Investigative Journalists

"Bombing a white-flag convoy is a war crime. So is using vacuum bombs against civilians. So is torture on an industrial scale. I saw damning evidence of all three in Putin's war on Chechnya and I came away struggling to understand how the West could let these Russian crimes against humanity go unchecked. The evidence that Vladimir Putin was a war criminal in 2000 was clear. All I can say is this: I bloody well told you so."

"If Litvinenko, Felshtinsky, Satter and I could discover the truth about the Moscow apartment bombings, so could the CIA and MI6. What happened instead was a sick-think by the Western foreign-policy establishment. They wanted to believe that Putin was a democrat, a friend of the West, someone with whom they could do business. They set out to bury the evidence to the contrary."

"It is hard, virtually impossible, to convey just how cruel the Second Chechen War was, how pitiless the master of the Kremlin's killing machine. The hardest thing for me, as a reporter, as a human being, to bear was to witness the colossal mistake made by the West's leaders who cuddled up to Vladimir Putin while the evidence of his war crimes in Chechnya, and the crimes against humanity committed when the FSB blew up Moscow apartment buildings, was overwhelming."

"September 1999 is the time, the way I see it, when Russia ceases to be a democracy. The Moscow apartment bombings were Vladimir Putin's original sin, and any Russian who dared to investigate them lived in mortal danger."

"The evidence is compelling that the very thing which galvanized Vladimir Putin's career in Russian politics – his fightback against Chechen bomb outrages – was, in fact, a black operation by the secret police. That Vladimir Putin blew up Russia."

"Common sense says it would be madness for a group of Chechens to smuggle explosives all the way from Urus-Martan to Moscow. Since the First Chechen War, Chechens are routinely singled out for harassment by Russian police, vehicles are stopped and searched, identity papers demanded. Besides, there has long been a strong Chechen mafia in Moscow, very capable of getting its hands on arms or explosives in the city. In Russia, in the 1990s, you could bribe your way into a nuclear rocket silo. The 'Chechen terrorists' would have been risking a great deal by hauling their explosives roughly 1,000 miles to Moscow when they could have bought them at the back of a local flea market."

"One Chechen view was: 'If we had wanted to bomb Moscow, we would have blown up the Kremlin or a nuclear power station. Why should we blow up a couple of blocks of flats?'"

"The Chechens had humiliated the might of Russia in the First Chechen War (1994–6), which [[Boris Yeltsin|[Boris] Yeltsin]] had started in a drunken rage. The Russian Army had fought the war with great brutality and greater incompetence. The Chechens fought them to a kind of stalemate, partly because Yeltsin, when he had sobered up, realized that he had been stupid and cruel."

"Putin's understanding of the world is maddeningly narrow, reduced to a gloomy tunnel vision, locked into a false narrative of betrayal. He once declared the fall of the Soviet Union 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century'. What? Worse than the First and Second World Wars? Worse than the Holocaust? The Soviet Union was, in reality, a dark totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin that slowly morphed into a gloomy senility."

"The Soviet Union could not afford to feed or house or care for its people, so it started to implode. Putin, the secret policeman in Dresden, never properly grasped the power of these three failures [the invasion of Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster, and the collapse of the command economy]. His tragedy – our tragedy – was that he had no first-hand knowledge of the three catastrophes. He was too high up in the secret police food chain to be sent to Chernobyl; too pathetically low to be sent to the fag-end of the failing war in Afghanistan; let alone to the fleshpots of the West where he would have seen the stark evidence of how ordinary people in New Jersey or New Brighton in the Wirral lived so much better than in Moscow, let alone Omsk or Tomsk. He never saw the comparative evidence of Soviet economic failure with his own eyes or, if he did, he was too brainwashed to understand what he was looking at. Instead, from the bowels of Stasiland, he came to internalize a dark nonsense, that his country's collapse was due to Western trickery and domestic betrayal, rather than the simple facts that the Soviet Union had run out of cash and self-belief and purpose. It was a failed state, just like the Kaiser's Germany became a failed state after it launched its own stupid war in 1914. Like Hitler in 1923, Putin from 1991 onwards breathed a poisonous fiction, that his country had been wronged, that it 'had been stabbed in the back'. In truth, it fell apart because it had been wrong, it had stabbed itself in the front, three times over."

