Russia's Post-Soviet Trajectory and the War in Ukraine

The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, and the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin were marked by rapid, often chaotic market reforms, the rise of powerful business figures known as oligarchs, and a severe financial crisis in 1998. Vladimir Putin became acting president at the end of 1999 and was elected in his own right in March 2000, subsequently working to consolidate central state authority, sometimes described as building a "vertical of power," and using Russia's energy exports, particularly through the state-controlled company Gazprom, as a source of economic leverage over European customers. In a widely noted speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, Putin criticized what he characterized as a US-dominated unipolar world order and the post-Cold War enlargement of NATO toward Russia's borders.