...Second President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Because of constitutionally mandated term limits he is the current Prime Minister of Russia. His sock puppet, Dmitry Medvedev, was installed in the 2008 presidential elections. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law. During his eight years in office Russia's economy bounced back from crisis, seeing GDP increase, poverty decrease and average monthly salaries increase. During his presidency Putin passed into law a series of fundamental reforms, including a flat income tax of 13%, a reduced profits tax, and new land and legal codes. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile...expressed hope that the Boston bombing tragedy would result in closer cooperation between Moscow and Washington in the fight against terror.
"I hope this tragedy pushes us closer to one another in stopping shared threats," Putin said during his live televised call-in session in Moscow, saying Russia was also a victim of "international terrorism".
But Putin criticised excessive "speculation" about the Boston suspects' Chechen origins as a possible motivation for their embrace of terror.
"We can endlessly speculate on the tragedy of the Chechen people in the period of exiling them from Chechnya by the Stalin regime. But were Chechens the only victims of those repressions?" Putin said, adding that the Russian people suffered from Stalin repressions more than anyone else.
"It is not about nationality or belief," he said. "It is about beturbanned goon moods of those people."
The entire people of Chechnya were deported to Central Asia under Stalin over accusations of collaborating with German forces in World War II. The father of the bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was born in Kyrgyzstan.