Quotes about Vladimir Putin

40 Sourced Quotes

While I suppose this means I'll spend this Easter in Sedona rather than Siberia, I couldn't be more proud of being sanctioned by Vladimir Putin for standing up for freedom and human rights for the Russian people and against Putin's deadly aggression in Ukraine. I will never stop my efforts to support democracy, free speech, and the rule of law in Russia,

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

Anna Politkovskaya

Beneath the anger of Trump supporters lies something deeper – shame, the shame of no longer being able to get ahead, the bitterness that their children will be worse off than they are, the resentment of being told they are backward, and fearing that they might be. Like Russian nationalists who put their faith in Putin, and Chinese patriots who back Xi, Americans who support Trump are responding to their private or collective humiliation.

Some of the people of the year include Gandhi, Stalin, Churchill, Nixon, Putin, Obama, and Hitler. So Trump is definitely fitting in there — you decide where he fits in for yourself.

Rather than even considering membership in the European Union, Russia would view it as a sort of surrender, Putin is forging his Eurasian Economic Union instead. It so far consists of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia. The European Union is somewhat decentralized. Germany and France have a lot of influence in decision-making, but no single nation dictates to everyone else. The Eurasian Economic Union, though, has Moscow in the cockpit with everyone else as junior partners or, as Kennan would have put it, vassals.

It's possible that Russia might take even Kiev if Putin thinks the response to seizing Crimea is sufficiently supine. I doubt it, personally, but I don't know that he won't. No one can know that. He wouldn't get much out of it, aside from a violent migraine, that he isn't already getting by invading Crimea. Ukraine can't fend off a full-blown Russian invasion, but it can make an invasion bloody and expensive. And what would Russians back home think? Ukrainians aren't their enemies. There is little hatred between these two closely-related peoples.

Public space frightens the Putin regime, which has worked hard, and effectively, to destroy it.

At the time we didn't make any satisfactory progress, but we at the Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry and the Prime Minister's Office are in constant dialogue with Russia. The President and President Putin are also in regular phone contact. We're in the kind of situation where things can't continue or worsen. If we don't go forward by negotiating then it will be time for harsher measures. There are human traffickers and people smugglers, organised activities. The President even spoke of escorts and queues. Everything suggests that it is illegal organised immigration and it should be stopped.

Like the Soviet regime before it, the Putin government spreads fear by destroying the illusion that one can protect oneself... People who work at two Moscow restaurants have warned me, separately, about the precise locations of listening devices at the eateries. The warnings came unbidden. The food at both places was, incidentally, not only very good but also apparently safe. That, along with the springtime sun, helps maintain the bizarre sense of normalcy that has a way of going hand in hand with the mortal danger that has become a fact of everyday life.

This is the president that looked in the soul of Putin [see George W. Bush's quote above], and I could have told him, he was a KGB agent. By definition he doesn't have a soul. I mean, this is a waste of time, right? This is nonsense, but this is the world we're living in right now.

Hillary Clinton