"The evidence at Nuremberg Two of Russian war crimes will be overwhelming. Satellite images, drone footage, eye-witness accounts, Bellingcat open-source material. A cyclist on a green bike in Bucha. His execution in early March by a Russian Army tank as he turns a corner, filmed by a drone. His body next to the wrecked bike filmed by reporters when the Ukrainian Army returned to the city. Once again: Kremlin inhumanity on repeat."

"When the Kremlin decided that it was foolish to keep sending yet more of its boys to die here, the Russian Army hit reverse gear. And as they did so, they expressed their dismay at their wretched performance against proper soldiers by butchering innocent civilians in the hundreds. By the way, satellite imagery taken during the Russian occupation shows bodies on the streets before the Ukrainians recaptured Bucha. The Russian Army carried out these killings. Full stop."

"Putin is a rational actor inside a bunker, so deep, so deprived of light and information, that he is pulling levers without understanding how the modern world is responding, without understanding that some of his levers at least are no longer working, without understanding that invading countries at peace is what the Nazis did."

"Paranoia is what ex-KGB spies do instead of playing golf."

"Paranoia is destroying the Russian Army from within. Vladimir Putin is a prisoner in his own high castle, just like Stalin. His terror of revealing his hand too early, and it being leaked to the Americans, was so great that he kept back his true invasion plans for and from the army until the day before the invasion. So the Russian general staff have had to make up the war as they go along – and the result has been disastrous. Generals have been appointed on the basis of their fealty to the Kremlin, not their courage, not their competence."

"Russian soldiers eat the best possible nutritious rations of any military, so long as it's dog food."

"Putin says that the government of Ukraine is neo-Nazi. The president is Jewish; the Russians attacked Babi Yar. For the avoidance of any doubt, it's not the Ukrainians who are behaving like the Nazis in this war."

"I am a sixty-three-year-old war reporter. I have covered wars and madness in Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa, the Romanian revolution, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I have seen babies with hacked limbs and an old man with his eyes blown in by an artillery shell and people with their lungs sucked inside out and a man with his brain sliced with a machete – and there is nothing worse than watching kids smile in war, watching the aristocracy of the human soul. It makes me cry – and cry I do."

"Some idiot is moving heavy furniture around in the flat above and I wake up with a start. I'm about to give Lambeth Council a ring to get them to sort him out when I remember I am in Kyiv and it's four o'clock in the morning, and it's not tables and chairs that are going bang but Russian artillery. The idiot is Vladimir Putin and his idiot war is two days old."

"Andrei, easily the most intelligent and sophisticated of the long-lasting sycophants, could well have behaved decently – in return for what favours one can only guess. Perhaps he was genuinely a good man. Perhaps."

"[...] the very function of the House of the People was [...] to make concrete the social inequality between the dictator's lowly vassals and the pomp and might of His Majesty. The architect of the House had been selected by a competition. There were a lot of interesting and arresting designs, but, to put it rather brusquely, the architect who came up with the most banal, Stalinist pastiche appealed successfully to the Ceausescu's taste. The prizewinner, after the revolution, has disappeared from view because she has been battered by much hostile criticism."

"No Marxist could take Ceausescu seriously after he was seen wandering around on state occasions carrying his sceptre in 1974, the one which so delighted Salvador Dali. The sceptre was the physical emodiment of Ceausescu's drift from the anti-statist, anti-personality bedrock of Marxist thought and practice. Of course, these principles had more often been breached than obeyed in the various communist states since the October revolution, but to play king so blatantly was thought somewhat indecent even among the unblushing despots of the Soviet empire. The 'Bourbonification' of the Ceausescu dynasty can be traced back to the early Seventies, but in the late Eighties it became more and more crass."

"The results of Ceausescu's exercise in social engineering could be seen immediately after the revolution throughout the country in orphanages and hospital wards where the unwanted babies lay. The unwanted included the babies suffering from AIDS – though the regime did not recognise that Romania had an AIDS problem. This official blindness made the problem worse, disastrously so. An old medical habit – abandoned in the West long before the Second World War – had lingered in Romania. It was to inject newborn babies with blood to give them greater strength. One batch of blood contaminated with AIDS, probably in a rare aid package from the United States, was the root cause. The lack of fresh, clean needles for the injections led, through cross-infection, to an AIDS epidemic among the young. But as this too officially did not happen, nothing was done about it."

