As Putin reaches 25 years in power, has he 'taken care of Russia'?

I will never forget New Year’s Eve 1999.

I was working as a producer in the BBC’s Moscow bureau. Suddenly there was breaking news: Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin had stepped down.

His decision to resign took everyone by surprise, including the British press corps in Moscow. When the news broke there was no correspondent in the office. That meant I had to step in to write and broadcast my first BBC dispatch.

“Boris Yeltsin always said he would see out his full term in office,” I wrote. “Today he told Russians he’d changed his mind.”

It was the start of my career as a reporter.

And the start of Vladimir Putin’s as Russia’s leader.

Following Yeltsin’s resignation, in accordance with the Russian constitution, Prime Minister Putin became acting president. Three months later he won the election.

On leaving the Kremlin, Yeltsin’s parting instruction to Putin was: “Take care of Russia!”

I’ve found myself recalling these words of Yeltsin more and more, the closer Russia’s war on Ukraine gets to the three-year mark.

That’s because President Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has had devastating consequences.

Primarily for Ukraine, which has seen massive destruction and casualties in its cities. Almost 20% of its territory has been occupied and 10 million of its citizens have been displaced.

But for Russia, too:

I’ve been reporting on Putin since he came to power a quarter of a century ago.

On 31 December 1999, who would have thought that Russia’s new leader would still be in power two and a half decades later? Or that Russia today would be waging war on Ukraine and facing off with the West?

I often wonder whether the course of history would have been drastically different if Yeltsin had picked someone else to succeed him. The question, of course, is academic. History is full of ifs and buts and maybes.

One thing I can say with certainty: over twenty-five years I’ve seen different Putins.

And I’m not the only one.

“The Putin I met with, did good business with, established a Nato-Russia Council with, is very, very different from this almost megalomaniac at the present moment,” former Nato chief Lord Robertson told me in 2023.

“The man who stood beside me in May 2002, right beside me, and said Ukraine is a sovereign and independent nation state which will make its own decisions about security, is now the man who says that [Ukraine] is not a nation state.

“I think that Vladimir Putin has a very thin skin and a huge ambition for his country. The Soviet Union was recognised as the second superpower in the world. Russia can’t make any claims in that direction. And I think that ate away at his ego.”

That is one possible explanation for the change we’ve seen in Putin: his burning ambition to “Make Russia Great Again” (and to make up for what many perceive as Moscow’s defeat in the Cold War) put Russia on an inevitable collision course with its neighbours – and with the West.

The Kremlin has a different explanation.

From the speeches he gives, the comments he makes, Putin appears driven by resentment, by an all-encompassing feeling that for years Russia has been lied to and disrespected, its security concerns dismissed by the West.

But does Putin himself believe that he has fulfilled Yeltsin’s request to “take care of Russia?”

I recently had a chance to find out.

More than four hours into his lengthy end-of-year press conference, Putin invited me to ask a question.

“Boris Yeltsin told you to take care of Russia,” I reminded the president. “But what of the significant losses in your so-called ‘special military operation’, the Ukrainian troops in Kursk region, the sanctions, the high inflation. Do you think you’ve taken care of your country?”

“Yes,” President Putin replied. “And I haven’t just taken care of it. We’ve pulled back from the edge of the abyss.”

He portrayed Yeltsin’s Russia as a country that had been losing its sovereignty. He accused the West of having “patronisingly patted” Yeltsin on the shoulder while “using Russia for its own purposes”. But he, Putin, was “doing everything”, he said, “to ensure Russia was an independent sovereign state”.

Presenting himself as the defender of Russian sovereignty: is this a view he’s come up with retrospectively to try to justify the war in Ukraine? Or does Putin really believe this take on modern Russian history?

I’m still not sure. Not yet. But I sense that it is a key question.

The answer to it may well influence how the war ends – and Russia’s future direction.