A quarter-century ago, on August 9, 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin picked Vladimir Putin as prime minister and anointed the then little-known former KGB operative as his successor, urging Russians to vote for him in the presidential election the following year.
Putin has been president or prime minister ever since. After eight years as president, he stepped back into the No. 2 position in 2008-2012 to avoid violating a constitutional limit of two straight Kremlin terms -- but later engineered an amendment that allowed him to secure a new six-year stint as president this past March, along with the right to run again in 2030.
With the massive death and destruction it has wreaked, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine -- launched in February 2022 and raging on today with no clear end in sight -- has defined Putin’s time in power much more starkly than anything else.
Hundreds of thousands of combatants and civilians have been killed. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced by the largest war in Europe since World War II, while hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their country either to protest the war or to evade a call-up.
The war has intensified Putin’s crackdown on dissent, independent media, and civic activism. It has served as a pretext for intensifying jingoistic indoctrination in schools and cultural institutions and for adopting draconian legislation that could determine Russia’s direction for years to come.
But while the scale is far greater, the war is just one of many deadly milestones that have marked the Putin era. RFE/RL takes a look at some of the most consequential.
Apartment-Building Bombings
Less than a month after Putin was made prime minister, Russia was rocked by a spate of deadly apartment-block bombings that left more than 300 dead and 1,000 injured in September 1999. The government blamed the blasts on Chechen militants, but there was no claim of responsibility.
Rescuers and firefighters work at the site of a massive explosion that destroyed a nine-story apartment building in Moscow on September 9, 1999
The perpetrators were somehow able to produce or obtain several tons of explosives, move them to cities all over the country, and plant them in a professional way that caused the buildings to collapse. In addition, a suspicious device was found and defused in an apartment building in Ryazan on September 22 in a bizarre incident in which local police arrested three Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives. FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev later asserted that it was an anti-terrorism training operation, but questions remain to this day.
SEE ALSO: Two Decades On, Smoldering Questions About The Russian President's Vault To PowerSeveral people involved in independent investigations of the bombings – including former FSB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko and State Duma deputies Yury Shchekochikhin and Sergei Yushenkov – were killed in the ensuing years. Twenty days after the first bombing, Putin launched the Second Chechen War amid a widespread climate of fear and anger.
Second Chechen War
The Second Chechen War officially ended in April 2000, but the ensuing state of emergency remained in place until April 2009 amid a continuing insurgency in the North Caucasus.
According to various estimates, some 50,000-80,000 civilians, militants, and Russian servicemen were killed during the often-brutal fighting. In a 2007 report, Amnesty International put the civilian death toll at about 25,000, with thousands more missing. The independent Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers estimated in 2005 that about 14,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. Chechen sources put all the numbers much higher.
SEE ALSO: Amid Reports Kadyrov Is Ill, Kremlin Mulls What's Next For ChechnyaThe war facilitated Putin’s installation of former separatist fighter Ramzan Kadyrov as head of the region, a post he has held since 2007. In the years since, activists, reporters, and victims have provided voluminous evidence linking him to widespread human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings in Russia and abroad, abductions and disappearances, torture, and the persecution of the LGBT community. Putin has continued to support Kadyrov and the government has never investigated the allegations against him. The war also marked the beginning of Putin’s dismantling of Russian federalism and the construction of his so-called “power vertical.”
Sinking Of The Kursk
On August 12, 2000, the nuclear submarine Kursk was crippled by explosions and sank while participating in Russia’s first major naval exercise in a decade. All 118 seamen aboard died, although 23 survived the initial blasts and lived for another six hours or so.
Following unprecedented criticism, Putin met briefly with relatives of the Kursk seamen on August 22, 2000.
Putin was widely criticized at the time, including on state television and by government officials and relatives of the victims, for continuing his summer vacation in Sochi during the crisis. The Russian military and government were also criticized for rejecting foreign offers of assistance during the crucial initial phase.
After the sinking, Putin began in earnest to bring the Russian media under control. By the middle of 2001, the once-feisty NTV had been brought under de facto state control, while tycoon-owned ORT television had been transformed into state-controlled Channel One by 2002.
Nord-Ost Hostage Crisis
On October 23, 2002, nearly 50 Chechen gunmen burst into the Dubrovka theater in Moscow during a performance of the musical Nord-Ost and held hundreds of people hostage for 57 hours, demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya. During the ordeal, prominent political and cultural figures conducted talks with the hostage-takers and about 300 of the 912 hostages were released.
