does putin have a phd in economics

Russian President Putin: Former KGB with economics degree

Vladimir Putin, Russia's longest serving leader since Josef Stalin, is a former KGB spy who earned a Ph.D. in economics and has a judo blackbelt.

His tough-guy image is well known because he invited government photographers to tag along as he rode on horseback while shirtless, treated a tranquilized tiger and a polar bear, and flew in an ultralight with migratory birds. But here a few things you might not know about the Russian leader:

Putin is fabulously wealthy  

According to Russia's Central Election Commission, Putin earned $860,000 between 2011 and 2016. But estimates of his net worth range from $40 billion to $200 billion. The latter estimate would make Putin, a life-long public servant, more than twice as wealthy as Microsoft-founder Bill Gates, who holds the title as the world's richest human.

How did it happen? As a KGB spy during the Soviet era, Putin maintained ties to organized crime, according to Karen Dawisha, author of  Putin's Kleptocracy; Who Owns Russia?  As president, he steers government contracts and the sale of state-owned enterprises to businessmen who support his rule and present him with valuable gifts, Dawisha wrote in 2014.

The judo schtick might be just that

Putin has practiced some form of martial arts since he was 14, first with a Russian form called sambo and then switched to judo, according to his official biography and interviews. He told NPR in 2001 that he considered the sport a type of philosophy that he has practiced his entire adult life.

Legal analyst Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare blog says that while there are lots of photos of Putin warming up and throwing opponents, they seem to be willing participants.

“Putin is fraud martial artist,” Wittes wrote on Facebook . “He only fights people who are in his power, and they are all taking falls for him.”

More: Putin's Russia: These are the candidates in an election some call a charade

Putin used his martial arts prowess to earn good pay as a movie stuntman in the 1970s, according to a December report in the Russian Dozhd news site .

Putin’s judo buddies are really, really rich

Several members of Putin’s Yawara-Neva judo club in St. Petersburg became extraordinarily wealthy or powerful since Putin rose to power. They include Putin’s former sparring partner, Arkady Rotenberg, worth $3.1 billion, his brother Boris ($1.2 billion), oil trader Gennady Timchenko ($16.4 billion) and Vasily Shestakov. Shestakov, president of the International Sambo Federation who got his start as a judo trainer, is the only member who does not appear in the Forbes list of Russian billionaires.

Putin’s dissertation included 'extensive plagiarism'

Putin in 1996 earned a post-graduate degree that is a rough equivalent of a Ph.D. at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute, though he never attended that school, according to a 2006 presentation by analysts Igor Danchenko and Clifford Gaddy at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, D.C.

His dissertation was on the investment in large-scale natural resource extraction, like oil and gas, to “restore Russia’s great power status.” Pages of it were largely copied from a 1982 American business school text book called Strategic Planning and Policy , Gaddy said.

Dark stories surround his rise 

As prime minister in 1999, Putin was alleged to have been behind a string of apartment bombings that killed 300 residents and were officially blamed on Chechen separatists, according to Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer and whistleblower who fled to Britain. Putin denied the allegations, which Litvinenko wrote in a 2001 book Blowing Up Russia . The bombings provided the rationale for a military campaign in Chechnya that coincided with Putin's first run for the presidency.

Putin's war in Chechnya employed a scorched-earth policy that left thousands of dead Chechens. Human rights violations were exposed by Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya.

Several of his critics and opponents died in brutal ways

Politkovskaya was shot to death at the entrance to her apartment building in Moscow in October 2006. Litvinenko was poisoned to death in London with a rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210, the next month. At least three other people who investigated or worked to expose their findings about the apartment bombings were murdered. And opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot to death in 2015, while strolling near the Kremlin with his girlfriend after dinner.

More: Mysterious rash of Russian deaths casts suspicion on Vladimir Putin

Twice married, two daughters

Putin married his first wife, flight attendant Lyudmila, in 1983, while he worked for the KGB. They had two daughters, Mariya, 32, and Katerina, 31.

Mariya studied medicine and has a Ph.D. in dwarfism. She was last known to be living in a penthouse in the “Crimean District” in Voorschoten, a suburb of the Dutch capital of the Hague. Katerina is a competitive rock 'n' roll dancer and heads the Zhavoronki Acrobatic Rock’n’Roll Center, the world's only facility dedicated to the sport, according to Reuters .

Putin divorced his first wife in 2013. He is rumored to have a girlfriend, gymnastics gold medalist Alina Kabaeva,34, who was photographed in 2015 wearing a wedding ring, according to British tabloids.

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How Putin Conquered Russia's Oligarchy

Greg Rosalsky

Note: This is Part Two of a two-part Planet Money newsletter series on the Russian oligarchs. You can read Part One here and subscribe to the newsletter here .

In the summer of 2000, 21 of the richest men in Russia exited their bulletproof limousines and entered the Kremlin for a historic meeting. In the previous decade, these men had risen seemingly out of nowhere, amassing spectacular fortunes as the country around them descended into chaos. Through shady deals, outright corruption, and even murder, these rapacious "oligarchs" — as Russians had come to derisively call them — had seized control of much of Russia's economy, and, increasingly, its fledgling democracy. But now, their nation's newly elected president, Vladimir Putin, wanted to tell them, face to face, who was really in charge.

"I want to draw your attention to the fact that you built this state yourself, to a great degree, through the political or semi-political structures under your control,'' Putin reportedly said in the closed-door meeting. ''So there is no point in blaming the reflection in the mirror. So let us get down to the point and be open and do what is necessary to do to make our relationship in this field civilized and transparent.''

Putin in 2000 ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Putin in 2000

Putin offered the oligarchs a deal: bend to my authority, stay out of my way, and you can keep your mansions, superyachts, private jets, and multibillion-dollar corporations (corporations that, just a few years before, had been owned by the Russian government). In the coming years, the oligarchs who reneged on this deal and undermined Putin would be thrown into a Siberian prison or be forced into exile or die in suspicious circumstances . The loyalists who remained — and the new ones who got filthy rich during Putin's long reign — became like ATM machines for the president and his allies.

"These individuals have enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people," the White House said in a recent statement announcing sanctions against over a dozen oligarchs connected to Putin. "[They] sit atop Russia's largest companies and are responsible for providing the resources necessary to support Putin's invasion of Ukraine."

Putin Shows Who's Boss

Putin came to power thanks in no small part to the original class of oligarchs, who got ostentatiously rich through crooked privatization deals during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. These oligarchs created and bankrolled what became Putin's political party, Unity, the predecessor to what is now called United Russia. They engineered President Boris Yeltsin's stunning comeback victory in the 1996 presidential elections. Without this victory, Yeltsin could have never appointed Putin as his prime minister, a position that proved to be Putin's launching pad for his presidential bid. The oligarchs helped fuel Putin's meteoric rise. Two of them, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, deployed their television stations and newspapers to turn Putin from an unknown figure into a household name.

But Putin was a shrewder politician than they initially realized. When Putin's 2000 presidential election campaign heated up, he began paying lip service to Russia's hatred of the oligarchs and the corrupt deals that enriched them. Shortly before election day, Putin was asked by a radio station how he felt about the oligarchs. If by oligarchs, he said, one meant those who "help fusion of power and capital — there will be no oligarchs of this kind as a class."

But, once in power, Putin didn't actually eliminate the oligarchy. He only targeted individual oligarchs who threatened his power. He first aimed at Vladimir Gusinsky , the rare oligarch who built most of his wealth from scratch as opposed to merely taking over extractive industries that once belonged to the government. Back in the mid-1980s, Gusinsky was a cab driver with broken dreams of directing plays in Moscow's theater scene. When the Soviet Union began allowing entrepreneurship in the late 1980s, Gusinsky made a small fortune making and selling copper bracelets, which were apparently a big hit with Russian consumers. In the early 1990s, he flipped buildings in Moscow's burgeoning real estate market and started a bank. By 1993, he had enough money to start a newspaper and Russia's first private television station, NTV.

