A Quote by Svetlana Alexievich
Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.
Related Quotes
Putin did not head the KGB, never has. Putin was a mid-level nobody there. Putin was one of those guys in the KGB who was a climber. He was forever hoping, climbing that ladder, trying to get to the head spot.
Putin is not a mass murderer. But, having said that, he is a product of the KGB, and the KGB was, of course, the secret police force of the Soviet Union.
Frankly, I would never accept an award from Vladimir Putin because then you kind of give some credence and credibility to this butcher, this KGB agent, which is what he is.
Putin is a former KGB agent. He's a thug. He was not elected in a way that most people would consider a credible election.
Putin, I believe, was actually born to be a KGB agent. And I say born because I think that his father was also an agent of the secret police in Russia.
If Putin and those around him had been smart enough to go in a different direction... The country was ready. The conditions were extremely favorable - with oil prices as high as they were, it was possible to do anything. It was possible to solidify democracy. After the Yeltsin years people began to think that democracy is a disaster, that democracy equals misery. Putin got a lucky break - and he used it the KGB way. He turned out to be a wily KGB man, not a wise statesman.
When [Vladimir] Putin, a former lieutenant-colonel in the KGB, became Russia's president on December 31, 1999 - eight years after the failed coup attempt against (then Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev, and eight years after the people had torn down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the hated founder of the KGB, in Moscow - it was admittedly a shock. Nevertheless, I decided to give Putin a chance. He seemed dynamic and capable of learning. But I had to bury my hopes after just a few months. He proved to be an autocrat - and, because the West let him do as he pleased, he became a dictator.
Donald Trump didn't even understand, right, that [Vladimir] Putin was playing him. So, in Putin's mind, I have no doubt that Putin thinks that he's an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation, although Putin would never say that.
Vladimir Putin is a dictator. He's not a leader. Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn't know Russian history and they don't know Vladimir Putin. Hillary Clinton knows exactly who this guy is. John McCain said, I look in his eyes and I see KGB. And Hillary kind of has that same feeling.
We should be I hope finally realizing what Vladimir Putin is. He's an old colonel, KGB, apparatchik, and he dreams of the restoration of the Russian empire.
There is no moral equivalent between that butcher and thug and KGB colonel Vladimir Putin and the United States of America, the country that Ronald Reagan used to call a shining city on a hill.
Putin knows how to run the KGB playbook. I mean, he knows how to work people.
After the fall of Communism, the biggest mistake Boris Yeltzin's regime made was not to disband the KGB altogether. Instead it changed its name to the FSB and, to many observers, morphed into a gangster organisation, eventually headed by master criminal Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin understood, from the Communist era when he was a KGB officer, that the Russian propaganda system of targeting Western media - that in the digital world, you could easily pull the Western media around by a nose ring.
The president(Obama) comparing him to a kid in the back of a classroom, I think, is very indicative of the president's lack of appreciation of who Vladimir Putin is. He's an old KGB colonel that has no illusions about our relationship, does not care about a relationship with the United States, continues to oppress his people, continues to act in an autocratic fashion.
The KGB still killed people, the KGB would not execute its last prisoner until the final days of its existence in 1991, but by the eighties a termination required paperwork and signatures and a post-action review.
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