Putin's comments come only hours after European leaders promised again to support a possible peacekeeping mission, something that Moscow has called "unacceptable" several times.He claimed this during a discussion at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, a city in the far east of Russia: "If any troops show up there, especially now while fighting is going on, we assume they will be legitimate targets."
Putin also said there shouldn't be any peacekeeping troops in Ukraine following a final peace settlement. He said that "no one should doubt" that Moscow will follow through on a pact to end its 3½-year full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
He stated that both Russia and Ukraine would require security assurances.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for the Kremlin, said later that Moscow would require "legally binding documents" to spell out these kinds of deals. He told the Russian news site Argumenty i Fakty, "Of course, you can't just believe what someone says."
Putin's words come after French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that 26 of Ukraine's friends have promised to send soldiers to Ukraine as a "reassurance force" after the war is over.
Macron said following a meeting in Paris of the "coalition of the willing," a group of 35 nations that back Ukraine. He claimed that 26 of the nations have promised to send soldiers to Ukraine—or to stay on land, at sea, or in the air—to assist keep the country safe the day after a truce or peace is reached.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke to the people at the Ambrosetti Forum, an international business conference, on Friday. He stressed that security guarantees should "start working now, during the war, and not only after it ends."
He claimed he couldn't say more because the information is "sensitive and relates to the military sphere."
The Ukrainian air force said on Friday that Russian forces assaulted Ukraine overnight with 157 strike and decoy drones and seven missiles of different sorts. It alleged that air defenses shot down or jammed 121 of the drones.
Serhii Lysak, the chairman of the regional administration, said on social media that one assault destroyed many homes in Dnipro, which is in central Ukraine. The regional government also reported that an undefined "facility" had been set on fire during the strike, although they didn't say what it was.
Lysak sent pictures of homes with roofs that were destroyed, glass pieces on the ground, and people bringing wooden planks to hide shattered windows. "Damage was done to private properties. He wrote, "Windows in apartment buildings were broken."
Local officials said that Russian drones struck infrastructure in the Novhorod-Siversk district of Ukraine's Chernihiv area, which is north of Kyiv. This left at least 15 communities without electricity.
The Russian Defense Ministry stated on Friday that Russian soldiers destroyed 92 Ukrainian drones overnight. Social media in the city of Ryazan, which is around 200 kilometers (125 miles) southeast of Moscow, said that the Rosneft oil refinery in the city had been attacked. They posted footage that looked like they showed a fire against the night sky.
Putin worked with the KGB as a foreign intelligence officer for 16 years, eventually becoming a lieutenant colonel. He quit in 1991 to start a career in politics in Saint Petersburg. In 1996, he relocated to Moscow to work for President Boris Yeltsin's government. He was the head of the Federal Security Service for a short time and subsequently the secretary of the Security Council of Russia. In August 1999, he was named prime minister. Putin became interim president when Yeltsin stepped down. Less than four months later, in May 2000, he was elected to his first full term as president. In 2004, he was elected again. Because the law only allows two consecutive presidential mandates, Putin was prime minister again from 2008 to 2012, this time under Dmitry Medvedev. He won the president back in 2012, after an election that was marred by claims of fraud and unrest. He was reelected in 2018.
During Putin's first term as president, the Russian economy increased by an average of seven percent per year thanks to economic reforms and a fivefold rise in oil and gas prices. Putin also led Russia in a war against Chechen rebels, which brought federal control back to the area. As Medvedev's prime minister, he oversaw a war with Georgia and made changes to the military and police. During his third term as president, Russia took over Crimea and backed a conflict in eastern Ukraine by sending troops into the country many times. This led to international sanctions and a financial crisis in Russia. He also sent troops to Syria to help his buddy Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian civil war. He wanted to get naval ports in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Putin started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, during his fourth term as president. This led to worldwide censure and further sanctions. He declared a partial mobilization in September 2022 and forcefully added four Ukrainian oblasts to Russia. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes linked to his claimed criminal culpability for unlawful child abductions throughout the war. After a vote in April 2021, he signed constitutional changes into law. One of these changes lets him seek for reelection twice more, which might mean that he will be president until 2036. He was elected to a further term in March 2024.
Putin has turned the Russian political system into an authoritarian regime with a personality cult. His leadership has been defined by extensive human rights abuses and corruption, including as imprisoning and silencing political opponents, censoring and intimidating independent media in Russia, and not having free and fair elections. The Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International, the Democracy Index from The Economist, the Freedom in the World index from Freedom House, and the World Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders have all given Russia very poor scores over the years.
