It is no secret that Russia has been controversial on every topic from LGBTQ rights to nuclear weapons. Search up “Political Controversies of Russia” and a long list that takes up 15 pages will pop up.
But many portray Russia, the whole country, as the problem but this is false. Vladimir Putin, the current president of the Russian Federation, is the real problem here.
There are a number of issues with Putin, spanning from his rise to power, to his actions to suppress dissent inside of Russia, to his actions internationally. The Russian government has been involved with hacking scandals in American and Eastern European elections, same sex marriage laws (neither same-sex marriages nor civil unions of same-sex couples is legal in Russia), as well a Russian motorcycle club called the “Night Wolves, which is closely associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin and which suggests “Death to faggots” as an alternate name for itself. Putin’s views on women’s rights aren’t any better. After Israel’s then president, Moshe Katsav, was charged with rape and sexual harassment in 2006, Putin actually praised him. “He turned out to be a strong man, raped 10 women,” Putin was quoted as saying during a meeting with Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert. “I never would have expected it of him. He has surprised us all, we all envy him!” After the remarks went public, a Kremlin spokesman told BBC that Putin meant them as a joke that wasn’t meant to be overheard. It is no secret that Vladimir Putin has not been holding out his opinions on controversial topics.
So who is Vladimir Putin and why is he so controversial?
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin began his career after law school as a spy with the KGB, the main security agency of the Soviet Union, until its dissolution in 1991. He later rose through the ranks of the Russian government and was appointed acting president in the late nineties when the sitting president, Boris Yeltsin, resigned. A few months later, he was officially elected president.
But, while that election did technically abide by Russia’s constitution, it “did not occur on a level playing field,” Michael McFaul, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 — stated that, before stepping down, Yeltsin strategically provoked a war, that killed almost 40,000 people, 25,000 of them being innocent civilians, against rebels in tragedy-ridden Chechnya to boost Putin’s popularity shortly before the election, a theory shared by other experts as well.
Putin was elected for a second term in 2004, though by that point the president had created barriers in the government that made it difficult for other parties or candidates to rise up. Constitutional term limits kept Putin from running for a third consecutive term, so from 2008 to 2012, he served as prime minister while his former chief of staff, Dmitry Medvedev, was president.
In 2012, Putin once again ran for president and won, though his win was marred by allegations of fraud (like ballot stuffing) and a lack of competition (Putin’s opponents were only allowed on the ballot with his permission). Throughout Putin’s tenure in the highest level of Russia’s government, he’s systematically worked to concentrate control to the president’s seat. In 2004, he signed a law giving the president the right to appoint governors, rather than requiring citizens to elect those officials.
And during his four-year break from the presidency, Putin maintained significant power from 2008 to 2012 as prime minister, while his former chief of staff, Dmitry Medvedev, served as president. In fact, it was during that break that Medvedev signed a law extending the presidential term from four to six years, meaning Putin will now be in power until at least 2018, and possibly until 2024.
Putin has also largely controlled Russia’s media since first becoming president, when he took over the country’s broadcast television. Putin is able to carefully control the messages his country’s citizens do and don’t receive.
And outside the media, Putin has passed a bill increasing penalties for citizens participating in protests, even peaceful ones, despite the fact that his own human rights adviser asked him to veto it. And when it comes to his interactions with foreign countries with which Russia has tense relations, Putin “finds new ways to scare the world” every week, by doing things like moving “nuclear-capable missiles close to Moldova and Lithuania”, threatening to shoot down American planes that attack the military forces of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and hacking elections in Eastern Europe and the United States.
And in his quest to regain Russia’s Cold War-era power, which has been nicknamed “hell”, Putin has taken to making risky, aggressive, criticized moves, like the annexation of the Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 (a militarized takeover of the region that was denounced by the United Nations and resulted in sanctions from the U.S. government), or the destruction of tons of banned Western food as a response to sanctions against Russia (which sparked outrage in Russians who were angered by the waste of food that so many people living below the poverty line could have eaten), or the deportation of millions of Crimean Tatars, the Muslim minority living in the fought over territory of Crimea.
Vladimir Putin has been called dictator by many foreign leaders, activists and citizens, but is it really such a bad name to describe the Russian president?
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