Top 177 Putin Quotes

Putin is a totally inscrutable guy. He gives nothing away. People interpreted what they wanted to see in him.

Ronald Reagan succeeded in bringing down the Iron Curtain by showing strength and resolutely standing up to the Soviet Union. President Trump needs to be similarly resolute towards Putin.

Vladimir Putin has to create foreign enemies, and he also has to justify… he has to claim… he can’t acknowledge that there’s a legitimate protest against his authoritarian rule, so he’s got to blame it on Hilary Clinton.

Russian strategy seems to center on maintaining Putin’s popularity at home; building a strong military capacity in special forces, nuclear weapons, and advanced submarines; pressuring nearby nations to join various defense and customs pacts dominated by Russia; and pushing back on the U.S. wherever convenient.

My relationship with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is very clear: respect. We met a couple of times; once I received a medal from him. I respect hugely how he brought Russia back from its knees.

Every Russian emperor from Peter the Great to Stalin and Putin knows a leader and his security agencies must never be parted. His safety depends on their slavish devotion.

True, Putin’s Russia does not dream of joining the E.U., but Russia’s stability depends on preserving the European nature of its regime.

It’s almost as if Putin is brilliant, really – he’s outfoxing Obama all the time.

LGBT people are at the heart of President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on democracy.

Many Americans have been looking for an explanation for Mr. Trump’s apparent adoration of Mr. Putin. How can a powerful, wealthy American man hold affection for the tyrannical, corrupt leader of a hostile power?

Putin has this ritual of having the televised meetings with ministers. Cameras will be allowed in to film the first five minutes of a meeting that is conducted entirely for the cameras. We don’t even know whether the meeting then goes on.

Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.

Hard men present hard choices – none more so than Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia.

Technically, Trump and Putin did appear on the same episode of ’60 Minutes.’ In two completely unrelated segments, that were shot in different cities, in different countries, on different continents.

Russia would prefer to rebuild trust rather than allow it to further corrode. That’s why, in July 2007, President Putin, in the spirit of strategic openness, proposed a truly collective effort at missile defense for Europe.

Getting rid of the Magnitsky Act is one of the top, if not the top, priorities of the Putin regime.

In a system created by Putin, it is only possible for Putin to win. I am realistic about who will become the president.

For Mr. Putin, vacillation invites aggression. His world is a brutish, cynical place, where power is worshiped, weakness is despised, and all rivalries are zero-sum.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s traditionalist-nationalist rhetoric, which blames secularism, diversity and internationalism for the weakening of Western democracies, gives voice to the grievances that American hate groups have felt for so long.

There is a view of Russian exceptionalism, that they are a unique civilisation, a view right since Ivan the Terrible that Russia is a special civilisation with a special culture. Putin is pushing that now.

When Presidents Trump, Putin and Erdogan are mentioned in the same breath here in Germany, as they are all too often, this is a false equivalence that cannot be tolerated.

Mr. Putin’s primary goal in the 2016 elections was to delegitimize our institutions and pit Americans against each other.

There aren’t a lot of things that are extraordinary about Putin, but his greed is truly extraordinary.

Putin himself made his original fortune in the early 1990s, when he stole the funds that had been entrusted to him to buy food in Europe to relieve the starvation in Leningrad that occurred during the economic collapse following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Our potential adversaries are watching us, and they have seen what has happened to us… This is why we’re dealing with a very problematical and troublesome Putin, and we’re dealing with Iran in a very terrible agreement we had.

You’d better believe that Putin sees that in Syria, Obama draws a red line and ignores the red line.

Of course for some Putin is a tyrant and dictator. Others consider him Russia’s savior. But I’m in a difficult position. Putin helped my father – and practically saved his life.

Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate.

The Russian government doesn’t like me; Vladimir Putin doesn’t like me.

President-elect Donald Trump has a host of national security challenges to deal with as he assumes office, from the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan to the grinding Syrian civil war to the flexing of Russian muscles under President Vladimir Putin to how to deal with ISIS as the terrorist army retreats in Iraq.

Mr. Putin has to understand that if he does something against us Belarusians, it will seriously damage the relationship between the Russian and Belarusian people.

Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.

The more Mr. Putin extends the fighting in eastern Ukraine, the more the financial markets will ratchet up their own pressure on Russia.

On Putin’s order, Russian security services try to destabilize NATO allies the U.S. has sworn to defend.

Putin believes Russia is back, and he may be right.

I looked at Putin and was terrified from the very beginning. That makes me look very prescient because he actually turned out to be exactly the monster that I thought he was.

Putin really assumed that once Trump – who had such clear admiration for him – was elected, it would be convenient for Trump to change the relationship with Russia profoundly and instantly.

The Intelligence Community Assessment concluded first that President Putin directed and influenced a campaign to erode the faith and confidence of the American people in our presidential election process. Second, that he did so to demean Secretary Clinton, and third, that he sought to advantage Mr. Trump.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin is viewed as a progressive Democrat.

Putin has the ability to advance his interests in many different ways. Sometimes tactical diplomacy can help.

Twitter-lutionaries are good at toppling regimes, but in the Mideast and North Africa, they’re losing out to the Islamists, who’ve built protest movements the old-fashioned way. And in Moscow, the Mink revolutionaries, who are united by Live-Journal but not much else, were easy for Putin to outmaneuver.

Of course, Putin may well have reasons for wanting Trump to be president – not least Trump’s apparent skepticism toward NATO and his lack of opposition to Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine and Syria.

It is not hard to see why Trump might choose Putin as his fantasy friend. Putin is the real-world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.

For the last ten years, I’ve been trying to avoid getting killed by Putin’s regime, and there already exists a trail of dead bodies connected to its desire to see me dead.

In mid-2014, 51 percent of American Republicans viewed Putin very unfavorably. Two years later, 14 percent did. By January, 75 percent of Republicans said Trump had the ‘right approach’ toward Russia.

And most worryingly, it wouldn’t surprise me if Putin ends up starting a major military conflict with the West at some point in the future to save his own skin as head of state in Russia.

I am talking about strategies that were developed, working with the Trump campaign. I really do believe that much of what you saw coming out of Trump’s mouth was a play from Putin’s playbook.

It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

Putin wants to restore the Russian empire. That’s his ambition; he’s stated it many times.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a gross violation of that nation’s sovereignty and an affront to the international community.

While President Putin is busy redrawing the map of Europe, President Obama is busy filling out his brackets.

We’ve been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn’t care about the law.

Vladimir Putin is decisive. He’s committed to victory, and he now has aircraft and surface-to-air missiles and main battle tanks in Syria.

Putin set out to build a mafia state. He didn’t set out to build a totalitarian regime. But he was building his mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime. And so we end up with a mafia state and a totalitarian society.

Rebuilding the military is something Putin will pay attention to.

President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives.