All Posts Tagged With: "putin"
Russian live fire air military exercise underway near Alaska
Russian military actions are clearly the prelude for Moscow’s presentation of demands and get or take what it wants.
Sarcastically entitled ‘Exercise Stability 2008′ the live fire operations will take place Oct.-6-12 over sub-Arctic Russia uncomfortably close to Alaska. This is the first time in almost a quarter century Russia has ventured dozens of nuclear bombers for an exercise in which live cruise missiles will be fired.
Russian air force spokesman Col. Vladimir Drik says Exercise Stability 2008 is “practicing the strategic deployment of the armed forces including the nuclear triad.” Triad refers to land, submarine and bomber launched nuclear weapons.
Last week on Oct. 1, Russian warships armed with nuclear missiles docked at Syrian ports and Oct. 8, on the eve of Yom Kippur, will continue into the Caribbean for joint maneuvers with Venezuela.
Col. Drik stressed that the Tu-95 and Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bombers will “carry their maximum combat payload and fire all the cruise missiles on board.” Also taking part in the air force exercise are Tu-22M3 Backfire strategic bombers, air superiority fighters, interceptors and aerial tankers.
The locations of the war games were deliberately chosen to underline three messages to America on the eve of its Presidential election.
- Russia is willing to brandish its nuclear strength in America’s face - to the north (Arctic) and south (Caribbean) - to challenge America’s position as the world’s No. 1 superpower.
- Russia is powerful and rich enough to rise above the shockwaves rocking the world’s financial markets while carrying on developing its military muscle and expanding its spheres of influence.
- By docking at the Syrian port of Tartus, the Peter the Great nuclear missile cruiser is Moscow’s marker on the Mediterranean to betoken the end of US Sixth Fleet’s sway.
Yesterday, Oct. 3, Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Russian Security Council, announced that 20,000 kilometers of the Russian border passes through the Arctic. Moscow therefore claims 18 percent of its territory and is preparing a plan to implement this policy. That include taking out oil and natural gas that exist there in vast deposits.
On September 30th the Russian nuclear powered submarine Ryazan docked at the Kamchatka Peninsula opposite Northern Japan after completing a one-month voyage under the Arctic Ocean without surfacing. That Delta III class strategic nuclear submarine is armed with sixteen nuclear tipped ballistic missiles with a range of 8,000 km. Russian Navy Commander Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky welcoming the Ryazan’s arrival said: “The navy continues to play an important role in safeguarding Russia’s maritime economic and research activity throughout the world, including in the Arctic.”
Russia sees weakness in a self-absorbed America. It is encouraged by presidential candidate Obama’s promise to cut military budgets. When Clinton cut military budgets in the 1992-1999 Russia was emboldened to develop is oil and gas reserves and is now ready to exploit its oil and gas production and take what is wants.
Russia’s air and naval strength does not yet match America’s military might but it has more than doubled it military spending including: a 23% increase last year, more increases likely, and the possibility of American cut backs makes Putin feel the time has come to get what he wants - a new Russian empire. Although Russian president Dmitry Medvedev stated emphatically last week that there is no cold war or any other war with America, Moscow’s actions tell a different story.
Russia Increases Spying On Israel Giving Intelligence to Iran and Syria.
Russia believes America is about to be propelled into an extraordinary shift toward socialism-isolationism ideas it can exploit.
Russia has intensified its spying on Israel and transferring that intelligence on Israel’s strategic capabilities to Iran and Syria. “(I)f the Russians help the Syrians get information, and the Syrians constantly pass it on to Hezbollah, it is a reasonable supposition that the information gathered by the Russians also reaches Hezbollah’s hands,” Col. Ram Dor, chief of information security in the Israeli military, said.
Russia has been monitoring Israel’s military and vital facilities via land, air and sea assets Russian warships are now routinely basing and staging out of Syrian’s Mediterranean naval base at Tartus that has now been converted 
to a permanent Russian naval base.
Officials said Russia has increased espionage operations inside Israel. They said Russian agents have been directed to identify and target young officers in the Israeli military and intelligence community. That is particularly insidious because there are more than 1 million Russian speakers linked to the former Soviet Union in Israel. Officials said Russian intelligence tracks emigrants who work in the Israeli military and defense industry and traces family inside Russia the purpose is to bludgeon their support by threatening family members still inside Russia.
