President Vladimir Putin of Russia celebrated the New Year by having an American tourist, Paul Whelan, arrested as a spy. Mr. Whelan was in Moscow to attend a wedding. But Mr. Putin needed a hostage as a potential trade for a Russian woman with Kremlin connections — Maria Butina, who had pleaded guilty of conspiring with a Russian official “to establish unofficial lines of communication with Americans having power and influence over U.S. politics.” So Mr. Putin grabbed Mr. Whelan, who has not been released.

Of course Mr. Putin did that. I’ve known him since the early 1990s. As a businessman in St. Petersburg, I spent scores of hours with Volodya, as he was known in those days, while he was the city’s deputy mayor. He sat in my headquarters on Stone Island as we conversed, in the almost-perfect German he likes to speak, over beer and Bavarian food. My trust in those early days was based on the fact that he acted rationally and appeared to be sincere in his interest in St. Petersburg. He didn’t take bribes, but he did cover for those who did, including his bosses — Mayor Anatoly Sobchak and later President Boris Yeltsin. Mr. Putin signed the registration papers for my security company and personally registered them. He advised and counseled me. He helped me expand my business. And at his request, I built, trained and equipped St. Petersburg’s first Western-style K.G.B. SWAT team, in preparation for the 1994 Goodwill Games there.

From our conversations in 1992, I realized that Mr. Putin understood that it was not the West, but the Soviet socialist system that was responsible for the social and economic downfall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, when we spoke about my native Germany, there was every indication that he had accepted German reunification as inevitable once the Berlin Wall came down. It was after he became president in 2000 that he worried increasingly about Russia’s political and economic failures and bemoaned a lack of what he considered proper respect from the West — and turned Russia inward with ideology and religion as tools.

For me, a different moment of change came in 1996, when my company and the headquarters in which I’d invested more than $1 million was expropriated by President Yeltsin. Volodya shrugged and told me there was nothing he could to do to help. And I began watching him metamorphose from a minor bureaucrat into the authoritarian four-times-elected president of Russia. I can tell you the Mr. Putin that Americans read about today is nothing like either the Mr. Putin I knew at first or the one I know now.