Council on Foreign Relations: Putin’s Russia Stakes Its Ground - by Michael Moran

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Putin’s Russia Stakes Its Ground - by Michael Moran

For U.S. and European policymakers who had consigned Kremlinology to the history shelf of research libraries, the past two years have brought cause for regret. Since December 2005, when Russian muscle flexing in a dispute with Ukraine showed the European Union how vulnerable (BBC) its energy supplies had become, President Vladimir Putin has made no bones about the fact that he deeply resents the status quo he inherited from Boris Yeltsin when he took power on the eve of the millennium. In 2005, he told (AP) Russians in a nationally televised speech that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century."