Tolerated under Yeltsin, NTV ran programs — including a satirical puppet show — critical of the Kremlin. When NTV newscasters — and puppets — began criticizing and making fun of the newly elected president, Putin slammed down his iron fist. In 2000, armed agents in camouflage and ski masks raided NTV's offices. The government alleged Gusinsky stole $10 million in a privatization deal. Gusinsky was jailed and then fled overseas. A state-controlled energy company, Gazprom, ended up buying NTV in a hostile takeover . Rest assured, Putin doesn't have to worry about puppets making fun of him anymore.

Director Victor Shenderovich poses with a life size puppet of Vladimir Putin in 2000, on the set of a popular satirical NTV television show called "Kukly" (Puppets). Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images hide caption

Director Victor Shenderovich poses with a life size puppet of Vladimir Putin in 2000, on the set of a popular satirical NTV television show called "Kukly" (Puppets).

In the early 2000s, another oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, crossed the line with Putin and also paid a hefty price. Khodorkovsky, a square-jawed magnate built like a retired linebacker, was then the richest man in Russia, estimated to be worth around $15 billion. He made his fortune largely through a corrupt deal with the Yeltsin administration under a scheme known as "Loans For Shares" (read our last newsletter for more details). Khodorkovsky was able to buy a 78 percent stake in the state-controlled oil company Yukos for only $310 million , even though it was then worth an estimated $5 billion.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the CEO of the Russian oil company Yukos, poses for photographs in his private office in 2003. Tatyana Makeyeva/Getty Images hide caption

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the CEO of the Russian oil company Yukos, poses for photographs in his private office in 2003.

Khodorkovsky proved to be a capable oil baron and brought Western-style management and transparency to his empire. As corporations do in the United States, he spent generously on lobbying and campaign contributions to politicians in Russia's legislature. He funded opposition political parties. He even hinted he might run for president. As his empire grew, he became increasingly strongheaded. In February 2003, Khodorkovsky challenged Putin in a televised meeting, alleging corruption at a state-owned oil company. Meanwhile, Khodorkovsky was mulling a merger with the American oil company Exxon Mobil. Putin and his allies hated all of this.

In 2003, masked agents stormed Khodorkovsky's private jet during a refueling stop and arrested him at gunpoint. Authorities charged him with fraud and tax evasion. They imprisoned him in Siberia, where he would languish for the next decade. The government took over his oil empire and handed the keys to one of Putin's longtime associates, Igor Sechin.

The Rise Of The Siloviki

Igor Sechin is one of the leading figures in a new breed of oligarchs, who have accrued wealth and power under Putin: the siloviki , which translates roughly to "men of force." Most are military men or former KGB officers, like Putin himself. Sechin, who has a PhD in economics, is rumored to have served as a KGB officer in East Africa during the 1980s.

Whereas the original class of oligarchs arose during the era of " shock therapy " and rapid privatization in the 1990s, the siloviki — or silovarchs, as they're also called — made their fortunes under Putin, largely through government contracts, Putin's re-nationalization of extractive industries, and good, old-fashioned corruption. Like Putin, most silovarchs revile the reform era of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, when Russia lost its empire and saw a host of liberal and pro-Western intellectuals take the helm of the government and the economy.

Sechin has worked for Putin for decades. In the 1990s, when Putin served as an aide to the mayor of Saint Petersburg, Sechin served as Putin's assistant. Later he served as Putin's deputy prime minister. A 2008 U.S. embassy document leaked by Wikileaks said, "Sechin was so shadowy that it was joked he may not actually exist but rather was a sort of urban myth, a bogeyman, invented by the Kremlin to instill fear." Some in Moscow call him "Darth Vader." Sechin now serves as the chairman and CEO of the state-controlled oil company, Rosneft, which is the largest corporation in Russia, producing around six percent of the world's oil and employing about 300,000 people.

Vladimir Putin speaks with Russian oligarch Igor Sechin (center right) in 2009. AFP/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Vladimir Putin speaks with Russian oligarch Igor Sechin (center right) in 2009.

In his autobiography, First Person , Putin wrote, "I have a lot of friends, but only a few people are really close to me. They have never gone away. They have never betrayed me, and I haven't betrayed them, either. In my view, that's what counts most."

Which brings us to another important subset of oligarchs, who are buddies with Putin but who did not serve in the military, police, or Russian security apparatus. A prime example of this type of oligarch — a Putin buddygarch, if you will — is Arkady Rotenberg.

It Pays To Be A Judo Partner With Putin

In the 1960s, a twelve-year-old Arkady Rotenberg was forced by his parents to go to a martial arts class. They didn't know it was like handing their son a winning lottery ticket. At that judo class, Rotenberg met a young Vladimir Putin. Rotenberg and Putin quickly became friends. For years, they sparred against each other and traveled to judo tournaments around their hometown of Leningrad (aka Saint Petersburg). The two were known as pranksters, getting into trouble doing silly things like popping balloons at parades by throwing wire pellets at them.

In 2000, Arkady and his brother Boris were small-time oil traders. But then something crazy happened: one of Arkady's best friends became the president of Russia. That same year, Putin created a new state liquor monopoly, Rosspirtprom, by merging more than a hundred liquor factories. Rosspirtprom controlled around 30 percent of Russia's vodka market. Putin put Arkady in charge of it.

A year later, Putin installed his own henchman on the board of Gazprom, a large state-run gas company. Arkady and Boris saw an opportunity. They started a new bank, SMP Bank, and began acquiring construction, gas, and pipeline companies that could service Gazprom. Since then, the Rotenbergs have emerged as the greatest beneficiaries of a government with a penchant for awarding no-bid contracts. The government has forked over billions upon billions of dollars to the Rotenbergs to construct things like pipelines, roads, and bridges. Curiously, they are known to significantly overcharge for these projects, but the Kremlin seems to be cool with it. Evidence suggests it might be because someone in the Kremlin is getting a cut.

Stanislav Markus, an economist at the University of South Carolina who studies Russian oligarchs, recently told The Indicator that Putin's buddies kick back some of the extra money they charge the state to the president himself. "That's what makes Vladimir Putin one of the wealthiest people on the planet," Markus said. "Nobody knows exactly how wealthy, but that's one of the key processes."

Much of the money that has flowed to the oligarchs and to Putin — whom historian Timothy Snyder calls "the head oligarch" — has been stashed in accounts and assets located outside of Russia. "There is as much financial wealth held by rich Russians abroad — in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Cyprus, and similar offshore centers — than held by the entire Russian population in Russia itself," a 2017 study by economists Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman found.

Although it's been hard to see exactly where all the money ends up — and how much of it is actually Putin's — it's easy to see that loyal oligarchs are making bank through extra fat government contracts. In 2014, as Putin grew excited about hosting the Winter Olympics in Sochi, his government spent lavishly preparing for the Games. The biggest winner of this spending? Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. A 2017 profile of Arkady in The New Yorker found, "In all, companies controlled by Rotenberg received contracts worth seven billion dollars — equivalent to the entire cost of the previous Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, in 2010."

Shortly after the Sochi Olympic Games, Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time , annexing the Crimean Peninsula. Naturally, Ukraine sealed off the one land entrance to the area, which is on their southern border. Looking to unite Russia with its new territory, Putin decided to create a 12-mile bridge over the Kerch Strait. Given it was a warzone with lots of logistical and political challenges, many contractors were reluctant to build that bridge. Not Arkady Rotenberg. His company took on the multibillion-dollar project, despite the political headaches it posed, and completed it in 2018 . "A miracle has come true," Putin said about the bridge's completion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin decorates oligarch Arkady Rotenberg with the Hero of Labour medal during an awards ceremony for those who led the construction of the Crimean Bridge over the Kerch Strait, which that links mainland Russia to Moscow-annexed Crimea. ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Russian President Vladimir Putin decorates oligarch Arkady Rotenberg with the Hero of Labour medal during an awards ceremony for those who led the construction of the Crimean Bridge over the Kerch Strait, which that links mainland Russia to Moscow-annexed Crimea.