Early years and schooling
Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Putina had three children, and Putin was the youngest. He was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad, Soviet Union. Spiridon Putin, his grandpa, was a personal chef for Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. Before Putin was born, two of his brothers perished. Albert, who was born in the 1930s, died as a baby. Viktor, who was born in 1940, died of diphtheria and famine in 1942 during World War II while Nazi Germany's forces were besieging Leningrad.
Putin's mother worked in a factory, while his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy. He served in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. His father worked in the NKVD's demolition brigade during the early days of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. He then joined the regular army and was badly hurt in 1942. The Germans who occupied the Tver area in 1941 murdered Putin's maternal grandmother, while his maternal uncles went missing on the Eastern Front during World War II.
Learning
Putin, c. 1960s
Putin began attending School No. 193 on Baskov Lane, close to his house, on September 1, 1960. One of the few kids in his class of roughly 45 who wasn't already a part of the Young Pioneer group was him. He started doing sambo and judo when he was 12 years old. He liked to read the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Lenin when he had some free time. Putin went at Saint Petersburg High School 281, which had a program that taught German. He speaks German well and has delivered lectures and interviews in that language.
In 1970, Putin started studying law at the Leningrad State University named after Andrei Zhdanov and finished in 1975. His thesis was about "The Most Favored Nation Trading Principle in International Law." While there, he had to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and he stayed a member until it stopped being a party in 1991. Putin met Anatoly Sobchak, an assistant professor who taught commercial law and eventually helped write the Russian constitution. Putin helped Sobchak's career in Saint Petersburg, while Sobchak helped Putin's career in Moscow.
Putin graduated from the Saint Petersburg Mining University in 1997 with a degree in economics for a thesis on how energy dependencies are used in international policy. Vladimir Litvinenko was his boss. He ran his presidential campaigns in St. Petersburg in 2000 and again in 2004. According to Western standards, Igor Danchenko and Clifford Gaddy think that Putin is a plagiarist. He copied whole paragraphs from the Russian version of King and Cleland's Strategic Planning and Policy. Balzer wrote about the Putin thesis and Russian energy policy. He and Olcott agree that "The primacy of the Russian state in the country's energy sector is non-negotiable." He also points out that BASF's 2004 Gazprom Nord Stream-Yuzhno-Russkoye deal had a 49–51 structure, which is different from BP's TNK-BP project, which had a 50–50 split.
Following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022
A sign of protest in front of the Russian embassy in Finland. Experts in international law have called Putin a war criminal.
As more and more civilians died during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. President Joe Biden labeled Putin a "murderous dictator" and a "war criminal." Biden remarked in his 2022 State of the Union Address that Putin had "badly miscalculated." Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine's ambassador to the UN, compared Putin to Adolf Hitler. Krisjanis Karins, the prime minister of Latvia, similarly compared the Russian leader to Hitler. He said that "Putin is fighting against democracy" and that "Putin is a deluded autocrat making life miserable for millions." If Putin can attack Ukraine, he might strike any other European country.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania's foreign minister, remarked, "The fight for Ukraine is a fight for Europe." Putin will go further if he isn't stopped there. French President Emmanuel Macron stated that Putin was "deluding himself." Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, called him "a dictator and a cynic." Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, termed Putin "a lying, murderous dictator." Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the UK, similarly called Putin a "dictator" who had allowed "a tidal wave of violence against a fellow Slavic people." Michael Hirsh and other writers have called Putin a "messianic" Russian nationalist and Eurasianist.
Franklin Foer of The Atlantic claimed in March 2025 that the 21st century was the "Age of Vladimir Putin." Foer said that:
For the last 25 years, the world has followed the ideas of one man. He not only short-circuited the transition to democracy in his own nation and in surrounding countries, but he also set off a series of events that has broken the transatlantic order that existed after World War II. He has been a figurehead, an amusing troublemaker, and a field marshal at moments in the worldwide turn against democracy. This is the time of Vladimir Putin.
History of elections
Main article: The history of Vladimir Putin's elections
Since 2000, Vladimir Putin has been nominated and elected President of Russia five times, usually as an independent. Putin got 88% of the votes in the most recent Russian presidential election in 2024. There were claims of problems with this election, such as ballot stuffing and forcing people to vote. Russian officials said that Putin got 88.12% of the votes in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine that were under Russian control. Putin got 98.99% of the votes in Chechnya.
