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slug: vladimir-putin name: Vladimir Putin role: President of Russia type: person

Vladimir Putin

Biography

Vladimir Putin (born 1952) has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since 1999, and in George Soros's writing he is the defining antagonist of the open society in the twenty-first century: the ruler who took a country that was, in Soros's words, "on the way to becoming an open society" and rebuilt it as the model of a modern closed one. No other political figure occupies as much space in Soros's public argument across the last two decades — from 2000, the year of Putin's first election, to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and beyond.

Putin came to power from the security services. As Soros recounts in Who Lost Russia? (2000), Boris Yeltsin's entourage, looking for a successor who would protect them from prosecution, "finally found one in the person of Vladimir Putin, the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB)." Made prime minister in the summer of 1999, Putin rode the second Chechen war — launched amid a series of mysterious apartment-building bombings that Soros found himself unable to rule out as a provocation — to the presidency. Yeltsin resigned on New Year's Eve 1999, virtually assuring Putin's election in March 2000.

The system Putin then built is a recurrent subject of Soros's analysis. Its hallmarks, as Soros catalogued them in 2004: a state that "reigns supreme," a parliament under two-thirds control, the "virtual disappearance of independent television," and civil society brought to heel. Its economic form Soros called state capitalism — full state coffers, a 13 percent flat tax, and stability bought at the price of political freedom. Its ideology, as communism's replacement, Soros described in 2015 as "a nationalist ideology based on ethnic grounds, social conservatism, and religious faith." And its instrument of external power was the state's recaptured control of oil and gas — what Soros analyzed as resource nationalism in the Yukos expropriation and the Rosneft flotation.

The foreign arc of the regime runs through war: the 2008 war with Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the hybrid war in eastern Ukraine from 2014, the intervention in Syria from 2015, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. For Soros, each stage confirmed the same diagnosis: a closed society that must externalize conflict to survive, ruled by a man who, in Soros's description of Putin and Xi together, governs by intimidation and so makes "mind-boggling mistakes."

Key Stories

The engineered succession (1999–2000). Soros watched Putin's rise at close quarters and through a personal lens: Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who engineered both Yeltsin's 1996 re-election and Putin's promotion, was a man Soros knew well — first as a donor to his International Science Foundation, later as his adversary in the Svyazinvest auction. When Chechen forces under Shamil Basayev invaded Dagestan in 1999, Soros "smelled a rat," recalling that Berezovsky had once boasted of paying off commanders in the region; when entire Moscow apartment houses were blown up and some three hundred people killed in their sleep, Soros could not bring himself to believe the bombings were staged to justify war — "It was just too diabolical" — but he could not rule it out either. What he never doubted: "there can be no doubt that it was the war in Chechnya that has propelled Putin to victory." His 2000 prognosis, written before Putin had served a year, proved durable: the new government would most likely be "authoritarian and nationalistic," built not on open society principles but on "the demoralization, humiliation, and frustration of the Russian people."

The gauntlet to civil society (2003–2004). The personal stakes were direct. Soros's Russian foundation had spent fifteen years and nearly $1 billion on education, science, and Internet access; in 2003 he closed it, judging that the state could now take over the work — and watched instead as the state moved against any private alternative. The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Yukos chief who had begun funding civil society himself, "cast a pall over the business community"; as Soros wrote, anyone considering philanthropy now understood "that nothing is possible without the state’s seal of approval." In Putin's Heavy Hand Could Halt Russia's Rise (2004) he named the trajectory plainly: Putin had "thrown the gauntlet to civil society," and Russia's liberalized economy had not meant democracy — Putin "seems to be emulating Singapore, or Chile under Augusto Pinochet." The warning was precise: a state that strangles civil society cannot thrive, and "Putin’s effort to modernize Russia cannot succeed unless critical thinking is protected."

The energy weapon (2006). In Rosneft Flotation Would Spur Putin On, Soros dissected how the regime fused political and economic power: the Yukos assets auctioned to an unknown shell that sold itself to Rosneft within days; Putin's own man installed at Gazprom, whose fiefdom was not dissolved but turned to "assert control over the production and transportation of gas in the neighbouring countries"; billions siphoned through untransparent intermediaries like Eural Trans Gas and RosUkrEnergo. When Russia cut gas to Ukraine in January 2006, Europe got its first taste of the leverage. Soros's conclusion became a decade-long refrain: Europe, "relying for a large portion of energy supplies on a country that does not hesitate to use its monopoly power in devious and arbitrary ways," had put itself at Russia's mercy — and only a common European energy policy could reverse the balance.