The Obama administration sanctioned the Rotenbergs to punish them and Putin for the invasion of Crimea. "Arkady Rotenberg and Boris Rotenberg have provided support to Putin's pet projects by receiving and executing high price contracts for the Sochi Olympic Games and state-controlled Gazprom," said the U.S. Treasury Department . "Both brothers have amassed enormous amounts of wealth during the years of Putin's rule in Russia." European nations also sanctioned them. For example, Italy seized Arkady's multimillion-dollar mansions in Sardinia and Tarquinia.

The sanctions proved to only bring the Rotenbergs and the Kremlin closer together. The Russian legislature even tried to pass a law, called "the Rotenberg law," which sought to compensate citizens who had their assets stripped by foreign governments. It didn't pass. However, the Rotenbergs have been compensated generously in the form of lucrative state contacts that got even bigger after they were targeted by foreign sanctions.

Western authorities are again targeting the Rotenbergs and other Russian oligarchs in response to Putin's second invasion of Ukraine. This script is similar to the prequel, but the sanctions are tougher and more coordinated than they were after Putin's first invasion of Ukraine. Last time, the sanctions proved to be largely ineffective . The people of Ukraine can only hope that this time will be different.

• arkady rotenberg

The American Education of Vladimir Putin

How the Russian leader came to oppose a country he knows little about

"The problem you Americans have in dealing with us is that you think you understand us, but you don't. You look at the Chinese and you think: 'They're not like us.' You look at us Russians, and you think, 'They’re like us.' But you're wrong. We are not like you. "

Over the past few years, top-ranking Russians have repeatedly delivered versions of the admonition above to American interlocutors. We’ve been told that it comes originally from Vladimir Putin. That makes sense. Putin is a former intelligence officer. And what the warning expresses, with typically Putin-esque bluntness and political incorrectness, is a maxim shared by U.S. intelligence officers: Beware of seeing false mirror images. Do not assume your adversary will think and act the same way you would in similar circumstances. You will likely misread him if you do.

Despite a new ceasefire , Russia and the West remain at risk of uncontrolled escalation over Ukraine, and in such situations little can be more dangerous than misreading your adversary. So Putin is right: Washington shouldn’t “mirror-image” him, and U.S. leaders shouldn’t assume that he will interpret events and words as they might. But one neglected question is that of how Putin interprets the United States. Has he followed his own advice—or does he assume Americans, including President Obama, will act and react as he would? Does he even care about how Americans think, what their motives and values are, how their system works? What does Vladimir Putin actually know about the U.S. and about Americans?

As it turns out, very little.

Because of his KGB history, Vladimir Putin is typically accused in U.S. media of harboring an anti-American, Cold War view of the United States, and of blaming the United States for bringing down the Soviet Union. But there is little evidence of any anti-American views in the early phases of Putin’s public life. As deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s, he did not accuse the United States of destroying the Soviet Union. Instead he publicly laid blame for the collapse of the U.S.S.R. on the miscalculations of Soviet leaders and their mishandling of reforms in the 1980s. His more negative views of the United States, and its perceived threat to Russia, seem to have hardened later in the 2000s, over the course of his interactions and relationships with two American presidents: George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

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There is no reliable record of Putin’s interactions with Americans or his thoughts on the United States during key phases of his life: his youth in Leningrad, his KGB service, his period in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, and his pre-presidential years in Moscow. When Putin went to Leningrad State University in the early 1970s, only a small number of American exchange students were there. But Putin did not study English, and he would have had limited opportunity to socialize with the American students outside the university. During his early KGB service in Leningrad in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United States was filtered through the world of counterespionage and global developments of the time; Americans seemed dangerous and unpredictable.

The early 1980s were years of heightened Cold War confrontation. After a period of détente, the United States had again become a clear and present danger for the Soviet Union. Based on their analysis of U.S. defense budgets, global U.S. military exercises, American and NATO air probes near sensitive Soviet borders, statements by top White House and Pentagon officials, and increased operations by the CIA in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the Kremlin leadership was thoroughly convinced that the United States posed a real military threat.

March 1983 brought a full-scale war scare, just after U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced the proposed development of a missile-defense system to shield the United States from a Soviet nuclear strike. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov lashed out against those plans and raised the specter of a nuclear holocaust. On March 8, 1983, Reagan made his famous “Evil Empire” speech about the dangers posed to the United States and its way of life by the Soviet Union. In September 1983, the situation deteriorated further when Soviet warplanes intercepted and shot down a civilian South Korean Airlines plane, KAL 007, in the mistaken belief that it was a U.S. spy plane.

In the Soviet Union, top leaders terrified themselves and their population with memories of World War II, and specifically of Adolf Hitler’s surprise 1941 attack on the U.S.S.R. As Benjamin Fischer, an analyst and scholar at the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, noted: “For decades after the war, Soviet leaders seemed obsessed with the lessons of 1941, which were as much visceral as intellectual in Soviet thinking about war and peace.” Andropov and his colleagues put the KGB on full alert in the early 1980s in response to the lessons they had learned from the Soviet intelligence failures of World War II. It was around that time that Putin entered the KGB Red Banner Institute in Moscow, where Soviet paranoia about the United States and fears of a nuclear war undoubtedly framed the tone and content of his instruction.

Putin was posted in Dresden, East Germany, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan began a process that would put the tensions and war scares of the early 1980s behind them. He was too low in the KGB rankings to have much interaction with any top-level espionage targets, which would have included Americans. Until he came back from Dresden in 1990 and began working for the mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin may have never met an American in any personal context.

By contrast, his position as St. Petersburg’s deputy mayor in charge of external relations offered Putin many opportunities to interact with Americans, in a very different atmosphere from that of the 1980s. After 1991, the Soviet Union was gone, and Putin and the rest of the mayor’s team were trying to figure out how to run the city and make its economy competitive again. American and other Western politicians, as part of a U.S. effort to forge a new relationship with the Russian Federation, openly courted Putin’s boss Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin seemed to respond well to the overtures.

U.S. businesses that moved into St. Petersburg had to deal directly with Deputy Mayor Putin who, according to John Evans, the U.S. consul general in St. Petersburg at the time, was always helpful in resolving contract disputes between U.S. and Russian businesses. Within the city’s U.S. and Western business community, Putin was seen as “pro-business.” He gave no impression whatsoever of any anti-American or anti-Western views.

The St. Petersburg connection also gave Putin an important entry point into the United States. In 1992, Sobchak co-chaired a bilateral commission on St. Petersburg with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It is not clear how much direct contact Putin and Kissinger had at that time. But Kissinger would become an important interlocutor for Putin when he became president later on. Putin has admitted that the source of his initial interest in Kissinger was the former secretary of state’s early career in World War II military intelligence. As a renowned scholar with an academic career and numerous books to his name, Kissinger could provide a sounding board for ideas about geopolitics. He could interpret the United States and the West for Putin. And he could explain Vladimir Putin to other influential Americans. But beyond Kissinger, Putin has had few representative Americans to rely on for insights into how the U.S. political system works and how Americans and their leaders think.

The two key presidential aides in charge of overseeing critical aspects of relations between Moscow and Washington for most of the 2000s—Sergei Prikhodko and his deputy, Alexander Manzhosin—spoke English, but to our knowledge neither had any experience of living or working in the United States. Otherwise, Putin’s “go-to guys” for the United States within the Russian government and the Kremlin have been Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister and former representative to the UN in New York, who speaks fluent English, and Yury Ushakov, a personal presidential advisor and former Russian ambassador to the United States. Putin’s lack of fluency in English has limited his own ability to have direct contacts except through interpreters or others who can act as connectors and conduits. Nor has he shown any particular curiosity about America beyond its leaders and their actions.

By 1994, the U.S.S.R.’s military alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, had collapsed along with the rest of the Soviet bloc, but NATO was still going strong, and Eastern European countries were knocking on its door seeking new security arrangements. Five years later, the issue of NATO and NATO enlargement came to play a significant role in Putin’s professional life and his ascent to the presidency.