Life at home Family
Main article: Vladimir Putin's family
Putin and Lyudmila Putina were married on July 28, 1983.
Putin and Lyudmila Shkrebneva got married on July 28, 1983. They lived together in East Germany from 1985 until 1990. Maria Putina was born on April 28, 1985, in Leningrad, while Yekaterina Putina was born on August 31, 1986, in Dresden, East Germany.
In November 2020, Proekt released an article that said Putin had another daughter named Elizaveta, also known as Luiza Rozova, with Svetlana Krivonogikh. Elizaveta went to school in Paris and used the name Elizaveta Olegovna Rudnova. The Moskovsky Korrespondent said in April 2008 that Putin had divorced Lyudmila and was going to marry Alina Kabaeva, a former rhythmic gymnast and Russian politician who won an Olympic gold medal. The report was disputed, and the paper was shut down not long after. Putin and Lyudmila kept going out in public together as husband and wife, but many started to wonder about the state of his relationship with Kabaeva.
Putin and Lyudmila said on June 6, 2013, that their marriage was finished. The Kremlin declared on April 1, 2014, that the divorce was complete. There were reports that Kabaeva had a daughter with Putin in 2015, but these were refuted. In 2019, Kabaeva is said to have given birth to twin sons with Putin. But in 2022, Swiss media reported, based on information from the couple's Swiss obstetrician, that Kabaeva gave birth to a boy both times.
Maria gave birth to Putin's two grandchildren, one in 2012 and one in 2017. Through Katerina, he is said to have a granddaughter who was born in 2017. Igor Putin, his cousin, was a director at Master Bank in Moscow and was involved in many money-laundering crimes.
Riches
Check out the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers as well.
During the 2007 parliamentary elections, official numbers showed that Putin had around 3.7 million rubles in bank accounts, a private 77.4-square-meter residence in Saint Petersburg, and other assets. According to reports, Putin made 2 million rubles in 2006. Putin said in 2012 that he made 3.6 million rubles. Putin has been seen wearing a variety of luxury wristwatches that are worth a total of $700,000, which is over six times his yearly income. Putin has been known to offer watches worth thousands of dollars as presents. For example, in 2009, he gave a Siberian youngster a watch called a Blancpain while on vacation. He also gave a manufacturing worker a similar watch the same year.
The Panama Papers name Arkady Rotenberg, a close friend of Putin's. This image was taken in 2018.
Russian opposition lawmakers and media say that Putin secretly has a wealth worth billions of dollars since he has had holdings in a number of Russian enterprises throughout the years. One editorial in The Washington Post said, "Putin might not technically own these 43 planes, but as the only political power in Russia, he can act like they're his." A journalist with RIA Novosti said that "intelligence agencies... could not find anything." Polygraph.info looked at a variety of studies from Western and Russian analysts, the CIA, and Russian media that made counterarguments to these conflicting allegations. Polygraph came to the conclusion:
There is no clear answer to how much money Putin has, and it seems that the Director of U.S. National Intelligence's evaluation is not yet finished. But with all the data and records in the Panama Papers and with independent investigators like those Dawisha talks about, Polygraph.info thinks that Danilov's allegation that Western intelligence services haven't been able to locate proof of Putin's riches is wrong.
— Polygraph.info, "Are 'Putin's Billions' a Myth?"
The German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists got 11 million papers from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca in April 2016. Putin's name did not show up in any of the records, and he said he had nothing to do with the firm. However, other news outlets have talked about three of the people on the list who work with Putin. The Panama Papers leak says that close, trusted friends of Putin hold offshore firms that are worth a total of $2 billion. The Suddeutsche Zeitung thinks it's possible that Putin's family may make money off of this money.
The paper says that the US$2 billion had been "secretly shuffled through banks and shadow companies linked to Putin's associates," like construction billionaires Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. Bank Rossiya, which the U.S. State Department had already said was Putin's personal bank account, played a big role in making this happen. It says that "Putin has shown he is willing to take aggressive steps to keep things secret and protect communal assets."
A large part of the money trail goes to Sergei Roldugin, who is Putin's greatest pal. He is a musician, and he says he is not a businessman, yet it looks like he owns assets worth $100 million or more. Some people think he was chosen for the part because he doesn't stand out. Some people think that Putin really controls the money and Roldugin was only a middleman. Garry Kasparov remarked that "controls enough money, probably more than any other person in the history of the human race."