The Russian intelligence on Israel is being relayed to the Lebanese-based Hezbollah militia via Damascus. The Syrians share the intelligence that they gather with Hezbollah, and the other way around,” Dor said. “This we know, because we know how to build a mirror-image that shows us what enemy intelligence knows about us.”
At the same time it was disclosed that Syrian President Bashar Assad has ordered the formation of an Iranian-trained praetorian guard to protect him from assassination which would unravel the Syria-Iranian-Russian triumvirate.
Russia’s expansionist agenda is driven by Putin’s Czarist-like personal ambitions funded by surging oil and natural gas income enabling a 23% increase in military spending, and accelerated by his view that America is about to be propelled into an extraordinary shift toward socialist-isolationist ideas that Russia can exploit.
Russian Bear Waging New COLD WAR- like Threats
Putin in clearly banking on the election of an inexperienced U. S. President in Obama he sees as impotent and indecisive.
Russia keeps upping the ante in its retaliatory moves for the greatly expanded U.S. and NATO presence in the Baltic, Eastern Europe, .and Black Sea to support the former Soviet republic of Georgia. On Monday, the two Tupolev Tu-160 Blackjack (White Swan) nuclear bombers it sent to Venezuela Sept. 10 carried out a six-hour patrol over the Caribbean Sea.
Putin in clearly banking on the election of an inexperienced U. S. President in Obama he sees as impotent and indecisive.
The fiercely anti-American communist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was so pleased to host the Tu-160s that he scheduled a personal audience with their crews Tuesday.
RIA Novosti also announced the two bombers would fly back to their home air base in southern Russia from Venezuela’s Libertador Air Base on Wednesday, three days later than their originally announced departure date.
The symbolism was obvious. The United States had infuriated the Russians by sending warships in support of Georgia to the Black Sea, which has been a virtual Russian lake for the past 250 years. So the Russians sent two of their most formidable nuclear bombers over the Caribbean Sea, which has been an American preserve for well over a century.
But the Tu-160 deployments and flights carry a far more ominous message to the U. S. A.: If Russia permanently deploys its Tu-160s in Venezuela, the United States could be at a greater risk than at any time since the darkest days of the Cold War.
The Blackjack is a Mach-2, 1,380 mph, super-long-range Tu-160s can carry stand-off X-555 cruise missiles with a range of 2,000 miles. That means that from a base in Venezuela, they could “loiter” over the Caribbean for 10 or more hours at a time with a capability of firing their Mach 2.8 cruise missiles that are capable of flying around 1,800 mph at sea level and hugging ground contours so their exact flight path could not be intercepted in advance with a range that could hit almost any target in the entire United States.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has let virtually all its domestic defenses against manned bomber attacks vanish. The Blackjacks would fly well “under the umbrella” of even Patriot PAC-3 and U.S. Navy Standard Missile-3 anti-ballistic missiles, none of which are designed for manned aircraft interception. The cold fact is that the United States currently has no missile defense system capable of knocking down a Blackjack missile attack or of preventing a cruise missile launch unless combat fighter aircraft — which are only a few hundred miles per hour faster than the Mach-2 Blackjacks — can intercept them.
RIA Novosti described the Tu-160 Blackjack as “a supersonic, variable-geometry heavy bomber designed to strike strategic targets with nuclear and conventional weapons deep in continental theaters of operation.”
The Russian news agency cited a Russian air force spokesman as saying the two Tu-160s were equipped only with dummy missiles without warheads.
But, of course, if Tu-160s were to be based permanently at Libertador Air Base, or elsewhere in Venezuela in the future, the missiles they carried might not always be dummy ones. Unspoken is that those airbases are vulnerable to nuclear and conventional weapons attacks by U. S. Airforce and naval aircraft that could render the threat moot.
Russia is playing for time. High oil prices has allowed it to bank a half trillion dollars but its tock market has collapsed losing 51% in value since May. If a flaccid U. S. president is not elected Putin has a whole new kettle of fish to contend with.