Putin was head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet successor to the KGB, when the alliance went to war in response to Yugoslav military atrocities against ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo, which was still part of Yugoslavia. The intervention took place a mere two weeks after NATO had admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The United States did not secure the usual authority from the United Nations to intervene. NATO warplanes bombed Belgrade, and NATO forces, with American troops in the lead, then moved into Kosovo to secure the territory and roll back the Yugoslav military. As Putin put it in a speech 15 years later: “It was hard to believe, even seeing it with my own eyes, that at the end of the 20th century, one of Europe’s capitals, Belgrade, was under missile attack for several weeks, and then came the real [military] intervention.”

NATO’s Kosovo campaign was a turning point for Moscow and for Putin personally. Russian officials interpreted the intervention as a means of expanding NATO’s influence in the Balkans, not as an effort to deal with a humanitarian crisis. They began to revise their previous conclusions about the prospects for cooperating with NATO as well as with the United States as the leader of the alliance. As Putin noted in a March 2014 speech , the experience left him with a rather harsh view of Americans, who, he said, “prefer in their practical politics to be guided not by international law, but by the law of force.” The Americans had, as they would on numerous occasions, “taken decisions behind our backs, presented us with accomplished facts.”

In August 1999, Putin was appointed prime minister, and his immediate concern was Chechnya, where separatist violence was spilling over the border and into the rest of Russia. The considerable high-level Western attention to, and criticism of, the second outbreak of war in the republic stoked Russian fears of NATO or U.S. intervention in the conflict. In the United States, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor in the Carter administration, and retired general Alexander Haig, a former secretary of state in the Reagan administration who had also served in top positions in the U.S. military and in NATO, helped to set up an advocacy group to demand a diplomatic solution to the war and policies to protect civilians caught in the conflict. Given the Soviet leadership’s neuralgia about officials like Brzezinski and Haig in the 1970s and 1980s, this group was viewed with alarm in Moscow. Russian political figures saw the risk of the Americans and NATO intervening in Chechnya to protect civilians, just as they had intervened in Kosovo.

Putin’s response was to write an op-ed in The New York Times in November 1999, in an early foray into international PR. He explained that Moscow had launched its military campaign in Chechnya to respond to acts of terrorism. He praised the United States for its own strikes against terrorists, noting that “when a society’s core interests are besieged by violent elements, responsible leaders must respond” and calling for the “understanding of our friends abroad.” The general message was conciliatory. Putin clearly hoped that the constructive atmosphere that had framed his interactions with Americans in St. Petersburg could be restored in some way.

After September 11, he appeared convinced that Washington would come to see things from Moscow’s perspective and would recognize linkages between al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and terrorists in Chechnya. In a press conference in Brussels on October 2, 2001, Putin asserted that terrorists took advantage of “Western institutions and Western conceptions of human rights and the protection of the civilian population ... not in order to defend Western values and Western institutions, but rather ... in a struggle against them. Their final goal is annihilation.” All states would have to clamp down politically at home, as well as improve military postures abroad, to deal with this problem. Based on Russia’s experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Putin offered the United States concrete assistance in rooting out al-Qaeda.

If Putin and the Kremlin hoped to create an international anti-terrorist coalition with Washington modeled on the U.S.-Soviet World War II alliance against Germany—one that would give Russia an equal say with the United States—that hope went unfulfilled. As Georgetown professor and former U.S. government official Angela Stent has pointed out: “When countries form partnerships forged out of exigencies such as the 9/11 attacks, the shelf life for these alliances is usually short because they have a specific and limited focus.” The U.S.-Soviet anti-Nazi alliance itself, she wrote, “began to fray as the victors disagreed about what would happen after Germany surrendered, and the Cold War began.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, Putin was mystified by the actions of his U.S. counterparts. In the absence of countervailing information, Putin initially saw American failure to respond to his warnings about the common threat of terrorism as a sign of dangerous incompetence. In a series of speeches just after September 11, Putin said he “was astonished” at the Clinton administration’s lack of reaction to his warnings of a terrorist plot brewing in Afghanistan. “I feel that I personally am to blame for what happened," he lamented. “Yes, I spoke a great deal about that threat. ... Apparently, I didn’t say enough. I didn’t find the words that could rouse people [in the U.S.] to the required system of defense.”

The 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq convinced Putin that the United States was up to no good and looking for pretexts to intervene against hostile regimes to enhance its geopolitical position. Putin and his intelligence officials knew that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was bluffing about his possession of chemical and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After the invasion of Iraq, and the U.S. failure to find any WMD, a comment attributed to Putin was passed around European diplomatic circles: “Pity about the WMD. I would have found some.” In other words, the U.S. intelligence services and government were beyond incompetent—if you’re going to use a pretext, do your homework; make sure it's a good one.

The opinion Putin and his security team seem to have formed over this period—that the United States was not just incompetent but dangerous, and intent on inflicting harm on Russia—was strikingly at odds with the conclusion in the United States that the collapse of Soviet communism meant the disappearance of the military threat from Moscow. As in the 1980s, U.S. officials had a hard time believing that Russia could genuinely see the United States as a threat. As a result, Washington made decisions that were consistently misinterpreted in Moscow—including a second major NATO enlargement in 2004.

The color revolutions in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004 further darkened Putin’s view of U.S. activities. For Moscow, Georgia was a tiny failed state, but Ukraine was a smaller version of Russia. In Putin’s view the Orange Revolution demonstrations in Ukraine in 2004, and their scale, could only have been orchestrated from the outside. This was especially the case when the color revolutions became conceptually tied to the Bush administration’s “Freedom Agenda” and its efforts to support the development of civil society and the conduct of free elections in Afghanistan and Iraq—two countries that the United States had invaded and occupied.

The color revolutions, Putin argued in his March 2014 speech, were not spontaneous. The West inflicted them on a whole array of countries and people. The West, Putin argued, tried to impose a set of “standards, which were in no way suitable for either the way of life, or the traditions, or the cultures of these peoples. As a result, instead of democracy and freedom—there was chaos and the outbreak of violence, a series of revolutions. The ‘Arab Spring’ was replaced by the ‘Arab Winter.’”

Russia's 2008 war with Georgia marked the end of Putin’s relationship with George W. Bush and his administration. The Obama administration came into office shortly afterward, intent on a “reset” that seemed to address Putin’s main stated desire for Russia to be approached by the United States with pragmatism on issues of mutual interest and importance. But once again, Putin and the Kremlin took their policy cues from U.S. actions rather than words.

U.S. offers of modernization partnerships to boost bilateral trade and help secure Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization were combined with bilateral presidential commissions for human rights and civil-society development. The repeal of Cold War-era restrictions on U.S. trade with Russia was accompanied by the introduction of a new raft of sanctions in the form of the Sergei Magnitsky Act, which targeted a list of Russian officials who had been complicit in the death of a crusading Russian lawyer. Disagreements with the United States and NATO over interventions in the civil wars that erupted in Libya and then Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings marred U.S. and Russian cooperation on negotiating with Iran over the future of its nuclear program. Putin was especially angered by the violent death of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi at the hands of rebels who found him hiding in a drainage pipe during an attempt to flee Tripoli following NATO’s intervention in Libya. In Putin’s interpretation, the 2011-2012 Russian political protests were just part of this one long sequence of events, with the hand of the West barely concealed.

On September 11, 2013, on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Putin returned to a public format that he had not used since 1999. He again wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, directed at the American public and calling for U.S. caution as it contemplated a military strike on Syria. The tone was anything but conciliatory. The prose was bold, not cautious. Putin observed: “It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’”

With this op-ed, Putin effectively declared that his American education was complete.

By 2013, as the crisis in Ukraine began to unfold, Putin’s view of America had become dark indeed. As he concluded in his March 2014 speech : “Russia strived to engage in dialogue with our colleagues in the West. We constantly propose cooperation on every critical question, want to strengthen the level of trust, want our relations to be equal, open, and honest. But we have not seen reciprocal steps.” Limited by a lack of direct contacts with the United States, and driven by his perception of the threat it posed, Putin believed that he had been rebuffed or deceived at every turn by the West.

