HitRed wrote:http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757,00.html
The link is one of many sections. Interesting.
When this intense and brooding KGB agent took over as President of Russia in 2000, he found a country on the verge of becoming a failed state. With dauntless persistence, a sharp vision of what Russia should become and a sense that he embodied the spirit of Mother Russia, Putin has put his country back on the map. And he intends to redraw it himself.
Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech. He stands, above all, for stability—stability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for a hundred years. Whether he becomes more like the man for whom his grandfather prepared blinis—who himself was twice TIME's Person of the Year—or like Peter the Great, the historical figure he most admires; whether he proves to be a reformer or an autocrat who takes Russia back to an era of repression—this we will know only over the next decade. At significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nations prize, he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power.
http://content.time.com/time/specials/2 ... 79,00.htmlInterview with Putin 2007
Reporter to Putin -Earlier you used the phrase Thou shalt not steal. Have you read the Bible?
Putin responds
Yes, I have.
he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power.
And this justifies pukin's putin's wars in Syria, Chechnya, and now Ukraine? This excuses his killing of civilians and destroying their homes and businesses? This excuses reprehensible the atrocities committed by Russian troops in all these places? NO, and an EMPHATIC NO, in case anyone misses the point.
HitRed, what you quoted was written in 2007. What we NOW know, some 15 years later, are answers to the type of leader pukin' putin is: he is a despot and an evil tyrant, worse than some of the tyrannical Czars of Russia. He is cruel and his forces commit war crimes. The determined defiance of the brave people of Ukraine has shown the world what type of vile evil ruler putin is.
We now know the answer to "whether he proves to be a reformer or an autocrat who takes Russia back to an era of repression—this we will know only over the next decade" asked in your article that you cited. He is worse than repression mentioned as only a possibility. Stability in Russia does not justify any of putin's wars or atrocities or repression.
