Vladimir Putin: After 25 years in power, what next for Russia’s president?

When Russian President Vladimir Putin was growing up in a dilapidated apartment block in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, he and his friends would chase rats through the corridors with sticks. One day, a huge rat he’d cornered suddenly turned on the young Vladimir and chased him back to his quarters.

“I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered,” Putin recalled in a 2000 interview.As the tale has been retold and analysed over the years, a consensus has emerged among Kremlin watchers: Putin identifies with the cornered rat, forced to lash out when he believes his survival is at stake.

‘Resist and endure’
Putin was born in 1952, seven years after the end of World War II, in which millions of Russians died, and the wounds, both physical and emotional, were still fresh. Putin never knew his two older brothers: one, Viktor, died of hunger during the Siege of Leningrad while the other died in infancy before the war. Putin’s father, a soldier, was crippled by shrapnel from a grenade blast while his mother was reportedly distant.