On a visit to New York in 2003, Vladimir Putin pitched himself to investors as an economic reformer willing to engage western capitalists, telling us that Russia was more than just another petrostate and shared the values of a “normal European nation”.
Those words ring hollow now that Putin is invading Ukraine, but he seemed sincere at the time. Having taken over a nation battered in the late 1990s by financial crisis and default, he was pushing privatisation and deregulation. He instituted a flat 13 per cent income tax, winning over US conservatives. With a boost from oil prices, reforms helped to increase Russian per capita income from $2,000 at the start of his tenure in 2000 to a peak of $16,000 by the early 2010s.
But power and success changed Putin. Unlike his peers in other emerging markets, he soon stopped meeting foreign fund managers. One of his aides told me such meetings were for “middling and small powers”, not great ones like the US and Russia.