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Disclaimer: This video is purely my opinion and should not be regarded as a primary source. I am not a financial advisor and this is not a recommendation to buy or sell securities. Always do your own due diligence.

9th of August, 1999, Russia's President Boris Yeltsin announced a new acting Prime Minister.

And in a poll, just 2% said that they'd vote for him to become president.

Exactly 1 month after Yeltsin's announcement, A massive explosion in

an apartment building just half an hour's drive from the Kremlin killed more than 100 people.

4 days after that, another apartment bombing less than 4 miles away killed 119 people.

The morning after the second bombing, the Speaker of the Russian parliament paid tribute to the victims that had died in the city of Volgodonsk, but he'd made a mistake.

Volgodonsk is 700 miles away from Moscow where the bombing had actually happened.

So when a car bomb actually exploded in Volgodonsk 3 days later, things got even weirder.

The new prime minister quickly ordered a massive bombing campaign against separatists in the war-torn region of Chechnya,

even declaring that, "...we'll waste them in the outhouse." 6 months later, the new Prime Minister was elected President by a grateful Russian nation.

And since he took power, he has not let go.

his enemies killed, started wars, and destabilized the global order.

But for someone so dangerous and so important, we know surprisingly little about him.

What's the real story behind those apartment bombings?

The Moscow apartment bombings are a key part of Vladimir Putin's rise to power, and don't worry, I'm going to talk more about them.

But to truly understand how he became the man he is today, you need to

understand the organization that molded him, the KGB.

1 of the main instruments of Soviet state power.

It operated totally above the law, spying on dissidents, carrying out espionage, and acting as a secret police force.

And because the Soviet Union had lots of enemies, The KGB needed lots of agents.

the country's most prestigious universities.

That's exactly where they found a young law student at Leningrad State University named Vladimir Putin.

They waited until he graduated, before recruiting him in 1975.

Lots of KGB agents joined because they basically had no choice.

When your country's notorious spy agency asks you to join, it's kind of hard to say no.

the KGB pushing papers in a gloomy office in Leningrad.

But his first big break arrived when, in the early 1980s, he was summoned to Moscow to attend the agency's elite foreign intelligence training institute.

That's right, it was basically a professional development course for Soviet spies.

a better spy, Putin was assigned to Dresden, deep in the heart of East Germany.

As the boundary between communism and capitalism, East Germany was a rich source of Cold War intrigue and information.

This is building number 4, Angelica Strassa.

Today It's the regional HQ for an esoteric spiritual movement.

But during the Cold War, it was the local KGB station.

And for the last 5 years of the 1980s, it was Vladimir Putin's office.

His mission was to recruit Communist Party and Stasi officials, compromise visiting Westerners, and travel undercover to West Germany.

It also involved stealing Western technology.

Despite being first to space and shocking the West with Sputnik, by the 1980s, the Eastern Bloc was lagging way behind the West.

Even though his cover story was that he worked as an aide to the dean, everyone knew that Putin was still working for the KGB, spying on and recruiting students.

Of course, there wouldn't be a next generation of crack KGB spies working undercover to steal Western technology and NATO secrets.

Because the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, brought undone by failed reforms and the pressure of trying to keep up with the United States.

Putin could see the end coming before it arrived.

quit the KGB to go work for 1 of his old law professors, a guy named Anatoly Sobchak.

Sobchak was 1 of the leading voices calling for democratic reforms in the Soviet Union.

After the Cold War ended, he was elected mayor of Leningrad, which by then had reverted to its original name of St.

Putin got a job working for Sobchak at City Hall, and he saw how bad things really were.

The decline in living standards in Russia after the Cold War is hard to comprehend.

Life expectancy at birth plunged by more than 5 years between 1990 and

Things got so bad that there are stories of people paying for things with bricks, because they were worth more than Russian rubles at the time.

Even for the millions of Russian people who, by the end, hated the communist system, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought chaos and humiliation.

Russians went from living in a country that went toe-to-toe with the United States as a superpower to needing handouts.

After his boss, Anatoly Sobchak, was voted out in 1996, Putin went to Moscow.

There, for reasons that have never really been explained, he suddenly started moving up really fast in his career.

in the Presidential Property Management Department at the Kremlin.

but it actually gave Putin lots of leverage to grant or turn down favors to other political insiders.

He must have done a lot of effective networking because his next job after that was as deputy chief of Boris Yeltsin's presidential staff.

still somehow found the time to get what's basically the Russian equivalent of a PhD in economics.

Putin's dissertation was about maximizing the value of mineral resources in his home region.

It's more than 200 pages of discussion about stuff like the quality of gravel pits in Russia.

There are real questions about whether he even wrote it.

But believe it or not, Putin's PhD wasn't really about education.

It was about ticking the boxes he needed in order to keep advancing in his career.

After working for Yeltsin, Putin became director of the FSB, the intelligence agency which replaced the KGB.

being a mid-ranking KGB officer in East Germany to running the successor agency less than 10 years later.

Maybe he was just really great at time management, and really great at all the jobs he was given.

Or maybe his bosses really liked the dissertation he wrote.