A man stands before photos of victims of the Nord-Ost hostage crisis at a commemoration ceremony in 2022
Early on October 26, special forces units raided the theater after pumping it full of an unidentified aerosol anesthetic. Russia’s health minister later said the chemical was based on the opioid fentanyl. Putin’s government said 132 hostages and 40 terrorists were killed in the raid, although independent sources believe as many as 200 hostages died, many because they were not given adequate care after being dragged from the building unconscious. A Moscow health official later said only one hostage died from gunshot wounds.
The government was widely criticized for failing to prepare to treat hostages for the effects of the gas, as well as for security lapses that allowed a busload of heavily armed terrorists to penetrate the capital undetected.
Beslan School Siege
On the first day of school in 2004, September 1, more than 30 attackers took more than 1,100 pupils, parents, and staff hostage at a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan. Most of the hostages were held for more than 52 hours in a hot, crowded gymnasium.
Shortly after noon on September 3, at least two explosions rang out and a fire erupted on the roof. Gunfire was exchanged and Russian security forces began to storm the building, supported by tanks and helicopters. After several hours of intense fighting, about half of the militants escaped.
Putin made a brief visit to the scene on September 4 but did not meet with the families of victims. Authorities said 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children.
In the aftermath, the government was again criticized for security lapses that enable the terrorists to carry out the attack. Critics said the assault was poorly prepared, and the government had not brought in sufficient medical equipment and personnel in advance.
The Beslan gymnasium in the aftermath of the September 2004 hostage crisis.
In the wake of the attack, Putin’s government passed anti-terrorism and anti-extremism legislation that critics say has been used ever since to crack down increasingly hard on political dissent and minority-rights activism.
Putin also rolled back democracy, eliminating the direct election of regional leaders, reorganizing the legislative system to enable the ruling United Russia party to cement its control of the parliament, and stepping up state control over the media and civic organizations.
Aleksandr Litvinenko Poisoning
Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned Kremlin critic, died in London in 2006 of acute radiation poisoning. British investigators concluded he was poisoned with polonium-210 slipped into his drink at an upscale London hotel by Andrei Lugovoi, a former FSB officer and current member of the State Duma, and Dmitry Kovtun, a former KGB officer.
Litvinenko, 44, had been a harsh critic of Putin, accusing him of creating a “mafia state” and writing two books alleging Russian security agency involvement in the 1999 apartment-block bombings. Weeks before his poisoning, he claimed that Putin had ordered the murder of prominent investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in Moscow on Putin’s birthday in October 2006.
SEE ALSO: Name Your Poison: Exotic Toxins Fell Kremlin FoesAlthough it was not the first killing abroad linked to Russian security agents, it was among the most prominent, as the assassins left a radioactive trail across a NATO member’s capital. It seemed to presage the attempted assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in the British city of Salisbury with a deadly nerve agent in 2018.
The European Court of Human Rights found Russia responsible for Litvinenko’s death and ordered Moscow to pay 100,000 euros($109,000) in damages. Russian security forces were later linked to poisoning attempts targeting the Kremlin’s domestic political foes, including opposition leaders Aleksei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Sergei Magnitsky's Death
In November 2009, tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, 37, died after 11 months in custody, during which supporters said he was denied medical care, beaten, and subjected to conditions amounting to torture. Magnitsky had been pursued by the same Interior Ministry officials he had accused of engineering a $230 million tax fraud. Ella Pamfilova, at the time the chairwoman of President Dmitry Medvedev’s human rights council, called Magnitsky’s death “a murder and a tragedy.”
SEE ALSO: Navalny's Prison Ordeal Revives Grim Memories Of Magnitsky's Death In 2009In 2012, the United States adopted the Magnitsky Act, which allows for the imposition of sanctions on Russian officials believed to be human rights abusers. The European Union and several more countries have passed similar laws. Moscow retaliated by barring U.S. citizens from adopting Russian children. Magnitsky’s death is regarded as a landmark in the souring of Russia’s relations with the West, which accelerated when Moscow seized Crimea and fomented war in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
MH17 Shot Down
On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down by Russian-backed separatist militants over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew. Although Russia denied involvement in the incident and blamed the Ukrainian military, an exhaustive international investigation determined in 2016 that the airliner had been shot down by a Russian Buk antiaircraft system, which had been brought from Russia on the day of the incident and was hastily returned to Russia immediately afterward.
Debris of the Boeing 777, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down in Ukraine in July 2014
A court in the Netherlands, where the MH17 flight began, convicted three Russians and a Ukrainian militant in absentia of murder in 2022 and determined that Russia had been in control of the militant forces at the time. A Dutch prosecutor said there were “strong indications that [Putin] decided on supplying the Buk to the separatists.”
