The second war against separatists in the Caucasus republic of Chechnya decisively hauled the country from split-up and boosted Putin's popularity to as high as some 70 percent.

The president made his second step to strengthen the central government's power by kicking oligarchs out of the power center and even the country.

Lacking broad public support in the mid-1990s, the then president Yeltsin turned to the country's super-rich, whose fortunes mostly were collected from Soviet debris, for help. Those oligarchs, such as billionaire Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, once had an important say in the government decision-making and dominated the media.

Several months after the 2000 presidential election, Gusinsky was jailed and then ousted from the country, agreeing to pass control of NTV television to state-owned gas monopoly Gazprom.

Oligarchs' political ambitions were mostly blown out in 2003, when oil giant Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky was sent into jail. The once richest man in the country is still serving his prison sentence of eight years for fraud and tax evasion.

In the following years, Putin started to streamline the government structure and promote the pro-Kremlin United Russia party as a ruling party with parliamentary majority to strengthen the executive power.

Putin has also managed to achieve remarkable economic improvement, registering an around 7 percent annual economic growth from 2000 to 2007, making the country one of the world's top ten economies and a member of what is called the Golden BRICs, a group of prominent emerging markets including Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Putin's cabinet took a series of initiatives to boost the economy, such as including expanding investment, stimulating domestic consumption, optimizing industrial structure, encouraging exports of high-tech products, facilitating energy exports, cracking down on economic crime and underground economic activities, as well as improving fiscal, financial and tax systems.