This post has been adapted from a new, expanded edition of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin .

Putin’s plagiarism, fake Ukrainian degrees and other tales of world leaders accused of academic fraud

Visiting Professor, George Mason University

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A recent college admissions scandal in the United States , which revealed that wealthy parents had bribed officials at elite universities, exposed the price some people are willing to pay to say, “ I went to an Ivy League school .”

In a country where the myth of academic meritocracy persists despite plenty of evidence to the contrary , many people were shocked to learn that the education system was rife with illegal and unethical conduct.

But academic fraud is nothing new – and it wasn’t invented in the United States. In certain countries, my research on academic corruption attests , some public officials have built their entire political careers on the false pretense of scholastic achievement.

Lying leaders

You’d think that former German Minister of Defense Baron Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg already had a long enough name.

But in 2006, he decided to add the title of “Dr.” to it, completing his doctorate of law at Germany’s University of Beyrouth.

Or so he said.

It turns out that Guttenburg, then widely seen as the successor to Chancelor Angela Merkel, had plagiarized large sections of his Ph.D. dissertation comparing U.S. and European legal systems .

The internet sleuths who outed his fraud in 2011 gave Guttenberg yet another name – the sobriquet “Googleberg.” He was forced to resign, landing an honorary position at the Washington, D.C.-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank .

Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta initially tried a different approach when he was accused of academic plagiarism soon after taking office in 2012: He denied everything .

“The only reproach I have is that I did not list authors at the bottom of each page, but put them in the bibliography at the end,” he said.

Ponta quit his post in 2015 after going on trial for tax evasion and facing a series of other scandals.

But he still defended his academic honor.

“After…stepping down from the political scene, I wish to pursue a new doctorate while adhering to and respecting all of the standards and requirements,” he said bravely, after admitting to having plagiarized more than half of his 2004 dissertation on the International Criminal Court.

Ponta later wrote to the rector of Bucharest University to renounce his degree.

Denial: The strongman’s tactic

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been far less receptive to repeated allegations that he was not the intellectual braintrust behind his 1997 dissertation, “Mineral and Raw Materials Resources and the Development Strategy for the Russian Economy.”

Accusations against Putin first surfaced in 2006, when an investigation by the Brookings Institution alleged he copied about 16 pages of his 200-page Ph.D. dissertation from other sources.

Twelve years later, the Russian strongman found himself defending against accusations that his dissertation had been ghostwritten. According to former Russian legislator Olga Litvinenko, Putin’s dissertation was written by her father, Vladimir Litvinenko, Putin’s academic advisor and the rector of Saint Petersburg Mining University.

Also helpful in “writing” Putin’s dissertation, says Litvinenko: a photocopy machine.

Employing the only cut-and-paste technology available in the late 1990s, she says her father helped Putin cheat by using scissors to snip paragraphs from various sources, glued them together and copied them to create new pages in his dissertation.

Putin has never responded to the allegations .

Models of cheating

Guttenberg’s, Ponta’s and Putin’s reactions to their false doctorate scandals are all completely appropriate, my research finds – if you consider the cultural context in which each occurred.

Leaving office after allegations of academic corruption, as Guttenberg did, is a rational response in his situation.

Germany ranks sixth of 129 countries worldwide in terms of adherence to the law, according to the World Justice Project’s annual “rule of law” index . There, such acts bring professional disgrace.

In an emerging democracy that still struggles with corruption, however, such as Romania , bravado is a reasonable way to handle allegations of academic malfeasance. Among European countries, Romania is among the least likely to hold public officials accountable for abuses of power or to demand transparency from government employees , according to the World Justice Project, which ranks the rule of law worldwide.

And in a well-established autocracy like Russia , frankly, top politicians can afford the luxury of simply ignoring allegations of a falsified resumes. Putin has held top office, as either president or prime minister, since 1999.

His grip on power is so all-encompassing that he is immune to the negative consequences of academic scandal – or pretty much any scandal.

Ukraine’s dissertation factories

The same holds true in Ukraine, another struggling young democracy.

In Ukraine, it is traditional for top politicians to hold doctorates . All of the five presidents that have run Ukraine since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 have had their Ph.D.’s – at least in theory.

But since the country has dozens of private firms that offer ghostwritten dissertations for sale , it has also become a Ukrainian tradition to expose politicians with unearned doctorates .

President Victor Yanukovych’s doctorate and professorship was called into doubt when people noticed that his 2004 application to run for president contained numerous grammatical errors – including the misspelled word “proffesor.”

In 2017, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was also accused of plagiarizing his dissertation.

Both followed Putin’s model: Ignore the scandal and hope it will just go away.

It did. Yanukovych became president on his second try in 2010. Yatsenyuk remains one of Ukraine’s leading politicians.

Don’t ask me about my degree

When asked about how they made their fortune, billionaires often cite Henry Ford’s quip : “I am ready to account for any day in my life, but don’t ask me how I made my first million.”

The car manufacturer’s bon mot hints at the shady – sometimes illicit – origins or great wealth.

For some European and Russian politicians – or even American college graduates – today, the modern equivalent might be, “Don’t ask me how I earned my degree.”

This article was updated to correct several statements related to the circumstances around Guttenburg’s leaving Germany.

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What’s awaiting Russia may be much worse than the chaos of 1990s

If Putin does not change course – and fast – Russia may find itself in an economic catastrophe akin to that of 1918.

Today, Russia appears to be on the verge of an economic collapse without parallel in its post-World War II history. The United States and European Union’s decision to sanction Russia’s central bank on February 28 has essentially severed the spinal cord of the country’s economy. Russia is set to default on its debts, see its oil export relationships rejuggled to its detriment, its currency collapse even further, and it is now possible that most of its residents’ quality of life may fall to Iranian or potentially even Venezuelan standards in the near future.

President Vladimir Putin has long justified his strongman rule through warnings that without his guiding hand, Russia would be destined to fall back into the chaos of the 1990s when Russians experienced a drastic decline in living standards and a major contraction in the economy on the back of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Yet the reality is that his invasion of Ukraine has made possible a collapse worse than anything that Russia experienced in the 1990s.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet economy and the birth of the new Russian economy saw huge amounts of wealth smuggled abroad, the collapse of the political-economic structure on which the Soviet Union depended and its replacement with a class of mostly violent criminals, well-connected former apparatchiks and the occasional idealistic capitalists who would come to be known as “oligarchs”. Russian life expectancies collapsed.

Yet together with Western credits, something coveted by both the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the first Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin, Russia was able to begin building a capitalist market structure. The “shock therapy” applied to achieve this, however, has been widely discredited for further empowering the oligarchic class and leaving average citizens to carry the cost. It was also responsible, at least in part, for the next economic disaster that devastated Russia just seven years later, in 1998.

While Russia’s 1998 default was partially driven by the new government’s inability to effectively collect taxes from the oligarchic class, the country’s integration into global markets also played a significant role in its emergence. Indeed, Russia’s integration into global markets enabled the impact of the 1997 Asian financial and currency crisis to bleed into Russian markets. But the West eventually helped Russia negotiate its way out of the crisis, offering more credits.

This crisis was demonstrative of how quickly Russia has been integrated into the global financial system. One of the first-ever Western mega hedge funds, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), had to be bailed out by a consortia of banks arranged by the US Federal Reserve as a result of its bets on Russia. In its default, the Central Bank of Russia also became the first national bank to default on its domestic debts rather than its external debts, even though it could print roubles. Making Russians bear the cost was seen as preferable to turning Russia into a debtor pariah.