But if you worked in Russian politics at the time, you could only climb the ladder as quickly as Putin did if someone even higher wanted it to happen.

However he did it, Putin quickly earned Yeltsin's trust.

After 30 years in Soviet and Russian politics, which included surviving a coup, Yeltsin was done.

He was extremely pessimistic about the problems Russia faced, and his bad health, which was exacerbated by his drinking, meant that he just didn't have the energy to try and fix them.

So Yeltsin believed his final act in public life should be to choose the right successor, someone who could do what he had failed to do, rebuild Russia into a world power.

1 of them was his deputy premier, Boris Nemtsov.

For a start, he had years of actual political leadership experience, having served as a provincial governor and member of parliament.

He was also, by the standards of Russian politics, a liberal democrat.

Instead of looking to the past for ideas on how to reform Russia, he looked to the West.

At 1 stage, Boris Yeltsin introduced him to Bill Clinton as his chosen successor.

The day the ruble fell 20%, Vogue magazine held a party for

The basic story is that another market crisis, this 1 originating in Asia, reduced the price of commodities like oil, gas, and metals that the Russian economy was dependent on.

As the country's revenue sharply decreased, so did its ability to repay its debts, which were mostly in the form of bonds held by foreign investors.

On August 17th, 1998, the Russian government defaulted on its debts and was forced to devalue the ruble.

It was a disaster for millions of Russians.

Yeltsin sacked the prime minister and his entire cabinet,

But even that didn't contain the fallout.

Boris Nemtsov had staked his political legitimacy on making Russia's economy look more like the West, so when it collapsed, he got blamed.

He went from receiving more than 50% in a presidential poll to being 1 of the most hated men in the country.

In addition to killing Nemtsov's hopes of being Yeltsin's successor, the financial crisis accelerated Yeltsin's desire to find a replacement and stand down.

And eventually, just 1 real choice remained—Vladimir Putin.

But Yeltsin and his inner circle had a problem.

It was 1 thing to name him prime minister.

And in a democracy, you can't just snap your fingers and make someone the president.

Putin had no profile, he wasn't a reformer like Nemtsov.

If people had even heard of him, they probably associated him with

If Russian elites wanted him to win an election, they needed people to know who he was.

to those bombings I mentioned at the start

They're a key part of Vladimir Putin's rise to power.

On the 9th of August, 1999, Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin acting prime minister.

days later, on the night of September 4th, 1999, a truck blew up a barracks in Bunatsk, a garrison town on Russia's border with the breakaway region of Chechnya.

Just after midnight on September 9th, a bomb went off in the basement of an apartment building in southeast Moscow.

The FSB, the internal security agency that until recently had been run by Vladimir Putin, reported that items removed from the scene contained traces of TNT and another explosive called RDX.

Government officials started blaming Chechen terrorists for the attack almost immediately.

Just after midnight on September 13th, authorities were called to check on reports of suspicious activity at an apartment building less than 4 miles away from the previous bombing site.

They didn't find anything, but just a few hours later, a massive car bomb destroyed a nine-story building on the Kashir-Skoya Highway.

3 days later, another bomb blew up near an apartment building in the southern city of Volgodonsk.

On the evening of September 22nd, several residents from the city of Ryazan, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow, saw a white sedan pull up

The car's license plate had been altered.

The residents also noticed 2 men removing several large sacks from the trunk and carrying them into the basement before driving away at speed.

When local police arrived, they found 3 large sacks wired to a detonator and explosive timer.

The bomb was defused and sent away for testing.

The next morning, the 23rd, Putin congratulated the local residents on their vigilance and lauded the security forces for foiling what could have been another deadly attack.

That same evening, police apprehended the men who'd been seen loading

When they were questioned, they produced FSB identification cards.

Remember, the FSB is the agency that ultimately replaced the KGB, and Vladimir Putin, before he became Prime Minister, was the FSB director.

The next morning, September 24th, the director of

It was an FSB training exercise meant to test public awareness.

And the sacks in the basement didn't contain explosives, they just had sugar in them.

The FSB was trying to sweep the whole incident under the rug and it might have worked until the results came back from the lab.

The analysis, which was conducted by the local branch of the FSB, showed that the sacks actually contained RDX, the same explosive that was found at the scene of the bombing at Guryanova Street 2 weeks earlier.

But RDX wasn't something you could make at home.

In fact, there was only 1 place you could get it in all of Russia—a heavily guarded facility in the city of Perm near the Ural Mountains, and about 1, 500 miles from Chechnya.

It's details like this that make the official story—that the bombings were all orchestrated by Chechen terrorists, hard to believe.

But the time for asking questions was over.

Because at the same time as Putin was praising the residents of Ryazan for their bravery, Russian warplanes were already launching massive airstrikes on

Their country had gone from being a superpower to a basket case.

People were going hungry, losing their savings, and dying in their homes.

Vladimir Putin promised an end to the chaos.

People didn't know about the gaps in the official story.

Or if they did, they pretended not to notice.

On March 26, 2000, Vladimir Putin was elected president with 53% of the vote.

The people of Russia might not have realized it, but they just made a very fateful decision.