"The effect of Pacepa's defection on Ceausescu's mental state was to destabilise him even more. He became quite crazy for a time and suffered a further, permanent loss of proportion. What talent there remained in his circle was removed in the whitch-hunt that followed the defection."

"What was the value to the West of Ceausescu's dissent from Moscow's diktat? Was it of inestimable worth? Or was it, in fact, a marginal propaganda gain of little real substance? Ceausescu was an irritant to the Russians, but they never felt threatened by him. They did march their troops up and down near the Romanian border when Ceausescu was visiting China in 1971; but they invaded Czechoslovakia when the Prague spring got out of hand. The difference is clear. Dubček challenged the communist system. Ceausescu never did. He was not, then, a serious 'enemy of my enemy'. The West misread the cards."

"There was an enormous amount of dissent in Romania, but it was passive, not active. There were far fewer workers and intellectuals who confronted brute power head on in Romania than in, say, Czechoslovakia or Poland. That has partly to be explained by the savagery of the Securitate compared to, for example, the Czech secret police, the StB, and partly the Romanians' lack of a democratic transition and the historic culture of submission."

"In Ceausescu's Romania madness was enthroned, sanity a disease."

"North Korea is an abomination to man as a freethinking individual."

"By common consent Ceausescu went mad during his and Elena's trip to China and North Korea in 1971. He went out an unstable paranoiac; he came back a madman. People close to him debate which had the more pernicious influence, China or North Korea. Terrible as Mao's China was as it emerged from the throes of the Cultural Revolution, North Korea was then and still is the more totalitarian society, and enjoys the distinction of being the most pyramidal society on earth."

"The Ceausescu cult was fed by a job lot of Westerners keen to do business with the one Eastern European leader who could, it appeared, stand up to the Russians and survive. At first, there was a trickle, then a torrent of Western visitors all singing Ceausescu's tune, none of them too choosy about the reality of the man they met – the myth was too much to their liking."

"The 'conditioning' of the communist terror of the late Forties and early Fifties was so strong, so severe that it only required the lightest caress from the Securitate to have the average Romanian lying prone in a position of abject submission. Whatever liberal sentiments Ceausescu expressed in his speeches, the secret policemen were still present, waiting, listening, asking questions. There was no need for Ceausescu to clump heavy-handedly about, threatening people. It had all been done so effectively a generation before and people had not forgotten. The people barked to command, because they knew what happened to the disobedient. Once the dog is trained, there is little need for the whip."

"Ceausescu substituted constructive action with frenzy. He went on a continuous rollercoaster, whistle-stop tour of the country. Once on this whirligig of official visits, speeches and congresses, he never got off it. The whirligig became faster and faster and more elaborate, with visits to foreign countries and a constant shuffling of ministers and ministries. It makes anyone who tries to follow it dizzy. It consumed his and everybody else's time; it wasted resources and achieved little. But inside Ceausescu's head frenzy equalled progress: it was an intellectual confusion to which, as time rolled on, the whole country was to succumb."

"Perhaps Red Horizons is a scissors-and-paste job by an unsung, CIA-approved ghostwriter. The raw material reads like translated of Pacepa's debriefing conversations held in Romanian with his CIA case officers immediately after he defected. Pacepa often quotes chunks of Ceausescu's old speeches, freely available from Romanian embassies and in Western libraries, as 'remembered convervations'; occasionally he even quotes the text of Romanian decrees as spouting out of Ceausescu's mouth."

"Red Horizons is no better than Bucharest secret policeman's gossip: sordid, dully pornographic, intrusive, morally repugnant, incoherent yet endlessly fascinating. Ceausescu is seen as a power-mad, deeply dishonest paranoiac, as well as someone who cheats at chess. Elena comes of worse, if that is possible, as a sluttish, bad-tempered moron."

"Poor man: history will never forgive him for proposing Ceausescu as the new general secretary of the party on the death, in 1965, of Gheorghiu-Dej."

"Virtually any description of life under the monarchy makes anyone who knows Ceausescu's Bucharest wince with regret for the good old days. Architecture, cuisine, culture, press freedom, prison conditions, freedom to travel, to go to church: all seem to have been better before the communists. Only the quantity of whores in Bucharest appears to have remained constant."