Poll Shows Russians Back Putin’s Anti-West; Anti-U.S. Efforts
Russian paranoia high - 47% believe major Western countries are Russia’s enemies and will cause it harm.
A poll of Russians by the Levada Center (see below) immediately after the Russo-Georgian war found 75% saying Russian-American relations are “not good,” 39% “chilly”; 28% say “strained,” and 8 % say “hostile.”
Forty-seven percent believe that major Western countries are Russia’s enemies and will cause harm to Russian interests if they can. Half said the U.S. was trying to “spread its influence over Russia’s neighbors,” and nearly three-quarters said the West’s support of Georgia is an attempt “to weaken Russia and force it out of the Caucasus.”
The Russian people were demoralized after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and most have welcomed the push for a new nationalist spirit and renewed Russian pride championed by Vladimir Putin over the past five years. High energy prices have increased the quality of life for the average Russian, and Putin’s push for a stronger Russia on the international stage has been enthusiastically embraced at home.
Putin has worked feverishly to reverse the few democratic gains that were made in the 1990s, has used energy as a diplomatic weapon, has invested heavily in the Russian military, and has worked to counter the United States on virtually every significant international issue.
The war with Georgia was just Putin’s latest jab at the west. Medvedev may be president, but few actually believe he is calling the shots, and Russians are buying what Putin is selling. With the Russian people on Putin’s side, he is likely to continue his adversarial relationship with the West, knowing that Europe has no stomach for a fight with Russia and that the United States is too occupied in Afghanistan and Iraq to do much to stop him. Putin is watching the November presidential election and believe if Obama is elected that will provide an opportunity for Russian nationalism and territorialism to be advanced.
Yuri Levada Analytical Center was formed in 1988-1989 as the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VCIOM) and it was part of the USSR Ministry of Labour and the Trade Unions Council (VTsSPS). Specifics of its polling can not be examined, and it has been a propaganda tool in the past.
Putin Has Motive and the Opportunity
Putin’s Police Will Use Fear and WMD of Gulag.
Historians see the German reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 as the real beginning of World War II. The treaty that ended World War I, forced Germany to agree to keep troops out of the Rhineland (a German region on the French border).
Hitler made a deal with Stalin giving him Poland and putting Great Britain and France between a rock and a hard place. So, when he sent 32,000 troops and police all they could do was huff and puff but could do little else.
That was then this is now. Putin is annoyed with Poland and the Czech Republic for its alliance with the U. S. and installation of anti-missile radars and missiles. But, Putin is focused on Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic States and a few of the Central Asian “stans” would be nice too. Would, or could, anyone stop him?
Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons, nor was Germany the supplier of a quarter of Europe’s energy needs Putin does and is. Hitler also didn’t have the support of the German people for such military adventures, Putin does.
Plus, Putin is a practiced KGB operator. Russia still has a massive secret police apparatus to instill fear. That is important because absorbing the nations of the “near abroad” (as Russia calls its neighbors), would mean having to deal with a lot of dissidents.
That’s what the Gulag (the Russian acronym for the prison camp system, or “The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies”) was created for. Today, credit cards, cellular phones and massive computer banks make it easier to keep and eye on and track people. From there it is only a matter of rounding them up and hauling them to oblivion in the Gulag.
Make no mistake such abject fear induced by then Soviet secret police worked before and it can work again, and Putin is not timid. He fancies himself a combination of Marx, Lenin and Stalin on a crusade to resurrect the Soviet Empire with himself as its new Czar and he senses a coming terminal weakness in America - that would remove the only impediment to his aspirations.
Diplomacy Is the Art of Saying “Nice Doggy” Until You Find A Big Rock
Sensing Weakness Putin Acts; Timid Recoil; U. S. Faces Threat, and Sides Are Being Picked
On a day when Russia is threatening a harsh response, beyond the diplomatic, to the placement of U. S. anti-missile radar and missiles Paul M. Weyrich Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation blames, if obliquely, cold warriors including George H. W. Bush for the wreckage in Georgia. His thesis is Russia should have been invited into NATO after the former USSR collapse and that would have prevented such aggression.
