Tổng thống Nga Vladimir Putin (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin) là nhà lãnh đạo lẫy lừng của nước Nga trong gần hai thập niên vừa qua. Để có được ngày hôm nay, tổng thống Putin đã trải qua không ít thăng trầm và không ngừng cố gắng. Hãy cùng The IELTS Workshop học thêm từ vựng mới qua tiểu sử Tổng thống Nga Vladimir Putin nhé..
1. Putin’s early days
Putin was born 1952 in what used to be called Leningrad, USSR, and is now known as St. Petersburg, Russia. He served for 15 years in the KGB, the Soviet-era agency that was the counterpart to the CIA. The spy agency was a notorious symbol of the Cold War and became the focus of a slew of U.S. spy novels and movies.
During that time, in 1983, he married a flight attendant named Lyudmila. They had two daughters. Putin and Lyudmila divorced in 2013.
By 1994, Putin had become deputy mayor in the city of his birth, and by 1998, the director of the FSB, the KBG’s domestic successor. A year later, Putin was prime minister, then president – one of two positions he’s held ever since.
2. Trouble at home
Over the last two decades, Putin has consolidated his grip on power by transforming Russia’s courts, media and other governance institutions to serve the whims of one person: himself. He has spent lavishly on the military, banned or jailed opposition politicians and journalists and cultivated support from right-wing, nationalist groups. He changed Russia’s constitution so he can stay in power until 2036, perhaps even longer.
Putin has also presided over a growing Russian middle class, modernized some areas of Russia’s economy such as in banking and technology and weathered successive financial crises because of Russia’s enormous strategic oil and gas reserves. He has sought to crack down on dissent by banning restricting free speech on the Internet.
3. On the world stage
Because of his political longevity, Putin has seen five U.S. presidents come and four go. During this time there has been cooperation on trade, nuclear and ballistic missile treaties, fighting terrorism and more.
There has also been sharp divergence – on human rights, on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, on the rule of law, on Moscow’s apparent or at least tacit support for cyber-hackers, and on what countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, formed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s break-up in 1991, should be allowed to do in terms of carving out their own cultural and ideological destinies.
Ukraine has aspirations to join the 30-nation NATO military alliance that was formed in the wake of World War II to help keep the peace in Europe. It seeks to lean west toward democracies in the European Union.
The NATO bloc’s gradual encroachment east toward countries that border Russia is seen by Putin as a threat to Moscow’s security and sphere of influence. It is this, partly, analysts believe, that underpinned Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Moscow’s support for separatist rebels in Ukraine’s Donbass region, where fighting has raged for eights years and is now the subject of an intense international spotlight because of what it could say about Putin’s invasion plans.
Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2022/02/19/putin-biography/6830111001/
4. Highlight Vocabulary
- notorious (adj) khét tiếng
- Consolidate (v) củng cố
- Whim (n) ý thích
- Lavishly (adv) một cách xa hoa
- Opposition (n) sự đối lập
- Constitution (n) hiến pháp
- successive (adj) liên tiếp
- Crisis (n) khủng hoảng
- Dissent (n) bất đồng quan điểm
- Longevity (n) sự bền bỉ, lâu dài
- Treaty (n) hiệp ước
- divergence (n) sự khác nhau, phân cực
- Invasion (n) sự xâm lược
Trên đây là một số thông tin về tổng thống Nga Putin cũng như từ vựng mà bạn có thể tham khảo. Học thêm một số từ vựng hay khác tại chuyên mục Từ vựng của The IELTS Workshop nhé.
