Putin: from KGB officer to war president

Twenty-five years of power, built on a war in Chechnya and kept with poison, prison and rigged votes. Ukraine is not an exception in Putin’s record. It is the pattern.

Background Last checked 22 October 2026. Sources at the end.

The officer

Vladimir Putin served in the Soviet secret police, the KGB, from 1975, including five years in Dresden in communist East Germany. In 1998 Boris Yeltsin made him head of the KGB’s successor, the FSB. In August 1999 he became prime minister, a little-known official with no political base.

The war that made him

In September 1999 bombs destroyed apartment buildings in Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk; more than 300 people died. The government blamed Chechen terrorists and Putin launched the second war in Chechnya, which made him popular and carried him into the presidency in 2000.

Then came Ryazan. On 22 September 1999 residents found sacks with a detonator in the basement of an apartment block; local police said the contents tested as explosive. The FSB, until weeks earlier Putin’s own service, then announced it had been a “training exercise” with sacks of sugar. Whether the FSB was behind the bombings has never been proven, and investigating it was dangerous: several people who did, among them the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, were later murdered.

The poisoner’s state

  • 2006: Litvinenko dies in London from polonium-210, a radioactive poison. A British public inquiry concluded in 2016 that the operation was “probably approved” by Putin and by FSB director Nikolai Patrushev.
  • 2015: opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is shot dead within sight of the Kremlin.
  • 2018: former intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter are poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury, England. A British woman, Dawn Sturgess, dies after finding the discarded poison. Bellingcat unmasks the two “tourists” the British police charged as officers of Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU.
  • 2020: Putin’s best-known opponent, Alexei Navalny, is poisoned with Novichok. Bellingcat and The Insider, with CNN and Der Spiegel, identify the FSB team that had been following him for years; Navalny then phones one of them, who describes the operation. He survives, returns to Russia in 2021, is jailed, and dies in an Arctic prison camp on 16 February 2024.

The ruler for life

In 2008 Putin swapped places with his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, because the constitution forbade a third term in a row, and came back as president in 2012. In 2020 he changed the constitution so that his previous terms no longer count: he can now stay in power until 2036. In March 2024 he was re-elected with an official 87% of the vote, against candidates the Kremlin had approved, after the real challengers were barred.

The wars

Every few years, Putin’s Russia has gone to war with a neighbour that tried to leave its orbit: Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 (Crimea and the Donbas), and Ukraine again, all-out, in 2022. In between, Russian forces fought in Syria from 2015 to prop up Bashar al-Assad, bombing hospitals and markets in rebel-held cities. In 2007, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, Putin had already told the West he would no longer accept the order that followed the Cold War.

What it means

Putin is not a statesman who was pushed into a corner. He came to power on the back of a war, has kept power by having critics poisoned, shot or jailed, and has rewritten the constitution to stay. Anyone who believes his promises in a peace deal should look at that record first, and at the promises Russia broke in Budapest in 1994 and Minsk in 2015 (see Russia’s excuses for the war).

Sources

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