Vladimir Putin

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Opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov, foreground, burns a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin during a protest rally in Moscow, Russia, Jan. 13. (Associated Press)

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting in his residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013. Putin discussed financial situation surrounding restoration works in Russia’s southern town of Krymsk, severely affected by floods last summer. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev, pool)

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File - In this file photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin locks a collar with a satellite tracker on the tranquilized five-year-old Ussuri tiger in a Russian Academy of Sciences reserve in Russia's Far East as he took a part in the national program for preserving the population of the Ussuri tiger conducted by researchers of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Animal-loving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been accused of staging his famous encounter with a tigress three years ago. St. Petersburg-based environmentalists Dmitry Molodtsov says that photos of the animal that Putin tagged with a GPS collar in 2008 and subsequent images of what preservationists claimed was the same tigress in fact showed two different animals, indicating that Putin's tigress never was let out into the wild. Molodtsov claimed Friday that Putin's tigress was borrowed from a local zoo for the occasion. A coordinator at the government-funded Amur tiger conservation project dismissed his claim as untrue.(AP Photo / RIA-Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin, Pool)

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, left, walk before a government meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow, Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013. (AP Photo/RIA-Novosti, Dmitry Astakhov, Government Press Service)

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** FILE ** Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) greets French actor Gerard Depardieu after Mr. Depardieu's arrival late Saturday, Jan. 5, 2013, at the president's residence in Sochi, Russia, the host city of the 2014 Winter Olympics. (AP Photo/RIA-Novosti, Mikhail Klimentyev, Presidential Press Service)