As unlikely as such deterrence seems; Weyrich’s contention is that had his advise and that of Edward (Ed) Lozansky, president of the American University, in Moscow, William S. (Bill) Lind, and Russian Parliamentarian Arkady Murashev been followed Russia’s paranoia would have been satisfied and such border wars avoided. Weyrich says that Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected president of Russia said he was open to the idea. That maybe true but the conditions mot think including NATO members would be onerous.
President George H. W. Bush’s advisers were absolutely against this idea. If he had had the foresight to disregard their counsel and push for our idea how different history very probably would be today.
Weyrich recalls visiting with Bush in the Oval Office after Dr. Robert (Bob) Krieble and I returned from Moscow, where we had found that Mikhail Gorbachev, the political rage at the time over here, was not popular in Russia. Yeltsin was much more popular. He says he told Bush if Gorbachev were replaced, his replacement could be someone more to our liking but H. W. Bush said he feared a replacement would be a Stalinist.
At that time Russia was in turmoil. It was broke. The old Soviet system was struggling to somehow stay relevant; Russia had been exposed as a paper tiger unprepared for conventional conflict but armed to the nuclear teeth, and in any case hindsight is while precise-moot. Plus former Soviet satellites had turned to the West as savior and barely scabbed over from decades of Soviet brutality and repression, and were loath to let the recently caged Bear loose into their bailiwicks.
“Is it now impossible for us to start over? Must Russia be our enemy? If it were, would we be prepared to fight another war? I don’t have the answers but it seems to me we must begin to think outside the box. Surely we must have new advisers with new thinking. The alternative is to risk sinking into the abyss of a new war with Russia. Do we need this? “asks Weyrich. Answering ,”No.”
Unfortunately Weyrich skips the key point that the U. S. and its allies need not be Russia’s enemy for it to be ours. So much so that I detect a surging optimism on the extreme left that it maybe time to reconnect with Russian cash to resurrect the American Progressive Party aka., Communist Party USA, or likely by another name and a willingness in some dachas outside Moscow to try it because they have the cash to do it.
McCain Got It Right When U. S., U. N. and Obama Got It Wrong
“Russia policy failure: U.S. diplomacy no match for Putin strategy,” says Bill Gertz
This World Tribune article by Bill Gertz titled “Russia policy failure: U.S. diplomacy no match for Putin strategy” opines as follows:
Bush has stated repeatedly in the past that he believes world problems can be worked out when leaders have good personal relations and he specifically stated that his contact with former Russian President Vladimir Putin was the key to keeping Moscow from becoming a hostile, anti-democratic power.
However, Russia over the past eight years has moved steadily away from democracy and toward anti-democratic authoritarianism. The attacks by Russian strategic bombers and missiles on Georgia represent the first real post-Soviet threats from Moscow.
The Russian military attacks on Georgia in the aftermath of Georgia’s military incursion into Ossetia, where Russia was covertly backing separatist rebels, are the most visible failure of U.S. policy toward Russia that has been marked by damaging neglect on the part of the White House National Security Council staff, the State Department and to a lesser extent the Pentagon.
State Department officials, in particular, ignored Russia’s slide toward neo-Sovietism, claiming in internal policy papers that Moscow remained committed to pro-U.S., pro-democratic reform policies. These officials failed to recognize that Moscow, based on its opposition to a U.S. missile defense site in central Europe, had shifted dramatically against the United States.
Senior Bush aides, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have expressed publicly that they did not understand Russian opposition to the missile defense site in Poland and Czech Republic.”
Other sources point to U.S. intelligence agencies predicting a Georgian military incursion into Ossetia that would trigger a Russian military response, but the scope and ferocity of the attacks was not anticipated, according to U.S. officials. Accurately assessing the situation Putin pushed the envelope sensing weakness by the U. S. and counting on an ineffective or non existent U. S. resolve, and he got both.
Presidential candidate John McCain immediately got it right. Barack Obama’s response to the Russo-Ossetian War typified an initially tepid U. S. response that encouraged Putin to go farther and be more brutal. Such temerity included a qualified response by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzah who said Aug. 8 at the UN that the United States “deplored” the Russian attacks, short of a harsher diplomatic terminology of condemnation and was among the things that the Kremlin viewed as tacit permission for the attacks.
