MOSCOW, RUSSIA - AFTER eight years overseeing an economic revival, clamping down on democratic change and strengthening Kremlin power as Russia's president, Mr Vladimir Putin is not done yet.
On Thursday Mr Putin was due to be confirmed as prime minister in a move expected to transform the relatively low-key office into a key power centre a day after protege Dmitry Medvedev replaced him as the country's president.
Mr Putin, 55, was a virtual unknown when he was picked by outgoing president Boris Yeltsin as his political heir less than nine years after the fall of the Soviet Union, taking Russians and the world by surprise.
The popularity of the shadowy former KGB officer, also a judo black-belt, quickly surged in his first months in office after he oversaw a brutal - but ultimately successful - fightback against Chechnya's separatist rebellion.
His many supporters in Russia say he has restored national pride on the world stage and a sense of relative well-being in a country deeply traumatised by economic collapse and political upheaval during the 1990s.
His critics say Mr Putin has merely benefited from high energy prices - Russia's main exports - and accuse him of creating a political system eerily reminiscent of Soviet one-party rule.
Ultimately the defining characteristic of Mr Putin's two terms in office may be the bolstering of Kremlin power, a campaign highlighted by the legal onslaught against the Yukos oil company and its billionaire owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Early beginnnings
Born on October 7, 1952, Mr Putin grew up in the tough post-war conditions of Saint Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, the son of factory workers who lived in one room of a communal apartment.
He says that as a teenager he decided to join the KGB intelligence agency after watching a spy movie.
'My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure product of Soviet patriotic education,' Mr Putin recounted in an interview.
After being told he would have to pursue his education to join the KGB, Mr Putin went to law school at Leningrad University and later managed to join the spy agency, securing a post in East Germany in 1985.
In Dresden, Mr Putin watched from a front-row seat the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and bitterly recounted how Moscow had hastily given up East Germany, where state security was among the most repressive in the Soviet bloc.
Back in Saint Petersburg in 1991, Mr Putin apparently left the KGB and joined the city administration of reformist mayor Anatoly Sobchak as an official in charge of economic relations.
Many of his associates from that time, including President Medvedev, have since become his main allies in the Kremlin, forming a closely-knit group referred to by political analysts as the 'Saint Petersburg clan.' After Mr Sobchak's electoral defeat in 1996, Mr Putin secured a job in Mr Yeltsin's presidential administration and just two years later landed the post of director of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB.
Still almost unknown to the public, Mr Yeltsin's trust in Mr Putin earned him another promotion as prime minister in August 1999 amid fighting in Dagestan, near Chechnya, and a series of apartment block bombings in Russian cities.
His tough line on Chechnya earned him strong approval ratings, although there were dark accusations of FSB collusion in the apartment bombings, which killed hundreds of people.
On December 31, 1999, Mr Yeltsin announced his resignation, leaving Mr Putin in charge and his anointed successor went on to win a landslide victory in an election three months later.
Holding the reins of power
In the succeeding years, Mr Putin took on media outlets that failed to toe the Kremlin line, brought the regions firmly under Moscow's control and put heavy restrictions on non-governmental groups.
The campaign culminated in 2003 with the arrest of Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who now sits in a Siberian jail convicted of fraud while fellow oligarchs made their peace with the Kremlin.
The Chechen war, which has only recently wound down, killed tens of thousands of people amid widespread accusations of mass human rights abuses by the Russian army and its Chechen allies.
On the international stage, Mr Putin has taken an increasingly assertive and some say adversarial stance with the West that he sees as bent on weakening Russia, leading to warnings of a new cold war.
Russia has suspended compliance to a Cold War arms treaty, flexed its muscle in world energy markets and criticised pro-Western regimes that have come to power in former Soviet republics.
Relations with Britain have been strained over Mr Putin's refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, who is wanted on charges of poisoning ex-KGB officer Mr Alexander Litvinenko in London with a radioactive substance.
Mr Putin is married to Ms Lyudmila Shkrebneva, a former flight attendant, and the couple have two daughters: Masha and Yekaterina, who are almost entirely out of the public eye.