But the 1998 crisis was not the first, or the worst, default Russians experienced in the past century. Moscow had already been in this position in 1918 when the Soviet Union defaulted on the Russian Empire’s debts. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Moscow’s stock markets shuttered, never to reopen, and the communist government repudiated all debts issued by the Tsar. Western market players initially failed to judge the seriousness of the Bolshevik repudiation of capitalism. Russian paper initially continued to trade in London, and New York’s First National Bank, a predecessor of today’s Citibank, actually opened its first Moscow branch seven days after Lenin’s coup. But as the Bolshevik repudiation came to be understood, the Soviet Union would be cut off from US and UK borrowing and financial markets for years to come.

The Soviet Union’s economy would be rebuilt only years later, after the economic collapse induced a civil war, and then only under Stalin’s autarky that saw millions conscripted into labour camps. Although Stalin’s Five-Year Plans were able to industrialise Russia, the human cost was brutal.

Regrettably, it looks as if Putin – who claims to have a PhD in Economics – is ready and willing to plunge Russia not only back into the chaos of the 1990s, but into an even graver situation more akin to 1918.

In response to crushing sanctions, Russia has weaponised its own debts and threatened economic war over gas, and potentially other commodities. Putin has the ability to cause significant global economic havoc, but he lacks an arsenal anywhere near comparable to the sovereign debt sanctions.

Putin is likely to fight back via an embrace of gold, cryptocurrencies and sanctions-busting. He was proactive in helping Caracas with such efforts, but they have largely been laughable – the Venezuelan-Russian “el Petro” cryptocurrency never went anywhere, and Venezuela’s oil exports remain far below historic levels. Russia is also running out of options to facilitate such actions. Switzerland, whose neutrality-induced sanctions loopholes helped facilitate such trade for other countries in the past, for example, has joined the EU’s sanctions regime against Russia.

For investors with direct exposure to Russia, losses will be deep and not recoverable for the foreseeable future. There remain creditor groups in France, Russia’s largest creditor at the time of its 1918 default, that today still argue they are owed money as a result. Investors and creditors need to be preparing for such a situation again.

Although the fact that countries such as Switzerland and Singapore have joined the latest actions demonstrate how broad outrage at Putin’s unilateral war of aggression is, there remains the potential that some third parties can mitigate the extent of the economic disaster Russia is facing. China is the only partner with the ability to truly bail out Moscow, but so far all indications are that it sees Russia’s actions as more of a threat to its attempts to undermine US dollar hegemony than an opportunity.

India, which refused to condemn Russia’s invasion at the United Nations General Assembly, is also reportedly working on a rupee workaround for sanctions. It has facilitated the evasion of Russian sanctions before, with Rosneft’s purchase of Essar Oil (since renamed Nayara), but any such action in the present environment would be a far higher risk. Washington may well threaten secondary sanctions.

Yet even if India’s Modi does engage in a full sanctions-busting regime, it will not be anywhere near a sufficient panacea to save the Russian economy. China is likely to take record gains through agreements to purchase Russian gas at even cheaper prices than before, but major aid will likely be limited. Such aid would make Russia subservient to Beijing anyway, hardly the kind of new multipolar order Putin hoped the war would usher in.

Putin knew this was the risk he faced in going for an all-out war in Ukraine – President Joe Biden had signalled from the first days of his presidency that restricting Russia’s access to global financial markets and restricting its economy would form the core of the US’s deterrence strategy. Putin may still have held out hope that he could divide the US and Europe on their sanctions agenda, and likely did not expect that Brussels and Berlin would be so willing to go for the jugular – few did.

However, when Putin acted with wanton disregard both for the civilian population of Ukraine and began to shell its largest cities, such a sanctions response was warranted. Vladimir Putin bears sole responsibility for destroying the Russian people’s economic livelihood.

Russia now faces a choice between another 1918, 1991 or 1998-style economic crisis. Unless Putin withdraws from Ukraine or the Russian people can otherwise force change in the Kremlin’s strategy, a 1918-style collapse is the base scenario, and the 1990s options are optimistic.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Putin’s Ph.D.: Can a Plagiarism Probe Upend Russian Politics?

Russia's President Vladimir Putin, right, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu attend a meeting of senior military officials in Moscow on Feb. 27, 2013

It’s an open secret in Russia today that many politicians and businessmen pad their resumes with fake diplomas, either plagiarizing their dissertations or paying someone to do it for roughly the cost of a midsize sedan. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no real effort has been made to stop this practice, in part because so many of the country’s elite — all the way up to President Vladimir Putin — might have their graduate work scrutinized. But on Feb. 6, Putin’s political underling Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev broke the taboo. At a meeting with government officials and academics, he announced a campaign to ferret out fake degrees at every level of society. The number of “phony” diplomas had “burst through all possible limits,” Medvedev said. “This will be a sort of purge.” So how far is he willing to go?

Last September, when Medvedev first brought up the issue on his video blog, he aimed low. In time for the start of the school year, he urged Russian high school and college students not to copy their work from the Internet, saying plagiarism is “a road to nowhere.” A week later, the Russian news website Slon, as well as numerous bloggers, dared him to preach further up the hierarchy. Slon offered a list of four names to start with: Sergei Shoigu, the Minister of Defense, Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, Vladimir Medinsky, the Minister of Culture, and at the top, President Putin. All of them, Slon pointed out, have faced accusations of plagiarism that have never been investigated. All four have either denied the claims or, in Putin’s case, declined to comment.

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The man in charge of Medvedev’s purge is Igor Fedyukin, a rookie official with a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and just eight months’ experience as the Deputy Minister of Education and Science. Fedyukin was part of a group of academics who in January exposed the extent of Russia’s plagiarism crisis by reviewing 25 dissertations chosen at random from the prestigious history department of Moscow Pedagogical State University. All but one were at least 50% plagiarized, with some as much as 90% copied from other sources. “That created the impression in the academic sphere that this phenomenon is pretty massive,” Fedyukin told me a few weeks later at his ministry, just up the block from the Kremlin.

When the subject turned to Putin and other high-ranking officials, Fedyukin became jittery. (The government spokesman who attended our interview, at the sound of Putin’s name, glanced up from his smart phone with a look of horror.) Repeatedly asked if Putin’s dissertation might be reviewed amid the purge, Fedyukin, his right leg tapping beneath the table, said, “It’s possible to review any dissertation when there are grounds to do so.” Later he added, “Status has nothing to do with it.”

The grounds for reviewing Putin’s dissertation in economics, which he received in 1996 from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute, stem from a 2006 report by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. That year, two Brookings researchers obtained a copy of Putin’s opus, which journalists had for years been unable to find. In poring over the 218-page work, they found 16 pages copied with minor changes from a Russian translation of an American economics textbook published in 1978. Apart from a reference in the bibliography, there were no signs to indicate that Putin was appropriating entire paragraphs without quotation marks. Six diagrams in Putin’s dissertation were also nearly identical to work in the American textbook and appeared without citation.

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The Brookings report caused a stir in the Russian press that spring, but not exactly a sensation. State TV networks did not cover the story, even though Russian bloggers were going berserk and a respected independent weekly, Kommersant Vlast , published a cover story, which extensively quoted Clifford Gaddy, one of the Brookings researchers. It also quoted the head of Putin’s alma mater, Vladimir Litvinenko, who said he had “no doubts” Putin wrote the work himself. Since the scandal broke, Putin has repeatedly declined to comment, as did his spokesman when I reached him last week. “The approach has been to simply ignore it,” Gaddy says by phone from Washington. “It’s the elephant in the room. Everybody knows about it, but nobody wants to bring it up.”

Now that Medvedev is turning the issue into a national crusade, it may become a lot harder to ignore. In the past few months, several lawmakers have faced plagiarism scandals, which have become a favorite way for political rivals to attack one another. On Feb. 18, the liberal lawmaker Ilya Ponomaryov demanded that the leader of a nationalist party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, be stripped of his parliamentary immunity for allegedly buying a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1998. Zhirinovsky denies the claim.

The Russian scientific community, meanwhile, has long been calling for a crackdown. Its reputation abroad has been devastated by the diploma mills, which have pushed Russian universities lower in the global rankings. Even the math and physics brain trusts that developed Soviet space and nuclear programs no longer carry much weight in the West, while the most prestigious school in Russia, Moscow State University, with 11 Nobel laureates among its alumni, places well below the University of Iowa and UC Santa Barbara in the Times Higher Education rankings.

