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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon on June 22, 2025. (Andrew Harnik via Getty Images)
__Hudson Institute and the Kleptocracy Initiative would like to give special thanks to Valery Balayan, director of the film, for permission to screen Who Is Mr. Putin? at Hudson on April 27, 2016.__
Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative hosted the first U.S. screening and English-language premiere of the film Who Is Mr. Putin? Based on investigations by independent journalists Anastasia Kirilenko and Vladimir Ivanidze, the film documents the origins of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s private wealth and subsequent rise to power.
The film has been lauded by experts for demonstrating how Putin's ascension to the Russian presidency is explained by an alliance built in the early 1990s between himself, certain friends from Leningrad's KGB, and mafia groups. Who Is Mr. Putin? was released in December 2015 and has already been viewed by more than 2 million Russian-speakers worldwide.
The screening was followed by a short panel discussion, moderated by Hudson Senior Fellow David Satter, featuring Anastasia Kirilenko, Karen Dawisha, and Ilya Zaslavskiy.
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Actors perform during a ceremony as part of a presentation of a fifteenth-century ring believed to have been owned by French heroine Joan of Arc on March 20, 2016, at the Puy du Fou historical theme park in Les Epesses, France. (Jean-Sebastien Evrard via Getty Images)