Putin’s Ploy Assumes A Vacuous, Liberal New Ball-less US
Ukraine’s 50 Million People’s Enslavement Are At Stake
Ukraine with close to fifty million people, is, by far, more populous and important than any other former Soviet republic or satellite. Russia, with a population of 142 million and dropping, needs to take over Ukraine to reassert itself as a global power. Asserting such power is the ambition and intention of Russian Prime Minister and shadow President Vlad Putin.
How important is this - well Russian agents poisoned the elected Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko for having the temerity of avowing, atheist forbid, a democracy.
When Viktor had the good judgment of not dying Russia cut off its natural gas supply freezing Ukrainians in their unheated homes. Germany is itself dependent on Russian natural gas supplied by a pipeline that U. S. President blocked starving Russia of cash, that it has not supported Ukraine’s entrance into NATO.
Barack Obama initially treated the Russian invasion as a border conflict asserting his Rodney King-like foreign policy will not help 50 million Ukrainian independence. Ukraine, located right next to NATO members Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania, can and should be defended by NATO.
Putin is no fool and senses opportunity and is willing to wait and see if America elects an indecisive president, and if it does he will immediately exploit that to enslave the 50 million Ukrainians to fulfill his dream of his own Lenin-like Kremlin mausoleum.
Epimenides Lives With CNN and Putin in Georgia
Epimenides was the king of Crete, a nation of fabulous liars. When asked by the Greeks if it were true, he responded ,“All Cretans are liars”—creating the famous “Epimenides Paradox“.
I have inserted a Novosti news clip allegedly from a Russian cameraman claiming CNN, the Epimenides of news, lied about the location of a news video clip. It appears Tsinhvali in South Ossetia was misidentified as Gori Georgia during a bombing. What is disingenuos is that although true, the misidentification was a slip and not a deliberate CNN lie [unlike their deal with Saddam in 1991]. This slip is used to trash all Western news coverage.http://www.vesti.ru/videos?cid=2&vid=143916
When GW Bush said “I looked into Putin’s eyes and saw a friend,” McCain said “I saw pure KGB” which by the way is highlighted WITH PRIDE on the Russian SPETSNAZ website for their version of the green berets. Disinformation is part and parcel of reinvigorated Russian hegemony.
Georgian Fighting Over But Consequences Have Just Begun
“…(T)he collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century, ” Russian Prime Minister Putin.
Last week, South Ossetian separatists - supported by Moscow - poured machine gun and mortar fire into neighboring Georgian villages. Georgia retaliated by attacking the separatist capital Tskhinvali with artillery, providing the pretext for Moscow’s invasion of Georgia.
Stanford University’s Russia scholar Michael McFaul sums up the use of overwhelming force by Russia in Georgia this week as nothing less than “a signal to everyone that Russia is back - and Russia is going to try and dominate this region of the world,” according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.
Fighting has ended, for now, in the Russo-Georgian War but scholars and pundits alike are resurrecting such iconic terms as “Cold War,” “Iron Curtain,” and “spheres of influence.” Make no mistake that Putin’s Russia has no intention of allowing a pro-western government within what he views as Russia’s domain, and is more than willing to kill a few thousand people to prove it.
“Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia’s attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition, complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory…,” says Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a Washington Post column.
Burnishing his enormous egotism and ambition t be greater than even Stalin Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who raced back from the Bejing Olympics to take command, charged that the U.S. has displayed a “Cold War mentality” in its friendship with leaders in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, according to The Times. Left wing sources chimed in to blame the U. S. even claiming it actually started the conflict.
Polemics aside, think-tankers has been burning the midnight oil analyzing just what Mr. Putin is up to. It seems to me simplistically easy given Putin decree that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” Sensing an opportunity with a potential new liberal, Eurocentric naïve, inexperienced U. S. administration the last few days then are the beginning of what Putin is designing as a Russian renaissance.