( PHOTOS: Protesters Rally in Opposition to Vladimir Putin’s Rule )

Konstantin Sonin, a professor of economics who blogs about plagiarism, says the roots of the crisis go back to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when the best scholars in Russia were forced out of universities and Marxist-Leninist dogma came to dominate every discipline in the humanities. Cut off from their international peers, Russian academics suffered “a return to the Middle Ages,” says Sonin. After four generations of isolation, many of the scholars who emerged from behind the Iron Curtain could offer little more than “indecipherable blather,” Sonin says. At the same time, the arrival of capitalism turned doctoral degrees into a status symbol, like a Lamborghini or a Rolex. “So our academics learned to do one thing well,” Sonin says. “They churn out these dissertations.”

Not everyone is convinced that Medvedev’s crusade will address the problem. Some experts feel his “purge” could be a way of hitting back at the conservatives surrounding Putin, who have mounted a campaign against Medvedev. On Feb. 19, a Kremlin-connected communications firm, Minchenko Consulting, published a report claiming that Putin had begun to seek a successor for Medvedev, setting off a scramble for the post of Prime Minister.

The report came after numerous attacks against Medvedev in state-run media, which have accused his government of mismanagement. The Skolkovo technology hub outside Moscow, Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley and Medvedev’s pet project, has been wracked by allegations of corruption. Kirill Petrov, who co-authored the Minchenko report, says the plagiarism issue “could be some small tactical move to injure one group in this battle.” The most likely political target from the Slon list is Shoigu, the recently appointed Defense Minister, who is a leading contender to replace Medvedev.

Despite the Brookings report and Medvedev’s political troubles, the plagiarism purge is unlikely to implicate Putin himself. “The entire campaign would become null and void,” says Sonin, the economics professor. “The Ministry of Education will immediately sweep it under the rug.” In the West, plagiarism scandals have ended political careers, most recently in Germany, where Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned in 2011 after his alma mater found flaws in his doctoral thesis and revoked his Ph.D. But Putin’s reputation as a leader doesn’t rely on his bookishness; a thorough review of his dissertation would hardly make a dent in his ratings. “For the Russian people, this is not even a tertiary issue. It is way down on the list,” says Petrov. “Nobody really cares outside of academic circles.” Those circles will likely be the only ones affected. It may be more ambitious than chiding freshmen for copying their homework, but Medvedev’s purge will hardly matter for Russia’s most powerful cheats.

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How Vladimir Putin Miscalculated the Economic Cost of Invading Ukraine

By John Cassidy

When Vladimir Putin was a schoolboy, one of his biographers tells us, he spent a lot of time reading the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, all of whom regarded economics as the driving force of history, and political forces as secondary. Evidently, the future Russian leader took these lessons to heart. In ordering an invasion of Ukraine, he apparently assumed that the countries of Western Europe were so dependent on Russian energy imports and so economically beholden to the Kremlin that their governments wouldn’t introduce sanctions that would do serious harm to the Russian economy. In any case, over the past half a decade or so, Russia had built up more than six hundred billion dollars in foreign-exchange reserves to weather any foreign pressure.

If Putin was indeed calculating along these lines, he was gravely mistaken. On Saturday, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announced that the E.U.—in coöperation with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada—was taking steps to “cripple Putin’s ability to finance his war machine.” The transatlantic allies moved to bar “selected Russian banks” from the global SWIFT messaging system, which financial institutions use to facilitate cross-border transfers of money. And, in a more surprising step, they also announced that they would impose “restrictive measures” on the Central Bank of Russia, with the explicit aim of preventing it from using its large stock of foreign-exchange reserves to lessen the impact of the sanctions. “This will show that Russia’s supposed sanctions-proofing of its economy is a myth,” a senior official in the Biden Administration said, in a teleconference with reporters. “The six-hundred-billion-plus war chest of Russia’s foreign reserves is only powerful if Putin can use it.” The measures the allies announced were designed to block Moscow’s Central Bank from buying rubles from Western financial institutions, a step that could offset the impact of sanctions and stabilize the Russian currency. “The ruble will fall even further, inflation will spike, and the Central Bank will be left defenseless,” the U.S. official predicted.

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In wartime, it is wise to treat statements from all sides skeptically. In this case, we don’t need to rely on the assessments of anonymous U.S. officials. When the international markets opened on Monday morning, the value of Russia’s currency plunged by a third. To stem the decline, the Russian Central Bank more than doubled its key interest rate, from 9.5 per cent to twenty per cent, and ordered Russian exporting companies to sell foreign currencies and buy rubles. These desperate moves helped trim losses, but at the close of trading in Moscow the ruble was still down by almost twenty per cent—a huge decline for any currency. In a briefing with reporters, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, conceded that “economic reality had significantly changed.”

In Washington, meanwhile, the Biden Administration intensified its economic offensive by imposing a freeze on the Central Bank of Russia’s assets held in U.S. financial institutions. The Treasury Department also prohibited any U.S. person, including American banks and businesses, from engaging in transactions with Russia’s Central Bank, finance ministry, or sovereign wealth fund. “This action effectively immobilizes any assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation held in the United States or by U.S. persons, wherever located,” the Treasury said, in a statement announcing the new policy. In London, the U.K government has introduced a policy along the same lines.

It wasn’t immediately clear just how much money the Central Bank of Russia still holds in New York, London, and other Western financial centers—and which it will no longer be able to access. (According to some estimates, about two-thirds of Russian reserves are now blocked off in countries that have introduced sanctions.) Even so, experts on economic sanctions described the targeting as unprecedented and highly effective. “The G-7 sanctions against the Russian Central Bank, not the SWIFT sanctions, are the real hammer, and they’re showing effect,” Jonathan Hackenbroich, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said. “Russia’s Central Bank might struggle to fight massive inflation and panic even after it doubled interest rates and introduced capital controls.”

The fall in the value of the ruble will quickly force Russian consumers to pay more for everything, from French wine to iPhones. And the sanctions on the Central Bank could reverberate throughout Russia’s financial system, effectively cutting off large parts of it from the outside world and raising the possibility of bank runs. “Financial systems need one thing to function, they need trust,” Stefan Gerlach, a former deputy governor of Ireland’s central bank, told the Wall Street Journal . “If you suddenly realize that they can’t get help from their government if needed, it becomes incredibly riskier to deal with them. You just pulled the carpet from under the financial system.”

That such unprecedented steps have been taken in just five days is remarkable. This time last week, it seemed like Putin had sound reasons for being skeptical about the prospect of truly damaging sanctions. Russia supplies the European Union with about forty per cent of its natural-gas imports and about a quarter of its crude oil imports; Germany and Italy are among the most dependent on Russian natural resources for fuel and power. On February 18th, Mario Draghi, Italy’s Prime Minister and the former head of the European Central Bank, said that if the European Union were to impose sanctions on Moscow they should be “concentrated on narrow sectors.” As recently as last Thursday, Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, expressed opposition to barring Russian banks from the SWIFT system. At that point, the idea of sanctioning the Russian Central Bank had been barely mentioned.

Less than a week later, Russia is an economic pariah. On Monday, the Japanese government announced it will join the sanctions on the Central Bank, saying that “Japan stands with Ukraine.” On Friday, UEFA , the governing body of European soccer, voted to move the 2022 Champions League final from St. Petersburg, where it was scheduled to take place, to Paris. On Sunday, BP, the British energy company, announced that it would divest a twenty-per-cent stake it holds in Rosneft, the state-owned Russian energy giant, even though it will entail a big financial loss. Then, on Monday, another energy company, Shell, announced that it, too, was cutting ties with Russia: the London-based firm said it would exit oil-and-gas joint ventures with Gazprom, the Russian energy conglomerate, and also end its involvement with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. When even Europe’s oil barons abandon Russia and its vast energy reserves, it is evident that the geopolitical—and geoeconomic—map has been redrawn.

