When Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel ended her political career three years ago, I was supposed to interview her counterpart, Russia's President Vladimir Putin, in Moscow, for a documentary. Other heads of state and government who had worked with Merkel during her time in office were also to feature in the program, a retrospective of the German leader and her career.

But the Kremlin said no. The reason it gave was that all the other interview partners were former leaders, whereas the Russian president was still in office. The project was therefore deemed unworthy of him. I was, at least, allowed to interview Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president who served a single term from 2008 to 2012, as a sort of interim head of state. Putin couldn't run for president again in 2008 for constitutional reasons; instead, he became prime minister, and continued to pull the strings of government in the background.

Medvedev was never actually Russia's number one. For the past twenty-five years, that has always been Vladimir Putin, ever since he was appointed Russian prime minister by then-president Boris Yeltsin on August 9, 1999. Western politicians, including Germany's long-term chancellor Merkel, come and go, but Putin remains.

In the course of these twenty-five years, the Russian president has transformed his country into the "strongest personalized dictatorship in the world," says the Russian political scientist Mikhail Komin.

He told........

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