“Armed with wealth from oil and gas; holding a near-monopoly over the energy supply to Europe; with a million soldiers, thousands of nuclear warheads and the world’s third-largest military budget, Vladimir Putin believes that now is the time to make his move,” Kagan says.
Ariel Cohen, senior research fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Security at The Heritage Foundation, has ferreted out what he believes to be the Putin strategy including:
- expulsion of Georgian troops and termination of Georgian sovereignty in South Ossetia and Abkhazia;
- “regime change” by bringing down President Mikheil Saakashvili and installing a more pro-Russian leadership in Tbilisi;
- preventing Georgia from joining NATO and sending a strong message to Ukraine that its insistence on NATO membership may lead to war and/or its dismemberment;
- Shifting control of the Caucasus, and especially over strategic energy pipelines, by controlling Georgia; and
- recreating a 19th-century-style sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, by the use of force if necessary.
More importantly, in my opinion, Putin wants to demonstrate that he can sabotage at will American and European Union (EU) declarations about integrating Commonwealth of Independent States members into Western structures such as NATO.
Putin’s Pravda Posturing Shades of Cold War
Russia’s Underwear in bunch over U. S.-Israel Anti-Missile Radar Plans.
Iran is heading towards a major breakthrough in its nuclear weapons capability, Israel’s deputy Israel Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz warned Friday according to an AFP story. Iran is continuing to advance toward a military nuclear capability and is heading towards a major breakthrough,” the Iranian-born Mofaz told a think tank after talks in Washington with US officials.
He charged that Iran was playing for time in talks aimed at halting uranium enrichment with the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain — the permanent UN Security Council members — and Germany, the so-called P5-plus-1. “One thing is clear is Iranians are continuing their policy of buying time and so far they are succeeding,” he said.
Also on Friday Putin’s Pravda, humorously Russian for “truth”, story said “Israel has entered the last phase of its preparations against Iran.” It also said the U. S. was about to pull a “dirty trick” against Russia by installing anti-missile radar in Israel before a new president is inaugurated in 2009. Because the radar system will be jointly operated by the U. S. and Israel without interference and can detect missile launches by Russia then former Soviets have their underwear in a bunch.
Russia and the U. S. have also been butting heads over U. S. proposals to install similar radar systems and an anti-missile missile system in Poland and Eastern Europe extensively to defend against an Iranian threat on Europe. Russia is paranoid about being hemmed in a way unseen since the JFK backed down during the Cuban missile crisis and removed intermediate range nuclear tipped missiles from Turkey.
Pravda’s notorious bent to convoluted propaganda showed through claiming “the Pentagon cannot provide more, than the 200,000 US and coalition forces in the tenuously and unstable region so it could not conduct war against Iran. Russia is still smarting from its humiliation in Afghanistan and peaked by the U. S. military aid to the Mujahedeen that rubbed their collective Slavic noses in it. In any case Pravda claims even a “slight war” - read Israeli attack, and Iran “would not miss a chance to strike oil pipelines and oil structures on neighboring Arab states causing economic upheaval. Pravda said such upset would hurt Europe, India and China most. That Pravda concluded in typical stem winding fashion, “(T)he U. S. would not mind weaker competitors” inferring if Iran refuses to stop it nuclear weapons development and is attacked the U. S. would be boogie-man, provocateur and beneficiary.
Notwithstanding such contortions Israel is resolutely determined to stop Iran’s Mortal nuclear weapon’s threat because of its anti-Semitism and pledge to incinerate Israel. Russia, if it want to contribute to preventing such a conflict, could be much more constructive, and a lot more forthright.
Putin Reluctantly Agrees to Become Prime Minister of Russia, whew!
After long months of speculation, the collective fears of the world are at last mitigated.
Contrary to the fears that Putin would simply leave the political scene after he maxed out on legally allowed terms as the Leader of Russia, he was slowly but surely persuaded by public opinion to accept appointment to the positions of Benevolent Dictator and the ceremonial post of Prime Minister. That post was already serendipitously offered to him by his appointee Medvedev who has not yet been elected but who book says, will be the next President of Russia. Why? Because he was hand picked by Putin to run and who will have the authority to name the Prime Minister. Make you dizzy?