Do swidaniya Vlad? Which translates as Goodbye, Vladimir? That is what analysts are now asking because of the ever-worsening stuff for Russian President Vladimir Putin, especially since the start of the Ukraine war.
It was more than 20 years ago that Boris Yeltsin, already visibly frail at the time, nominated him as prime minister and designated successor as head of the Kremlin. Since then, the now 69-year-old has been prime minister, president, prime minister and president again and again – for the Russian constitution has a limit on how long the state can stay in office.
Not even he himself expected that Putin would ever reach the highest offices. He grew up as a boy in a working-class family in a Leningrad backyard. His mother endured the nearly 900-day blockade by Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the Neva city.
To fight back against the strong guys, Mr Sutka learned judo, and after school, joined the KGB at an early age. Until the fall of the GDR, He served with the Soviet intelligence service in Dresden. In 1990, Mr KGB’s first job after that was at Leningrad State University, supervising Western study-abroad students.
Only a year later, he moved to City Hall, became deputy to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, at a time when press writers campaigned for change from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, from the Soviet Union to Russia, and for Leningrad to be renamed back to St. Petersburg, and organized sit-ins in front of Putin’s and Sobchak’s offices.
For Putin believes he has the longer leverage. He senses that as economic problems loom in the West, the calls for an end to the Russia sanctions will grow louder and louder – and they could be ground down if the Kremlin does not relent.
There is a difference of opinion about Putin: former chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schröder sees him as a “flawless democrat,” and others despise him as an unscrupulous autocrat. But Putin is playing with this.
Calling the fall of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” his goal is to return Russia to the world stage, divide Europe and make Russia once again one of the dominant powers on the continent. Having never come to terms with its waning influence in Europe, Russian does not want to leave independent states like Ukraine to their own fate and wants to divide Europe.
To achieve this, it is relying on the support of populist parties in the EU, on its heavily modernized army, on the breach of the INF disarmament agreement still negotiated by Gorbachev and Reagan, on a new disarmament debate that is dividing Europe, as well as on its role in Syria.
Through Moscow’s intervention alongside the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Mr Putin has not only shown despots around the world that they can rely on him and that he can win wars for them. He has also divided NATO partners Turkey and the United States through his Syria intervention.