Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin is a former Russian intelligence officer and a politician who has served as president of Russia from 1999 to 2008 and from 2012 to the present. He was also the country’s prime minister in 1999 and from 2008 to 2012.

In the two decades of Vladimir Putin’s reign, he has consolidated his rule and projected to the Russian people an image of Russia as a global power. He turned Russia from a nascent democratic state into an autocratic one, expanded Russia’s influence in the Middle East, strengthened Russian relations with China, and displayed a willingness to use force to achieve his goals, as in his annexation of Crimea in 2014 and his large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Vladimir Putin served for 15 years as a foreign intelligence officer in the KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union. In 1990 he retired from active KGB service with the rank of lieutenant colonel.