Putin is very much afraid of leaving. Because he is formally right now in his first term, so has another eight years from now. Legally, he has created all the mechanisms for himself. He's a lawyer.

Putin is just maneuvering. He wants to be respected. He wants to be an important player in global politics. He wants people to negotiate with him and he wants to have the trade-offs here and there and spheres of influence. He's very much a person of the 20th century in the global and geopolitical space.

Some politicians are scared of Putin and some are extremely apologetic, actually. And I feel very sorry for this because some people who are like my friends from the left flank, they praise Putin because they see him as the fighter against American imperialism, which he is not. You know, why would you select between American imperialism and Russian imperialism? To my mind, it's exactly the same thing.

Putin is very much afraid of leaving. Because he is formally right now in his first term, so has another eight years from now. Legally, he has created all the mechanisms for himself. He's a lawyer.

Right now, I see a lot of alarming trends inside Russia, especially in Siberia, which I represent in the parliament. People start to ask questions: If we mine all the natural resources - if we have all the oil, all the gas, all the coal, all the gold, all the diamonds - why the hell do we need central Russia? They are just eating at our resources. Without Moscow having a response for this, it would face very nasty questions such as one that was asked during my recent reelection campaign - it actually became a slogan of my campaign - "Stop feeding Moscow."

Putin is not a strategist at all. He has brilliant tactics, but he is a very bad strategist overall. And I think he is acting very opportunistically there, just to play the cards with America. He was very proud of himself when he convinced us to give up on chemical weapons so that it could be played down and prevent an invasion, and that was very helpful for Obama because Obama saved his face and didn't order airstrikes at that very moment. Putin was extremely proud. That's the kind of thing Putin does.

From the point of view of legislation of the Constitution, my mandate has been given by my constituency. So it's only my constituency that can revoke my mandate. So until the next election, nobody is supposed to do anything.