Bush and Blair vented their mutual aggravation with Putin during a call two weeks later. “I left St. Petersburg more worried about Russia than ever,” Blair told Bush on July 28. “You should be,” Bush agreed. “We talked at dinner. He’s okay with centralization, which he thinks leads to stabilization. I told him, ‘What happens when the next guy comes and abuses it?’ He said, ‘I’ll stop him.’ He thinks he’ll be around forever. He asked me why I didn’t change the Constitution so I could run again.”
