Poo-tin or Pew-tin ?

Can we make up our mind who we're going to war on ?

From the BBC Pronunciation Unit in 2006: A frequently mispronounced name is Vladimir Putin. The stress on the first name falls on the second syllable, and there is no "pew" sound in the surname: vluh-DEE-meer POO-tin."

However, compare and contrast this piece from the New York Times' man in Paris, William Safire, back in 2005... 

"We in the English-speaking world, and in most of the Western world using the 26-letter Roman alphabet, write the Russian president's name as "Putin." That's not a good transliteration from the 32-letter modern Cyrillic alphabet, which the Russians use, because our Roman spelling suggests we pronounce it PYOO-tin, as in "putrid," or PUT-in, as in "put-down."

"We are officially informed by the Kremlin that Vladimir Putin pronounces the u in this name with neither the yew sound nor the u in put or but. If we wanted our spelling to represent accurately the sound of the way Russians pronounce the first syllable of his name, it would be POO-tin or POU-tin. Our mouthing of that last syllable would still be a little off because of what phonologists, the scientists of sounds, call "the soft t," which doesn't exist in our alphabet. The closest I can get in Roman spelling to the sound of his name in Russian would be POO-tsyin, or POO-tyeen."