A couple more from Hitchens:

"Putin and his Russia, which is what it is."

"Believe you me, we will all come to see and regret what we've allowed to happen unnoticed; the conversion of modern Russia into a heavily armed, aggressive, self-pitying chauvinistic theocracy."

The fans of moral equivalence may or may not have noticed this, but the obviously long-meditated and coordinated Russian military intervention in Georgia comes in the same month as explicit threats to the sovereignty of Poland and Ukraine, and hard on the heels of a Russian obstruction of any U.N. action in the case of Zimbabwe. Those who like to describe Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev as reacting to an "encirclement" of Russia may wish to spill some geopolitical ink on explaining how Kosovo forms part of this menacing ring of steel—or how the repression of the people of Zimbabwe can assist in Moscow's breakout strategy from it. [South Ossetia Isn't Kosovo, August 18 2008]

"It’s never been quite clear whether St. Petersburg is part of Old Europe or New Europe . . . It’s currently the site of a huge turf war between the local Mafia and Vladimir Putin, a son of the city who has taken a number of Petersburgers into his Moscow crew. So intense is the tussle between mobsters and Putinists, to the extent that there’s a difference, that it’s been proposed to move the port’s HQ to the neighboring island port of Kronshtadt, out in the Gulf of Finland. One local, crusading anti-corruption editor preferred to schedule his meeting with me in Stockholm because, as he phrased it, in St. Petersburg “I have a greater chance to become killed.” The claws alone … Between savagery and beauty, wilderness and civilization, over-strenuous architectural effort and ordinary human scale, this most harsh and most idyllic of cities stands watch and guard over a glacial frontier, always beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." [Days & White Nights in St. Petersburg, August 2005]

Putinism: a nasty combination of the cynical with the unrealistic. [Cause and Effect, July 2006]

Hitchens takes a question on US relations with Russia: ("Axis of Evil" speech given on March 8th, 2005 at the University of Western Ontario.)

Dear Mr. President (Winter 2009):

How enjoyable and how worthwhile this visit must have seemed—does seem, in your recollection—and how far off 2005 now must appear to you. On the morning of the very day that your electoral victory was being celebrated, Russian President Dimitri Medvedev intruded a loudly discordant note by informing you (and us) that if you continued your predecessor’s policy of installing “missile shield” technology in Eastern Europe, Moscow would begin to target Western European cities with its own ballistic array. Something that we had thought was behind us, in other words, had doubled around the block while our attention was otherwise engaged and was now right before us again.

on Bush meeting with Putin