When Boris Yeltsin suddenly resigned as Russia’s first post-Communist president on New Year’s Eve, 1999, his country seemed to be spiralling downhill into economic and political disintegration. Few gave his largely unknown successor as acting president much chance of reversing the economic implosion or remaining in office for long.
The then-Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin’s media operation had already begun to portray the ex-KGB operative in stark contrast to the moribund Yeltsin as an action-man. That same year the second Chechen war on the country’s southern border raged. Twenty-five years later, Vladimir Putin is still in the Kremlin, but Russia is again in the grip of war on its post-Soviet periphery after last week’s downing of an airliner over Chechen airspace.