"Paranoia appears to be the occupational disease of any Romanian ruler, and Carol II was no exception. Like Ceausescu, he knocked down buildings near his home – in this case, the Royal Palace – to make a clear field for machine-gun fire."

"For most of its history Romania has been divided, skewered and kebabed by a succession of foreign invaders and masters, some of whom were unspeakably nasty. Cruel as Ceausescu's time was, it was not without precedent in his country's history."

"To understand the extraordinary fact of Ceausescu's monolithic power, and the otherwise incomprehensible lack of resistance to it, one must try to experience the sheer dead weight the Romanians bore day in, day out. During the twenty-four years of his reign, their thoughts were blunted and restricted by what George Orwell might have called 'Homagespeak'."

"His tongue could not get round seemingly simple phrases like tutulor, a form of address meaning 'to everybody'. When Ceausescu said it, it sounded like 'everyboggy'. It is hard to put across to those who have not heard Romanian, a language waggishly described by the BBC's John Simpson as a 'mixture of dog Latin and Esperanto', just how uncouth Ceausescu sounded. To American ears, one must imagine a New Jersey drawl; to British ears, one should think of a Wolverhampton whine: provincial, but not interestingly so."

"To write anything about Ceausescu without discussing his secret police is like Hamlet without the Prince, everybody else and the skull."

"This is a horror story – a true one – about a monster who came to be president of a country."

"It enjoyed the material and spiritual backing of the German Nazis and the Fascists under Mussolini, and combined Jew-baiting with apocalyptical orthodoxy, appeals to Romanian nationalism with a samurai's reverence for violent death and suicide."

"One of my political heroes is the former head of the IRA Martin McGuinness."

"NO, TOMMY, YOU STOP NOW!!! NO, LISTEN TO ME!!! YOU WERE NOT THERE-AT THE BEGINNING-OF-THAT-INTERVIEW!!! YOU-WERE-NOT-THERE!!! YOU DID NOT HEAR OR RECORD-ALL THE INTERVIEW!!! [calms down] Do you understand? Do you understand? [continues shouting] YOU ARE QUOTING THE SECOND HALF OF THE INTERVIEW, NOT THE FIRST HALF! YOU CANNOT ASSERT WHAT YOU'RE SAYING! [calms down] Now, you listen to me."

"I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it, it makes me cringe."

"All concerned deny any wrongdoing."

"Full of flaws, unbelievably arrogant, a man who did flirt with the far right, but, over the course of the last ten years, the boy from Chernobyl stood up for the idea of another Russia, a country not defined by grotesque corruption, cruelty and a stupid war, but by honesty, courage and great good humour. That secures his place in history. When all hope was lost, and Russia turned, yet again, back to darkness, then along came a knight in dented armour, tilting at evil windmills. Alexei Navalny was bold and good. Alexei Navalny kept the red eye of Russia's soul alive and one day it will start blink-blink-blinking again as it stomps, like Terminator 2, towards the machinery of greed that controls the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny is dead, but what he stood for will be back."

"Dictators fuck things up, big time. They destroy the chance of peaceful political change so that when, eventually, they die in their sleep or blow their brains out or are stabbed repeatedly in the anus – the respective ends of Stalin, Hitler, Gaddafi – chaos reigns. At best, for him, old age will come to Vladimir Putin and then the only end of age and the Russia he created will fall apart. At worst, Alexei Navalny's prediction after the fireball that did for Evgeny Prigozhin that creating, then destroying, armed gangs is a recipe for civil war will come true sooner than Putin thinks. And then, perhaps, Russia will descend into Mad Max with snow on its boots, cast out of the pale by the Western world, hated by the Islamists in its south and east, its Siberian riches eyed by the Chinese dragon."

"The Make America Great Again wing of the US Republican Party has been highly critical of Ukrainian attempts to police the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church, also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, not perhaps realising that its head, Patriarch Kirill, was an active KGB agent in Soviet times, has been mired in a cigarette smuggling scandal and is reckoned to be worth $4 billion. For the avoidance of doubt, Kirill has called Putin's presidency 'a miracle of God'. Praise be, some say."