I have not got a clue and there is no point telling me or you that history will tell as he is writing it at the moment.

He like most of us will be long departed from this world before the truth is revealed.

Who is Vladimir Putin? Why was he chosen as Yeltsin’s heir?

Mr. Putin is a career KGB officer who spent 16 years of his life in the KGB. … He graduated from then Leningrad State University from the law department, that like many things didn’t prepare laws–since law didn’t exist at the time of the Soviet Union–but prepared governmental bureaucrats.

Russia is a very infantile society. it is accustomed to having a state that was responsible for everything — medical care, schools, even the way they made kids.

The State was responsible for everything; the State got involved in everything. So he was well prepared for this job.

I don’t think that’s a good idea to judge Putin just by his KGB past.

He has this image of this big father, who is ready to take care and that’s definitely had and still has a great impact on Russians.

In Russia Putin is viewed as a dynamic, strong, honest, civil, modest and adequate leader, which is everything that Yeltsin wasn’t.

The war in Chechnya created Putin. It proved that there was someone on stage who can be decisive.

He appeals to nostalgia for the past and being from the KGB, means he supports a strong state.

He is against corruption and NATO which he is inadvertently reinventing.

What does Vladimir Putin want in Ukraine?

The fate of eastern Ukraine in the weeks ahead will help to reveal how far Mr Putin is prepared to go in his burning ambition to restore Russia’s greatness.

What exactly are Mr Putin’s long-term goals?

Either this is part of a long-term strategy to partition Ukraine. Or it’s a series of tactical moves designed to leverage influence over Kiev.

We are now embroiled in a full-scale standoff with Russia not seen since the Cold war.

NATO has been expanded to Russia’s borders and the long feared encirclement of Russia by Russians has already occurred.

No matter what Russia does next, we need not concern ourselves with Putin contributing to NATO new headquarters or the sounds coming out of Westminster or Capitol Hill.

The West will declare itself jolly cross while NATO opens its headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, at a construction costs of 750 million Euros  with an overruns that could reach 245 million euros.  

Putin’s theory on Crimea’s place in Russian history makes some sense: The peninsula had been part of Russia from 1783 to 1954, and even under Ukrainian rule housed Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It’s not always a pretty history, though. For example, the entire Crimean Tatar population was deported from Crimea during World War II, and a huge number are believed to have died.

Correcting the historical mistake from 1954 that saw Crimea end up as part of Ukraine. It has always been a bugbear for Putin “Millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones,” he said, “overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.”

Putin will ask if the West has a right to preach about not invading foreign countries when it has sent in the tanks to Iraq and Afghanistan. The West’s fantasy of acting as world policeman — striking out dictators and returning countries to democracy — is finished.

Ultimately, Putin’s appeal to history makes sense in two strands of his political thought: the memories of a Russian empire that drive his plans for a Eurasian Union and his argument that the West’s international dominance is decadent and undeserved. Under the cover of the UN’s right to national self-determination, he is endeavoring to reassemble the Russian empire.

Perhaps if the Ukraine had not busied themselves dividing the spoils, instead of building a state they would not be in the position they now find themselves. History is often complicated and incoherent:

Europe’s ever changing borders don’t necessarily justify yet another change.

We the great unwashed will just have to wait and see.

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