely four years ago serving as Yeltsin’s fifth prime minister, with a derisory approval rating of 2%.
The former KGB apparatchik now basks in popularity rates that seldom dip below 70%, thanks in part to a team of spin doctors and his grip on the media. His 50th birthday in October was celebrated with apparent mass hysteria, accompanied by such memorabilia as Putin vodka, Putin carpets, Putin watches and even a frost-resistant Putin tomato.
Abroad, too, he is a respected figure, having emerged from the Iraq crisis with none of the scorn meted out by America to his French and German counterparts, despite having sided with them in opposing the invasion. (Putin also nearly scuppered a fence-mending exercise with Tony Blair at a press conference on April 29, when he mocked the coalition’s failure to find Saddam Hussein or any weapons of mass destruction.) Yet when Putin dines at a banquet in London’s Guidhall, where Tsar Alexander II was similarly honoured 129 years ago, it will effectively crown the Russian leader’s efforts at self-rehabilitation that began last month when he hosted world leaders in his native St Petersburg.
.....
His presidency has not been a bed of roses, although luck has shone on him. As a non-drinking, non-smoking man of action, he is the antithesis of the shambolic Yeltsin. He has mastered the trick of sounding like a reformer to the West and acting with Stalin-like firmness in Russia.
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