Vladimir Putin

Russian leader Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 in Saint Petersburg (then known as Leningrad). After graduating from Leningrad State College, Putin began his career with the KGB as an intelligence officer in 1975. Putin rose to the top ranks of the Russian federal government after enrolling in the administration of President Boris Yeltsin in 1998, as prime minister. in 1999 before. assuming as president. Putin was reappointed Russian prime minister in 2008, and maintained power by generating re-election to the presidency in 2012.

Seeing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he retired from the KGB with the rank of colonel and returned to Leningrad as a supporter of Anatoly Sobchak (1937-2000), a liberal politician. Following the election of the latter as mayor of Leningrad (1991), Putin became the head of its external associations and its first deputy mayor (1994).

After Sobchak’s defeat in 1996, Putin resigned his post and later moved to Moscow. In 1998 he was appointed deputy director of control of the presidential administration of Boris Yeltsin.

Soon after, he was appointed head of Federal Security, an arm of the former KGB, and head of the Yeltsin Security Council. In August 1999, Yeltsin removed his prime minister Sergey Stapashin along with his cabinet, and also announced Putin in his place.

In December 1999, Yeltsin resigned as president and appointed Putin interim president until recognized elections had been held (in the original 2000). He was reelected in 2004. In April 2005 he made a historic trip to Israel to speak with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the first visit there by a Kremlin leader.

However, due to term limits, Putin was pressured to step down from the presidency in 2008, not before securing the post for his protégé Dmitry Medvedev. Putin was Medvedev’s key minister until 2012, when he was re-elected president of Russia.

US Election Tricks

Months before the 2016 US presidential election, more than a dozen US intelligence agencies unilaterally agreed that Russian intelligence was behind the attacks on the email of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta, who at the time had been president of the Democratic presidential candidate. Hillary Clinton.

In December 2016, unidentified senior CIA officials concluded “with great confidence” that Putin was actually involved in intervening in the US presidential election, according to a USA Today report. Officials went on to claim that the hacked messages from Podesta and DNC that were given to WikiLeaks just before US Election Day had been developed to weaken Clinton’s campaign in favor of her Republican opponent Donald Trump. Immediately thereafter, the FBI along with the National Intelligence Agency publicly supported the CIA assessments.

Putin denied such efforts to disrupt the US elections, and regardless of his intelligence agencies’ assessments, President Trump typically seemed to favor the tenure of his Russian counterpart. Underlining its attempts to unfreeze public relations, the Kremlin in late 2017 found that a terrorist attack in St. Petersburg had been thwarted, due to intelligence offered by the CIA.

Private life

In 1980, Putin met his future wife, Lyudmila, who was operating as a flight attendant at the time. The couple married in 1983 and had 2 daughters: Maria, born in 1985, and Yekaterina, born in 1986. In original June 2013, after almost thirty years of marriage, Russia’s first couple announced that they were getting divorced, providing very little reason for the choice, but making sure they got to it in a friendly and mutual way.

Putin, an Orthodox Christian, is believed to frequently attend religious services on important dates and holidays, and has had a long history of spurring the construction and restoration of a large number of churches in the region. It generally seeks to unify all religions under the command of the government expert and legally requires religious organizations to register with local officials for approval.