Boris Yeltsin gave away the country.
Vladimir Putin took it back. It's that simple.
Within a couple of years of Yeltsin's ascent to power you were reading reports of property values being inflated on the French Riviera by the influx of post-Soviet Russians buying villas there. Oligarchs were crawling out of the woodwork. Billionaires still in their thirties. Shrewd young men who managed to turn their mid-level security posts in the crumbling Soviet empire into unimaginable riches.
By the mid-nineties there were eighty thousand Russian-owned villas in the French Riviera. The newly-minted oligarchs were spreading their wings. Companies on every bourse around the world. Football teams. All at the expense of the Russian people.
Putin put a stop to that. There are still oligarchs of course. But today the ones who remain operate in the interest of Russia, not at her expense.
Unlike the American scenario, where Obama is totally in thrall to the Wall Street oligarchs.
Which is why Putin is considered a hero in Russia, and Obama's ratings have never been lower.
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