The Maidan and the hybrid war (2014–2015). Ukraine is where Soros's analysis and advocacy fully merged. The spontaneous uprising on the Maidan, he argued in a 2014 interview, "wounded Putin in his Achilles heel. The idea of a spontaneous rebellion simply did not enter into his calculations. In his view the world is ruled by power and those in power can easily manipulate public opinion." Putin answered with Crimea's annexation and the separatist enclaves — alternating, as Soros put it, "between hybrid war and hybrid peace at will," exploiting the West's refusal to risk direct military confrontation. Soros's counter was the "winning strategy": sanctions alone merely fed Putin's narrative that Russia was the victim of Western hostility; only a successful, radically reformed "new Ukraine" — financed at $50 billion, defended "whatever it takes" — could prove him wrong, because such reforms "would also appeal to many people in Russia, who would demand similar reforms. That is what Putin is afraid of."

Syria and the weaponization of refugees (2015–2020). Soros was early to name the logic of Putin's Syria intervention. In a 2016 essay he argued that Putin's aim was "to foster the EU’s disintegration, and the best way to do so is to flood Europe with Syrian refugees" — the bombing of civilians was not a byproduct but an instrument. By 2020, writing in the Financial Times about Idlib, he stated the charge without hedging: creating the humanitarian disaster that turned almost six million Syrians into refugees "has been one of his central goals," executed with air power that deliberately targeted hospitals, schools, and kindergartens, and shielded by fourteen Russian vetoes at the Security Council.

The full-scale invasion (2022–2023). At Davos in May 2022, Soros framed the invasion as a civilizational event: "The invasion may have been the beginning of the Third World War and our civilization may not survive it." He traced the blunder's anatomy — the "no limits" declaration with Xi Jinping on February 4, the soldiers carrying dress uniforms for a victory parade that never came, the atrocities of Bucha that Russia's own people were kept from seeing, the "special military operation" that ground on under the butcher of Grozny. His judgment of Putin's position was cold: "Putin seems to have recognized that he made a terrible mistake when he invaded Ukraine," but a ceasefire was unattainable "because he cannot be trusted" — and starting peace negotiations "would be equivalent to resigning." A year later he was reading the Wagner affair as a sign of the regime's desperation, and still insisting: "The best and perhaps only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat Putin as soon as possible."

Impact on Soros's Work

1. The closed society incarnate. Soros inherited the open/closed framework from Karl Popper; Putin supplied its principal contemporary specimen. From 2000 onward Soros used Putin's Russia to show that a closed society is not a museum piece but a modern construction — assembled from television control, staged nationalism, and a state that answers only to itself. By the 2022 Davos speech the framing had become global: "a struggle between two systems of governance that are diametrically opposed to each other: open society and closed society," with Putin's Russia and Xi Jinping's China as the two great threats (see open society).

2. A boundary for political philanthropy. The Russian experience marked the limit case of political philanthropy: a foundation could build universities, libraries, and Internet centers for fifteen years and still be unable to protect the space it had created once the state turned. Soros's lesson — that Khodorkovsky's arrest taught every would-be philanthropist that nothing happens "without the state’s seal of approval" — is the dark twin of his foundation-building elsewhere: open society work presupposes a minimum of political freedom to defend.

3. Ukraine as the decisive theater. Putin's aggression determined the central policy cause of Soros's last decade. Wake Up, Europe, A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine, and Ukraine & Europe: What Should Be Done? are one sustained argument: that the new Ukraine is Europe's most valuable asset, that assisting it is defense expenditure, and that letting it fail would accelerate European disintegration — which Soros identified as Putin's strategic objective.

4. A reflexive reading of the antagonist. Soros consistently read Putin through reflexivity: a leader who manipulates public opinion is trapped by his own manipulation. Putin's narrative — Russia the victim of Western hostility — was self-reinforcing, since the hardships of sanctions fed the grievance; the only refutation was to change the underlying facts by making Ukraine succeed. Hence Soros's most-quoted characterization: Putin "is a gifted tactician, but not a strategic thinker" — a judo expert who exploits his opponents' weaknesses, leading from a position of weakness himself.

Key Passages