He fucked everyone counteredforcing many correspondents to rush back to Moscow and celebrate the entry into the new millennium on planes and in airports. On December 31, 1999, President Boris Yeltsin addressed his fellow citizens on television, not to congratulate them on the anniversary, but to announce his resignation from officehalf a year before presidential elections planned in which his successor was to be chosen. “I am leaving before the deadline… Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, with new, intelligent, strong and energetic people,” proclaimed the former president, who died nearly of decades.
Nobody who had followed the dramatic events of the previous months in the Eurasian giant raised doubts about who the then Russian president was referring to when he spoke in similar terms in his farewell speech to the Kremlin. It was about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putina former KGB agent 47 years old featured in East Germany during the Cold War, appointed prime minister only the previous August. A true unknown to the public who, as his only management credentials, exhibited the period of one year in which he was in charge of the Federal Security Service (FSB)one of the branches of the all-powerful intelligence agency for which he had worked during his youth.
And at that point in 1999, Putin had emerged as the winner of a stark political struggle that had taken place behind the scenes within the Russian elite, with a first option represented by him and his entourage, former FSB agents from Saint Petersburg, and a second possibility headed by the popular former prime minister Yevgueni Primakov. In the crazy period that elapsed between the summer and the last day of that momentous year, Russia went from shock to shock, suffering from deadly and strange attacks designed to cause the greatest possible number of deaths. civilian casualtiesto see how his Army embarked on a new war in Chechnya, including watching on television and in prime time, the then attorney general Yuri Skuratov in an orgy in bed with two prostitutes.
Electoral procedure
The results of legislative elections held in December had placed his Edintsvo party (Unitembryo of the current unofficial formation United Russia), hastily created in few months. And nothing and no one stood in Putin’s way to the top, turning the pending presidential consultationwhich ended up being brought forward to March, in a mere procedure. Power had changed hands in Russia with such speed that Putin himself did not even allow himself to pick up the phone from his predecessor in office when he called to congratulate him on the electoral victory in the spring, as confirmed in the documentary ‘The Witnesses’. of Putin’, prepared by the documentary filmmaker Vitali Mansky based on images obtained during his first year in office.
A quarter of a century has passed since all that; two and a half decades marked by wars like those of Chechnya (1999-2009), Georgia (2008), Syria (2015-present) o Ukraine (2022-present)due to a growing confrontation with the West until it led to total antagonism, and a growing political repression within Russia that ended up becoming fierce in the years prior to the invasion of the neighboring country. Looking back, the question that arises overwhelmingly among analysts and observers is whether this Putin still somewhat hesitant even before the cameras, who came to power meteorically at the turn of the century is the same one who has turned the security architecture in Europe, attacking militarily for the first time after the Second World War a sovereign country in the Old Continent.
“His premises are the same as then, an obsession with control within the country, something in which he has been successful, and a desire to restore the place that, according to his vision, corresponds to Russia in the world, being respected and even feared, a point at which it has not achieved all its objectives, but it is working on it,” Nicolás de Pedro, researcher at The Institute for Statecraft and expert in the post-Soviet space, responds to EL PERIÓDICO.
According to this academic, resentment against the West was always “very rooted“in the elite of the country that was formed after his arrival to power, both in the president as in the members of your environmenthaving suffered the humiliation of “the dismemberment of the Soviet Union” and the “collapse of the Soviet empire.” But anti-Western “paranoia” has become radicalized over the years, turning any event into “the product of a conspiracy” by the EU and the US against their regime, de Pedro believes.
Another element that, in his opinion, has empowered Putin and placed him in his current position has been the West’s hesitant and incoherent reaction to each coup carried out by Russia. Putin sees Washington and Brussels “as a pineapple from which he gets something every time he hits: after the Georgia war, came the ‘reset'” (rewinding of relations) promoted by the US president Barack Obama“after the annexation of Crimea came the construction of Nord Stream-2”, the gas pipeline that links Germany with Russia, he concludes.
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