The MH17 disaster played a significant role in galvanizing much of the international community against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. At the same time, Kremlin-controlled media and social-media channels developed and perfected what came to be known as “the firehose of falsehood propaganda model,” in which the goal is not to convince people of anything, but rather to confuse and muddle issues until people conclude the truth is unknowable. “Russian propaganda entertains, confuses, and overwhelms the audience,” researchers at the Rand Corporation think tank wrote in a 2016 study.
Boris Nemtsov Killing
Late on February 27, 2015, former deputy prime minister and leading opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was shot to death on a bridge near the Kremlin. One of Putin’s most prominent foes, Nemtsov was a vocal critic of the aggression Russia launched against Ukraine in 2014 and had been working on a report – completed by allies after his death -- detailing evidence of the extent of Russia’s involvement in the war in the Donbas. Five Chechen men were convicted of the killing in June 2017, but -- as in the slayings of Politkovskaya and other Kremlin opponents -- the identity of the person who ordered it has never been uncovered.
Two weeks after Nemtsov was gunned down, Putin awarded Chechen leader Kadyrov -- who a day earlier had publicly praised the leading suspect in the case as “a true Russian patriot” -- the Order of Honor for “professional achievements, public activities, and many years of diligent work.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy lays flowers at the site where Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on the eighth anniversary of his death, on February 27, 2023.
Nemtsov’s acolytes maintain an informal memorial to the slain politician on the bridge where he was killed, although police, city workers, and vigilantes regularly attack them and try to dismantle it.
SEE ALSO: Boris Nemtsov's Mother: 'This Is Unbearably Hard For Me'Kemerovo Mall Fire
In March 2018, at least 64 people died, half of them children, in a fire at the Winter Cherry shopping complex in the western Siberian city of Kemerovo. The Russian investigation found that fire exits had been blocked, an alarm system had been disabled, and regulations had been violated during the mall’s construction. Local prosecutors also said emergency responders “lacked the necessary equipment and skills” to cope with the situation.
Putin visited the site two days after the disaster and promised that “all those who are guilty will be punished.” Ten people, including the co-owner of the mall and the former Kemerovo region emergencies minister received prison sentences in the case on charges including embezzlement, fraud, negligence, and bribery.
SEE ALSO: 'Vultures,' 'Self-Hype': Russian Officials Deride Outrage Over Deadly FirePutin’s critics charge that his focus on quashing political dissent and solidifying his own power have left Russia vulnerable to real terrorists and to disasters such as the Kemerovo fire that are caused or exacerbated by corruption and negligence.
Aleksei Navalny’s Death In Prison
Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny died in a remote Arctic prison in February 2024 after years of persecution and prosecution by the Putin government.
His widow and many supporters believe Putin is responsible for his death. The charismatic lawyer had been held in custody since returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been treated for the effects of a nerve-agent poisoning that he blamed on Putin and the FSB, in January 2021.
In June 2021, his Anti-Corruption Foundation and his network of regional offices were declared “extremist organizations.” Navalny himself was designated a terrorist and an extremist in January 2022. Many of his top associates were either imprisoned or fled the country to avoid prosecution.
Aleksei Navalny at a court hearing on February 2, 2021.
Since Navalny’s death, the Russian opposition has lacked a leader and has been frequently mired in division and acrimony. Analysts agree there is no democratic political force remaining in Russia that is capable of presenting a realistic challenge to Putin at this point.
By contrast, Putin’s government was briefly shaken in June 2023 when thousands of Wagner mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin staged a short-lived mutiny, briefly controlling the large city of Rostov-on-Don and marching toward Moscow.
The situation was quickly defused and order was restored, Prigozhin and Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin were killed two months later when their private jet crashed north of Moscow. Wagner-affiliated social media claimed the plane had been shot down by the Russian military, and many observers believe Putin had them killed.
SEE ALSO: Interview: Prigozhin's Demise And Russia's 'Gangster Rules'Crocus City Attack
On March 22, 2024, four gunmen attacked the Crocus City Hall concert venue outside Moscow, killing 145 people and injuring more than 500 others. It was the deadliest terrorist incident in Russia since the Beslan school siege in 2004.
The extremist group Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, although many Russian officials, including Putin, and media personalities claimed without evidence that the attack was organized by Ukraine with the help of the United States -- an assertion the U.S. State Department dismissed as “absurd.”
SEE ALSO: How Putin's Police State Leaves Russia Vulnerable To Terrorist AttacksOn March 7, the United States had warned Russia that “extremists” were planning an attack in the capital.
The Washington Post reported on April 2 that the U.S. warning specifically mentioned the Crocus concert hall. Three days before the attack, Putin appeared to dismiss the warnings as “provocative statements” that “resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.” Foreign Intelligence Service head Sergei Naryshkin said the U.S. warning was “too general.”