The New Yorker:

I bumped into Vladimir Putin in Chile, in 2004, when we were both in Santiago for the annual conference of leaders from twenty-one nations on both sides of the Pacific. Putin was strutting across the hotel lobby in that distinctly quick duck-footed waddle that twists his upper torso and makes him look like a mechanical toy. His gaggle of security guards elbowed me aside to let him pass. What struck me—a small female—was how small he was, too. In a brief exchange of glances, we were at eye level.

“He walks like someone who thinks, How do I walk like a cool guy?” a seasoned Russia expert told me, as Russians went to the polls last weekend.

That image of Putin recurs every time I see pictures of him tracking tigers, swimming in Siberia, practicing judo, flying a hang glider, riding horseback bare-chested, or scoring hockey goals. At sixty-five, the diminutive leader of the world’s largest country, which covers eleven time zones spanning two continents, still seems to be a little man obsessed with proving his bigness—physically and politically, at home and on the global stage.

During his third term as President, which began in 2012, Putin and his allies grew increasingly ambitious, seizing Crimea, in 2014, intervening in Syria’s civil war, in 2015, meddling in the 2016 American Presidential election, allegedly plotting the assassinations of exiles and dissidents over the past couple of years, and, shortly before the 2018 Russian Presidential election, boasting of a new nuclear weapon capable of evading U.S. missile defenses.

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