Posted on 08/02/2005 6:07:10 AM PDT by kedr
TURKU. Aug 2 (Interfax) - President Vladimir Putin said the Russian Constitution prevents him from remaining in office after 2008.
"Maybe I would want to, but the constitution of my country does not permit me to do so," Putin said after talks with Finnish President Tarja Halonen on Tuesday.
"I believe the most important thing for us in Russia today is stability, which may be achieved on the basis of acting legislation and the observation of constitutional provisions," he said.
Betcha he doesn't.
"I believe the most important thing for us in Russia today is stability, which may be achieved on the basis of acting legislation and the observation of constitutional provisions,"
That's one of the wisest things Ive heard him say in a long time. Let's just hope it holds.
At which time he will simply go back to his other job full time, Running the soviet intelligence apparatus.
That way he doesn't have to be out front answering questions.
He can stay in the background killing and steeling.
You are an idiot if that is all you have to say.
Putin is a dog.
He is diminishing democracy in favor of strong man rule.
Ping
Well, Putin can always amend the Constitution.
Your welcome for this educational post.
By the way, your post made as much sense as a democrat saying in 1993 that George Bush Sr. would just go back to running the CIA after his presidency to retain power.
Translation: I will have my stool pigeons alter the Constitution so I can legally succeed myself in 2008 and maybe for life.
The only one acting like an uncivilized buffoon (read idiot) is you. You don't agree with kedr's view (never mind he lives there) fine, that's your prerogative, calling him an idiot shows the level of your IQ and it's not impressive.
If that's the definition of a commi, as it seems to be in your book, then what are the Republicans here in America who have done, as a party, none of the above?
You're entitled to your opinion but others differ.
"Let us not fool ourselves: Russian President Vladimir Putin is and always was a die-hard Communist KGB agent.To think otherwise would be naive."
John LeBoutillie
12/1/2004
http://www.worldthreats.com/russia_former_ussr/Ras-Putin.htm
MOSCOW (CNN) -- As a teenager back in the early 1960s Vladimir Putin dreamed of becoming a spy. "It seemed unattainable, like flying to Mars," he recalls in a new biography that just hit the bookshelves, paid for by his election campaign. So in the ninth grade Putin set off for his local KGB office in Leningrad.
"Some old guy came out and listened to me," Putin recalls. "I told him, 'I want to work for you.' 'I'm glad to hear that,' he said, 'but there are a few pointers I have to give you. First, initiative is not enough here. You have to either serve in the army or get a higher education.'"
"What's the best degree to get?" the young Putin asked. "A law degree," the KGB man replied. "I understand," said Putin, who went off to apply to the elite law school at Leningrad State University.
"No one could stop me," Putin says in his biography.
After 17 years as a KGB intelligence officer, Vladimir Putin still is better at eliciting information on others than he is at revealing his own background. The new book, complete with photographs of Russia's acting president as a young father playing with his bare-bottomed daughters, is the first serious attempt by his election campaign to fill in some -- but not all -- of the blanks.
Putin enrolled at the university in 1970. He studied law and German. Much of his spare time he spent at his hobby, judo, which had become his passion.
"Judo," he says, "is not just a sport, but a philosophy." It was the perfect sport for a self-disciplined, no-nonsense young man.
Years later, as Russia's prime minister, he told an interviewer, "Why did the Soviet Union break up? Because things were allowed to happen: laxness. And if we continue like this, Russia will fall apart, and it will happen so fast, you can't even imagine it."
No answer from Moscow
In 1975 the KGB offered Putin a job. He accepted immediately. He began in counterintelligence, then moved to foreign intelligence. Ten years later the KGB sent him to East Germany, to Dresden, to work in political intelligence.
This part of Putin's biography is "murky," as one senior U.S. government official puts it.
U.S. intelligence, which has assembled its own biography of the Russian leader, does not have a deep understanding of what Putin did in Dresden. Putin was low in the hierarchy of KGB agents. "There were not a lot of vital secrets he was looking at in Dresden," says one Washington official.
Putin married before going to East Germany. By Soviet standards he was old when he tied the knot in 1983 -- he was 30. His wife, Lyudmila, is eight years younger than he. She is a specialist in English and French. His two blond-haired daughters, Masha and Katya, were born in Dresden.
The time in East Germany did give Putin exposure to life outside Russia. He was there in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell.
In one riveting moment he recounts in his biography: German demonstrators were rallying outside the security ministry where he worked. He called Moscow for orders. No one in Moscow answered. "Moscow kept silent," he recalls. "I felt the country no longer existed."
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to his hometown, Leningrad (soon to revert to its original name, St. Petersburg). He went back to his alma mater, Leningrad State University, and began working in the international affairs department, still as an intelligence officer, monitoring international visitors.
Putin during his days as deputy mayor under Anatoly Sobchak in St. Petersburg
Still a communist at heart?
It was Anatoly Sobchak, Putin's mentor at the university's law school, who wooed him to politics from the KGB. Sobchak himself had left academia and run successfully for mayor of St. Petersburg.
It was the first heady days of post-Soviet reform. Putin became Sobchak's external affairs aide. His job: promote investment in the city Peter the Great built in the early 18th century as his "window on Europe."
Putin quickly became known as a man who could get things done. His KGB past helped him to talk less, listen more. It was here that Putin got to know Western business figures, and he personally helped to put together some of the biggest investment deals in St. Petersburg.
Supporters of Putin point to those days at the mayor's office as proof he is a true reformer at heart. But one of Putin's opponents in this presidential race, Grigory Yavlinsky, claims Putin is really a Soviet communist.
"Communism means that you are ready to pay whatever price for your own political goals," Yavlinsky says. "Communism means that you say one thing and do another. Communism means you are always lying. All those points are the main points of Putin's policies."
