...Second and fourth President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. 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 or dead...said on Thursday that his decision to take the Crimean peninsula under Russian control was made final after "secret polls" showed that its people wanted to be ruled by Moscow.
"My decisions were finalised after people's attitudes became clear," Putin said.
"We weren't prepared for such a turn of events. To tell you the truth, we could imagine how people felt but did not know for sure."
"Only after conducting the first sociological surveys, which, to tell you the truth, were done in secret, the numbers were pretty close to reality," he said while meeting with supporters of the All-Russian Popular Front, a group at the forefront of his re-election campaign in 2012.
"It became clear once and for all that we have chosen our line of action well," he said. "The first poll showed that about 80 percent of Crimean population are for joining Russia."
Later "when the process began to develop" at the referendum on March 16, "this figure grew more to nearly 97 percent," he said.
"That is an amazing figure," he added.