Well, Russia at the present time is at a crossroads.

The communists have been defeated, but the ideas of freedom now are on trial.

Putin's first major crisis came less than 6 months into his presidency.

This is the Kursk, a nuclear-powered Oscar II class submarine.

At the time, it was the biggest cruise missile submarine in

So it was the obvious choice to lead Russia's first major naval exercise in more than 10 years.

These exercises were basically a way for Vladimir Putin to show adversaries like NATO in the United States that, after a tumultuous few years, Russia was once again a military power.

On August 12, 2000, deep in the Barents Sea, the crew of the Kursk were given clearance to launch 2 dummy torpedoes at the Peter the Great battlecruiser.

At 1129 AM, nearby Norwegian seismic detectors registered an explosion.

2 minutes later, another much larger explosion was detected.

Amazingly, the US Defense Secretary William Cohen knew about the accident before the Kremlin.

The international community quickly offered assistance to try and save any crew who

might still be alive, but the Russian government refused all offers of help.

Publicly, they said they had everything under control.

It took 16 hours to locate the Kursk after it sank, and 2 days before officials publicly acknowledged that anything was wrong.

was just experiencing minor technical difficulties.

In truth, any crew members who survived the initial blast were rapidly running out of air.

He actually wasn't even informed of the accident until the day after it happened.

The Navy kept telling him that they had it under control and that there was a strong possibility that the accident had

If the cover-up was bad, the rescue attempts were even worse.

their attempts to get into the submarine.

From his seaside resort, Putin finally agreed to accept outside help.

By the time Norwegian divers finally opened a hatch to the submarine, there were no survivors.

On August 21st, the Russian Navy was finally forced to admit the truth to the public.

The Russian media strongly criticized the government response as inept, and their explanations as totally unreliable.

Putin decided to meet with family members a full 10 days after the sinking.

Access to the meeting was tightly controlled.

State media's broadcast of the meeting showed only Putin speaking.

2 journalists who got in by posing as family members witnessed distraught widows and mothers screaming at the president and demanding to know who would be punished for the disaster.

When 1 extremely emotional mother wouldn't stop interrupting, a nurse popped up behind her and forcibly injected her with a sedative.

Days later, Larry King asked Putin what happened.

The Kursk fiasco was terrible for Putin because it challenged the main part of his appeal — keeping Russians safe and restoring the country's status as a great power.

Great powers don't lose their best ships in training exercises.

And his response made it look like he didn't really care about the people who died or the effect it had on their families.

Still, for the first few years of his presidency, most world leaders either didn't see that side of Putin or didn't care.

I found it to be very straightforward and trustworthy.

I am confident that this new level of cooperation between NATO's members and Russia will now change the world and for the better.

Was Putin, the KGB mastermind, just tricking these world leaders into thinking he was a good guy?

I think the truth is much more complicated, and a lot of it has to do with NATO.

Remember, NATO was created in order to contain Soviet influence in Europe.

So after the end of the Cold War, most people believed the alliance had served its purpose.

Western policy makers didn't see any real reason to keep expanding it.

They preferred to focus their energies on encouraging Russia to become a democratic, capitalist country.

But that began to change in the mid-1990s.

Now we have to finish what America started 4 years ago, welcoming Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic into our alliance.

If you look around at who's in the room today, you can see that they are more than willing.

Eastern European countries, which had spent decades under Soviet influence, were suspicious of Russia's long-term motives.

They wanted to join NATO while Russia was still weak because they knew it wouldn't be weak forever.

Polish officials even told a team of researchers that if you don't let us into NATO, we're getting nuclear weapons.

And Bill Clinton and his team of idealistic foreign policy officials helped make it happen, just as he promised, Poland, Hungary, and

the Czech Republic all eventually joined the alliance.

This was basically Russia's worst nightmare, but it couldn't do anything about it.

The next round of NATO expansion, in 2004, added 7 more countries.

Almost all had been part of the Eastern Bloc.

The 3 Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, were part of the Soviet Union itself.

the West, at least in geopolitical terms.

For Putin, this shift in the global order was part provocation, part existential threat.

NATO was creeping up to his country's doorstep, which threatened to permanently relegate Russia to the status of second-tier power in its own region.

Putin wanted to undermine NATO and destabilize the US-led world order.

In his mind, I'm sure he also wanted to inflict some pain on the countries that, in his eyes, had humiliated Russia at the end of the Cold War.

But he knew there was no way Russia could win a war against NATO.

To achieve his goals, Putin would need to find another strategy.

In late 2004, Ukrainians went to the polls to elect a president.

They weren't just choosing between 2 guys with virtually indistinguishable policies.

They were choosing between 2 different visions of what kind of country Ukraine should be.

In 1 corner was the pro-Russian incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

In the other corner was the pro-NATO, pro-EU opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko.

The man who won would tilt Ukraine closer to the West or closer to Russia.

The future of the country was on the line.

The Ukrainian parliament had already agreed to the formation of a free trade zone with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

And Yanukovych had promised to make Russian an official language in Ukraine.

You better believe that Vladimir Putin was watching closely.

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History of Vladimir Putin (Full Documentary)