Putin's political career in St. Petersburg was linked to Sobchak's. When Sobchak lost his re-election campaign amid scandal in 1996, Putin resigned.
A year later, thanks to connections with St. Petersburg politicians plugged into Moscow, Putin got a job at the Kremlin as an aide to Pavel Borodin, the all-powerful boss of the Kremlin's property administration. Two years later, as acting president, Putin would fire Borodin over allegations of massive corruption.
Popularity based on scanty facts
His appointment in Moscow was the beginning of Putin's breathtakingly fast rise to the top.
In 1998 the former KGB spy was named head of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), successor agency to the KGB. He also became head of the President's Security Council.
In August 1999 President Boris Yeltsin abruptly fired Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin and named Putin as his new prime minister. Then, on New Year's Eve, came Yeltsin's dramatic announcement that he was stepping down and installing Putin as acting president.
The key to Putin's political success among Russians is also his most controversial action: the brutal war in Chechnya.
Traumatized by apartment bombings in Moscow and other cities blamed on "Chechen terrorists," fed up with lawlessness and kidnappings in Chechnya, fueled by ethnic animosity toward Chechens, most Russians strongly supported the war, and still do.
The war's few opponents see it as proof of Putin's ruthlessness and dictatorial potential -- and testimony of his presumed disrespect for human rights.
Yeltsin last fall with his soon-to-be successor Putin
Yet Putin for most Russians is still a rather faceless bureaucrat, like the spy whose face no one remembers. On Russian TV, in newspapers and on talk shows, the question on everyone's lips is: Who is Vladimir Putin?
Putin is standing traditional political campaigning on its head, refusing to debate his opponents, refusing to run political ads.
As one member of the Russian parliament says, Putin is telling voters, "Elect me now and I'll tell you later who I am." Yet his poll ratings now hover at nearly 60 percent, far outstripping any competitor.
As he did when he dreamed of being a KGB spy, Vladimir Putin now has his eyes set on the Kremlin. And it seems no one can stop him.
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/russia/story/analysis/putin2/
Let's put it this way, I wouldn't take a check from Putin, especially after he stabbed Bush in the back!
Semper Fi,
Kelly
Oh, and the main auto manufacturing plants, still owned by the government, are to be auctioned off this year along with 1,000+ other companies.
Yup, definitly a communist. /sarcasm
Oh and it's great that you quote CNN, I believe according to that fine source, Bush is the incarnation of Hitler.
Putin perpetuates brutality of Soviet era
Jul. 27, 2005
By Richard F. Staar
At a news conference on June 16, 2001, after meeting Vladimir Putin, President George Bush is quoted as having said:
``I looked into that man's eyes and saw that he is direct and trustworthy. We had a good dialogue. And I saw his soul.''
That Putin wore a silver cross, suspended from a chain around his neck, may also have given the impression that he is deeply religious, perhaps even a ``born again'' Christian.
Unfortunately, there is nothing in this man's background that would support either of the above conclusions. On the contrary, Putin is a product of the Soviet communist system. His father had worked for the secret police, informing on his neighbors. The entire family was atheist.
The son, while still in secondary school, walked into a KGB office and asked about employment there. Advised to study law, he did so. The KGB then recruited him, and he was sent to the Andropov Institute for Counterintelligence.
After graduation, Putin was posted to Dresden in East Germany, where he worked for 16 years until 1991. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he still remained a reserve officer in the secret police while employed in the St. Petersburg mayor's office.
It was there that Putin received a call from KGB friends in Moscow with an offer to become deputy chief for general affairs under President Boris Yeltsin. The latter subsequently made Putin head of the Federal Security Service (former KGB) for one year. After that, he became Yeltsin's successor.
It is true that Putin had nothing to do with the first war in Chechnya (1978-81) during which Russia lost about 15,000 men killed in action. He did, however, play a key role in the second war (1999-2002), declaring that insurgents would be hunted down and exterminated ``even in their outhouses.'' Officially, only 5,000 Russians were killed and an additional 12,000 wounded in that conflict. The Committee on Soldiers' Mothers asserts, however, that Russian casualties had been three or four times higher.
On Oct. 22, 2002, a small group of armed Chechens seized a theater in downtown Moscow, taking around 1,000 hostages. They threatened to blow up the building, unless Russia stopped the war in the North Caucasus. Putin rejected negotiations. The rescue team used poison gas that killed 120 of the hostages and left 600 others hospitalized. All of the Chechens died.
Almost two years later, during Sept. 1-3, 2004, a small group of Chechen fighters took 1,200 school children hostage at Beslan. Again, as he had done at the theater in Moscow, Putin ordered the use of force rather than negotiations. More than 330 people died, about half of them children.
With a reported 70 percent approval rating, Putin should have no problem during elections scheduled for 2008. However, that is when his second term as president expires. Will he step down, as required by the constitution? Probably not. As the old saying goes, ``power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.''
On June 25, 2005, legislation was introduced by the pro-Putin ``United Russia'' political party that would allow the president to resign before his term expires and then run again for the same office, should the 2008 election be invalidated for some reason. One such reason could be a voter turnout at below the required 50 percent level. That, too, could be arranged.
RICHARD F. STAAR is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of the Federation of Russia and East-Central Europe, military strategy, national security, arms control and public
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/12233469.htm
Let me put it this way, after Putin stabbed GWB in the back, I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him.
Now if you would take a check from him then that's your problem.
well if you like what's going on in Russia and are so impressed by Putin, why don't you move there?
that's what I thought! LOL
well I tell ya what, genius
you pick the publication you like and I'll post it for ya
gezzzzzzzzz
I guess everyone who disagrees with you is Hitler! LMAO
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