Western environmentalists might value their independence, but their organizations are largely donor driven, and if he wanted to, Putin could have a lot to donate.
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.
Vladimir Putin is doubtlessly trying to drive a wedge into the Western alliance. When it comes to the Russian minorities in the Baltics, Putin will surely know that his chances there are slim to none. They are quite comfortable in those countries. But at the moment, there are at least three EU member-states where it is questionable whether they still belong among Western democracies: Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
There were a lot of offers before 'Vicky Donor,' but I wanted to wait for the right opportunity.
I think that Putin's strategy has been throwing a lot of money, fairly haphazardly, at a lot of projects aimed at disrupting Western relations and undermining trust in democracies. They may have gotten farther in the States than anywhere else.
I am happy to donate funds to various organizations that help people in need.
I know a lot of great success stories of those who were excellent problem-solvers because they had found a need that they could fill well. As a result, they built organizations around them and those organizations had belief systems that could be described as a form of leadership.
You could call it that [urban Western], I guess, you could certainly call it that. A lot of these types of films are, really, if you get down to the core most suspense thrillers in this genre, the Western is sort of the birth of it all.
The one thing I wanted was independence. And I realised to have that independence, you needed financial independence.
The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife, or struggles for independence.
If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.
In light of Trump's irresponsible behavior, even Putin may decide that it was time to recalculate Russian interests. This could happen quite quickly if Trump goes ahead and wrecks one of the few potentially stabilizing developments in the Middle East during the last several years. Similarly, if Israel joins NATO, this might be more than Putin is willing to swallow.
The refugee problem is definitely a disaster for the entire region. Putin - the refugee problem in Chechnya was largely contained inside of Russia itself although there were tens of thousands of Chechens who sought refuge across Europe. Putin wasn't swayed by that issue when it came to Chechnya.
The only successor to President Putin is President Putin himself and we could of course dream about President Putin stepping down voluntarily and picking out successor which would be probably as bad as him.
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.
I have always admired organizations that help children grow and learn, and organizations that protect and shelter children when no one else does. And I wanted to draw attention to these organizations and recognize the contributions they were making to the country and to our children in particular.