Analysts: Putin Has Squandered Influence
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has dented his prestige and squandered influence by backing the wrong side in political clashes in Ukraine and in the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia, analysts say.
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PRESIDENT PUTIN faced the most serious foreign policy crisis of his five-year rule last night after the Kremlin s efforts to install a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine were left in tatters.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggressive foreign policy enjoys huge support at home, an opinion poll showed on Tuesday, adding in a commentary that the Kremlin chief seemed more liberal than most his people.
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Russia&#39;s President Vladimir Putin has  described himself as the world&#39;s only &quot;pure&quot; democrat and  attacked the United States and Europe, which have criticized  him, for falling short of their own ideals.
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President Putin's move to enhance his power in response to a wave of terrorism does not take on the real problem: the corrupt and unreformed security services that produced Putin in the first place, politicians and analysts say.
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NEW YORK, Dec 8 (IPS) - The popular image of Russia in the West today is of   a land of post-Soviet oligarchs, oil company billionaires  languishing in  jail, President Vladimir Putin ruthlessly  centralising his power by  replacing provincial governors, civil  liberties being abused, and, of  course, the 10-year war in  Chechnya with the resulting unthinkable murder  of hundreds of  children in Beslan.
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Russia's president appointed a virtually unknown technocrat as prime minister. The shake-up, expected to make clear who would succeed Putin, has experts puzzled.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has always rejected international criticism of events in Chechnya calling them an &#39;intervention in internal affairs,&#39; but lately Putin has been gradually softening on this position.
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UKRAINE remains an indepen dent state. For now. But last week&#39;s shamelessly rigged presidential-election results were engineered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin&#39;s security services.
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Nobody in Russia seems to know how scrapping the popular vote in regional elections can help Russia&#39;s war against terrorism. ULYANOVSK, Russia--In the aftermath of the Beslan tragedy, Russians were expecting
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Russian newspapers are lukewarm about the country's progress towards joining the World Trade Organization.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin names a new cabinet but it offers few clues as to who may succeed him.
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Guess who's not coming to dinner? Vladimir Putin was not invited to NATO's first summit in a country once incorporated into the Soviet Union, but that did not stop rumors that the Russian leader might show up for a meal anyway.
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Whatever President Vladimir Putin's purpose in choosing a new prime minister, he didn't look far.
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Critics say Putin's regime stifles dissent in the press.
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The year 2004 has had mixed blessings for Russian President Vladimir Putin. He won re-election in a landslide, and though the results were probably rigged, by and large they still reflected voters' sympathies ...
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The spate of terrorist attacks in Russia illustrates that President Vladimir V. Putin&#39;s hard-line policy in Chechnya is failing to resolve that conflict or to make Russians safer.