Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia since 2000, is 70 today, October 7.
Glimpses from the life of Russia's current tsar:
IMAGE: Putin and his then wife Lyudmila at the Taj Mahal, October 4, 2000. Photograph: Reuters
IMAGE: Putin receives the traditional bread and salt from a Ukrainian woman dressed in national clothes on his arrival in Zaporizhzhya, October 6, 2002. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin and Sonia Gandhi at their meeting in New Delhi January 25, 2007. Photograph: B Mathur/Reuters
IMAGE: Then President A P J Abdul Kalam with Putin at the At Home at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Republic Day 2007. Photograph: B Mathur/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin and his then wife Lyudmila at the opening dinner of the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, June 6, 2007. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
IMAGE: Putin strokes a tiger cub at his Novo Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, October 9, 2008. Photograph: RIA Novosti/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin, who likes to portray himself as famously macho, swims in a lake in southern Siberia's Tuva region, August 3, 2009. Photograph: RIA Novosti/Pool/Alexei Druzhinin/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin greets then President Pratibha Patil at Rashtrapati Bhavan, March 12, 2010. Photograph: B Mathur/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin takes part in an expedition to the Ubsunur hollow biosphere preserve to inspect the snow leopard's habitat in the Tyva republic in the Siberian federal district, October 29, 2010. Photograph: Alexsey Druginyn/RIA Novosti/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin at an ice hockey training session in Moscow. Photograph: Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin visits a bike festival in the southern Russian city of Novorossiisk, August 29, 2011. Photograph: Ivan Sekretarev/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin takes aim with a rifle for the partially sighted during a visit to meet disabled athletes in Sochi, March 9, 2012. Photograph: Alexsey Druginyn/RIA Novosti/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin with then prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh, December 24, 2012. Photograph: Grigory Dukor/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin is seen through the glass of a C-Explorer 5 submersible after a dive to see the remains of the naval frigate Oleg, which sank in the 19th century in the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea, July 15, 2013. Photograph: Alexei Nikolskyi/RIA Novosti/Kremlin/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin places a shawl around then German chancellor Angela Merkel as then Britain's prime minister David Cameron watcg a fragment of the ballet Ruslan and Lyudmila during the G-20 Summit in Peterhof near St Petersburg, September 6, 2013. Photograph: Alexander Demianchuk/Reuters
IMAGE: Left to Right: Putin, Narendra Modi, Brazil's then president Dilma Rousseff and Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist party of China, at the BRICS Summit in Fortaleza, July 15, 2014. Photograph: Paulo Whitaker/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin exercises at the Bocharov Ruchei state residence in Sochi, August 30, 2015. Photograph: Michael Klimentyev/RIA Novosti/Kremlin/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin enters a hall at the Kremlin, October 1, 2015, to meet with members of the presidential council for civil society and human rights. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin practises judo with Musa Mogushkov of the Russian national judo team in Sochi, January 8, 2016. Photograph: Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik/Kremlin/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin plays with his dog Yume in Moscow, December 7, 2016. Photograph: Sputnik/Kremlin/Alexei Druzhinin via Reuters
IMAGE: Putin at a Night League hockey match in Sochi, May 10, 2017. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin and Modi visit the Zvezda shipyard, accompanied by Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, ahead of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, September 4, 2019. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: A man, wearing a shirt printed in the colours of the Russian national flag and depicting Putin, crosses a street in St Petersburg, Putin's home city, May 21, 2022. Photograph: Anton Vaganov/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin greets a medic as he visits soldiers wounded during the conflict in Ukraine at the Mandryk military hospital in Moscow, May 25, 2022. Photograph: Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin at a meeting with ornithologists and members of the Kamchatka falcon breeding centre in Kamchatka, Russia, September 5, 2022. Photograph: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool/Reuters
IMAGE: Putin and Denis Pushilin, Leonid Pasechnik, Vladimir Saldo, Yevgeny Balitsky, who are the Russian-installed leaders in Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, at a ceremony to declare the annexation of the Russian-controlled territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, after holding what the Russian authorities called referendums in the occupied areas of Ukraine in the Georgievsky Hall at the Great Kremlin palace in Moscow, September 30, 2022. Photograph: Sputnik/Dmitry Astakhov/Pool/Reuters
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff.com
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com