Details of how the G-7 countries decided to target Russia’s Central Bank have yet to be revealed. Richard Nephew, a sanctions expert at Columbia University who worked in the Obama Administration on economic measures directed at Iran, told me that he and his colleagues had long been monitoring the Russian buildup of foreign-exchange reserves. “The question was, if it comes to sanctioning Russia in a future crisis, is there a way to do it effectively?” Nephew said. “Or does the country have enough liquid assets to ride things out?” In targeting the Central Bank and freezing Russia’s foreign assets, the Western allies found a way to make life difficult for Putin and his regime despite their large war chest. “It’s a pretty tough situation for them,” Nephew said. “There’s not really a way around these restrictions.”

Where do things go from here? In the coming days, Putin could conceivably move to cut off oil-and-gas exports to Western Europe. Even though the loss of revenues would exert further pressure on the Russian economy, such a move could cause greater pain in European countries, in the form of energy shortages and sharply higher prices. Hackenbroich told me that the government in Berlin, in agreeing to impose sanctions on Russia’s Central Bank, will most likely have planned for this possibility. During the past month or so, he noted, German economic officials had lined up alternative sources of natural gas, from countries such as Qatar and Azerbaijan. “It looks like the German government is ready to accept the possibility of a Russian energy cutoff and accept the consequences,” he said. “I don’t think that we are going there immediately, but so much that seemed impossible a week ago has already happened, and who knows where we will be at the end of this week.”

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The Ideology of Putinism: Is It Sustainable?

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Table of Contents

Report by Maria Snegovaya , Michael Kimmage , and Jade McGlynn

Published September 27, 2023

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Does Vladimir Putin have an ideology? The authors of this report argue that he does. Borrowing heavily from czarist and Soviet themes, as well as other intellectual sources like the twentieth-century radical right, Putinism elevates an idea of imperial-nationalist statism amplified by Russian greatness, exceptionalism, and historical struggle against the West. Statism, a key pillar of Putin’s ideology, includes deference to a strong, stable state, allowing Russians to be Russians; such statism is based on exceptionalism and traditional values. Another pillar is anti-Westernism, which, when combined with Russian exceptionalism, promotes a messianic notion of Russia as a great power and civilization state, guarding a Russo-centric polyculturalism, traditional family and gender roles, and guarding against materialism and individualism. That this ideology is not spelled out in philosophical texts but most often absorbed through signs, symbols, and popular culture makes it both malleable and easily digestible for less-educated people. 

Will this ideology help keep Putin in power? This report suggests that it could. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and its radical break with the West have prompted the regime to mount even more sustainable ideology-building effort. It is hard to see where challenges to the Putinist ideology could emerge in Russia. Societal resistance to Kremlin propaganda has remained marginal, even during more liberal periods. An alternative pro-Western identity able to challenge the Kremlin’s propaganda has failed to emerge and is less likely following the massive exodus of Russian liberals as a result of the Ukraine war. The flexibility of Putin’s ideology machine and the simplicity of the narratives it spreads suggest that Putinism is not going anywhere soon and may become further entrenched in the Russian social sphere. 

This report is made possible by the generous support of Carnegie Corporation of New York.

This report is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

© 2024 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.

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Jade McGlynn

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Few across 17 advanced economies have confidence in Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s global image has been consistently low for years in many countries, and a Pew Research Center survey conducted this spring in 17 advanced economies shows that negative views of him are at or near historic highs in most places. Today, a median of 22% say they have confidence in Putin to do the right thing in world affairs, compared with a median of 74% who say they have no such confidence.

Singapore (55%), Greece (55%), Italy (36%) and Taiwan (34%) stand out as the only places surveyed where roughly a third or more say they have confidence in the Russian president. Confidence is lowest in Sweden (14%) and the United States (16%). In both of these countries, as well as in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, New Zealand and Belgium, at least 45% or more say they have no confidence at all in him.

While confidence in Putin has been quite low in many countries for much of the last decade –particularly following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 – it has dropped even further in the past year in Australia (down 7 percentage points).

This analysis focuses on public attitudes toward Russian President Vladimir Putin in 17 advanced economies in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific. For non-U.S. data, the report draws on nationally representative Pew Research Center surveys of 16,254 adults from March 12 to May 26, 2021, in 16 advanced economies. All surveys were conducted over the phone with adults in Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

In the United States, we surveyed 2,596 U.S. adults from Feb. 1 to 7, 2021. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.

This study was conducted in places where nationally representative telephone or web surveys are feasible. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, face-to-face interviewing is not currently possible in many parts of the world.

Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses. See our methodology database for more information about the survey methods outside the U.S. For respondents in the U.S., read more about the ATP’s methodology . Information on populist party categorization can be found here .

Across many places surveyed, younger people have more confidence in Putin than their older counterparts. The largest difference by far is in Japan (44 percentage points between the youngest and oldest respondents) though there are differences of at least 20 points in the UK, Spain, Australia, France and New Zealand. Though the difference is smaller in the U.S., Americans under 30 are also more likely to have confidence in Putin, with roughly a fifth of 18- to 29-year-olds saying so, compared with only 9% of those 65 and older.

These age-related patterns have often been prevalent in views of Putin. And when it comes to opinion about Russia more generally, younger adults also tend to have more favorable views of the country than older people.

In some countries, men are more confident in Putin than women. For example, in Germany, 36% of men say they have confidence in Putin to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 19% of women agree. Double-digit differences are also present in France, Italy and Belgium, while gender differences are smaller in Canada, Spain and New Zealand. Those with less education also have more confidence in Putin than those with more education in about half the countries surveyed. In Italy, for example, roughly a quarter of those with a postsecondary degree or higher have confidence in Putin, while nearly four-in-ten of those with no postsecondary degree have confidence in him. Similar differences persist across eight other countries polled.

In Europe, supporters of populist parties , both right- and left-wing, are more likely to have confidence in Putin than those who don’t support such parties. For example, in Italy, those with a favorable view of right-wing Lega are more than twice as likely to have confidence in Putin as those with an unfavorable view (62% vs. 26%, respectively). The same goes for supporters of Forza Italia – roughly half have confidence in Putin to do the right thing, while roughly a quarter of nonsupporters say the same.

In the U.S., Republicans and Republican-leaning independents tend to have more confidence in Putin than Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (20% vs. 12%, respectively). Still, overwhelming majorities in both parties lack confidence in Putin.

More broadly, in some countries people who identify themselves as ideologically right-leaning are more likely than those on the left to have confidence in Putin. The largest such difference is, again, in Italy, where a majority (56%) of those on the right say they have confidence in Putin while just 19% on the left agree. In Sweden, Greece, France, Canada, Germany, Australia, the UK and the U.S., there are also double-digit differences between the right and left.

When it comes to comparisons with other global leaders, confidence in Putin is substantially below that in German Chancellor Angela Merkel, U.S. President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron. Yet his ratings are quite comparable – and slightly better in some of the European countries surveyed – to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s.

Confidence in Xi and confidence in Putin are closely related: Places with higher levels of confidence in one tend to also have higher levels of confidence in the other. The opposite is true of Merkel – places with higher levels of confidence in Merkel tend to have less confidence in Putin.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses. See our methodology database for more information about the survey methods outside the U.S. For respondents in the U.S., read more about the ATP’s methodology . Information on populist party categorization can be found here .

• Vladimir Putin
• World Leaders

Laura Silver is an associate director focusing on global attitudes at Pew Research Center .

J.J. Moncus is a former research assistant focusing on global attitudes research at Pew Research Center .

Growing Partisan Divisions Over NATO and Ukraine

Large shares see russia and putin in negative light, while views of zelenskyy more mixed, americans see both russia and china in a negative light – but more call russia an enemy, americans confident in zelenskyy, but have limited familiarity with some other world leaders, among european right-wing populists, favorable views of russia and putin are down sharply, most popular.

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