Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin is Russia's third president under their Democratic government experiment. Handpicked by Boris Yeltsin to succeed him, Putin held strong convictions about how his country should be managed and where he wanted to stand on the world's stage. Fiercely patriotic and ambitious, Putin began his career as a counterintelligence spy but when the Soviet Union's Communist rule dissolved in 1989 he was determined to find another way to serve his country.