Aussiegirl is reflecting on Putin post-9/11 and how he has fallen back into his old KGB ways.

On November 15, 2001, President Putin visited the United States and was feted at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. He was riding high in the saddle at the time. It looked like Russia was entering the free world at last, democratizing, cooperating on the war on terror, and could easily become an ally and partner of the United States in a new post-Soviet world. This is the meeting where George Bush drove him around the ranch in his pickup truck and treated him to a Texas-style barbecue, and famously peered into his soul and found a religious and good man there.

What a difference a few years make. Since then Putin has increasingly reverted to type, falling back into bad old habits when the going got tough. A reflex of his old KGB days — when in doubt — do what you’re familiar with. He has centralized his own power, cracked down on media in Russia, seized Yukos illegally and imprisoned its CEO and plans to sell off its assets. His mishandling of the Beslan massacre only led to a further power grab as he responded by suspending the local election of regional governors in a move to centralize power even further. His ham-handed attempt to interfere in the recent Ukrainian elections backfired severely when the extent of election fraud was revealed and the not too subtle cooperation between former President Kuchma and Putin was made plain. He has also attempted to bully Georgia, after it too rejected a Russian engineered fraudulent election and brought in its own democratic reformer in the so-called Rose Revolution. He’s making deals with the Syrians, the Chinese and the Iranians, casting his lot with the usual suspects of anti-American and anti-Western despotic regimes. Old habits just die hard, it seems. But this is not your father’s Soviet Union — and things are not going quite according to plan.

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