Putin

Time lehti valitsi Putinin vuoden henkilöksi. Lehden mukaan valinta ei ole mikään kauneuskilpailu (popularity contest). Time valitsee henkilöitä, jotka ovat saaneet merkittäviä asioita aikaan. Oikein tai väärin. Hyvää tai huonoa.

On erinomaista, että Putinin positiiviset vaikutukset Venäjän kehitykseen tunnustetaan myös. Onkin jo riittävästi kuultu sitä toista puolta, nyt on kolikon toisen puolen aika.

Ohessa lainaukset Time lehden erinomaisen hyvin kirjoitetusta artikkelista:

"It is the largest country on earth; it shares a 2,600-mile (4,200 km) border with China; it has a significant and restive Islamic population; it has the world's largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and a lethal nuclear arsenal; it is the world's second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia; and it is an indispensable player in whatever happens in the Middle East. For all these reasons, if Russia fails, all bets are off for the 21st century. And if Russia succeeds as a nation-state in the family of nations, it will owe much of that success to one man, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. "

"When this intense and brooding KGB agent took over as President of Russia in 2000, he found a country on the verge of becoming a failed state. With dauntless persistence, a sharp vision of what Russia should become and a sense that he embodied the spirit of Mother Russia, Putin has put his country back on the map. "

"Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech. He stands, above all, for stability—stability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for a hundred years. "