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In February 10th 2007 President of Russia V. Putin held a speech at the 43th Munich Security Conference. The speech included both the matters of security and global policy. Researchers in Russia together as well as their western colleagues (political scientists, journalists, historians and other analysts) obviously came to the same opinion - that was the speech of the Russian president that attracted all the attention to this annual conference not being so traditionally popular as, for example, the “G-8” or the APEC summits. And though the estimations of the ideas advocated by Putin in his speech predictably differ depending on political creed and engagement of the analysts (sometimes that was also the matter of their erudition), the importance of the event was undisputable. Today one decade past the event we have the opportunity not just to analyze the crucial principles which Putin tried to clarify to his foreign partners, but also to verify them through the prism of approbation, as the scientists say. But before we start to study the speech itself, we should reveal the global political circumstances, in which the Conference took place. What was Russia as a global power in the beginning of the XXI century and was it a true global power in 2007? Was the political weight of the Russian president enough for bringing the influence into the world? Finally, what was the perceptions of Russia in the western community 15 years after the greatest transformation of the global political role of the country in Europe and in the world? After finding the answers on these questions we will reveal the main theses of the Russian presidents’ speech and will try to give them possibly candid estimation. In the work the authors used a wide methodological list. The historical-analytical method made it possible to reveal the evolution of the problems outlined in the speech of V.V. Putin for the specified time period (10 years). The comparative method allowed us to compare the basic conditions in which Russia was at the time of the president’s speech in Munich in 2007 and the conditions in which our country is today. The method of political forecasting underlies the construction of the main conclusions and forecasts, which determine the scientific and theoretical novelty of the study.

Piotr Dutkiewicz is the professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Center for Governance and Public Policy at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). He got his education at Warsaw University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a Visiting Fellow at St. Peter’s and Nuffield Colleges in Oxford and a Visiting Professor at Berkeley University, Institute for International Relations. He is a member of the Valdai Club, a group of forty renowned experts on Russia. In 2009, he received the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation from President Dmitry Medvedev. In this interview professor Dutkiewicz will tell us about the main contradictions shaping the new world order.

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