John Sweeney (journalist)

"In Russia, Putin's enemies are not allowed to have a private life. We know all about what they do in the bedroom. But no one knows simple facts about Vladimir Putin. How many kids has he got? With whom? And are they by any chance extraordinarily rich?"

"Putin shapes his public image to the nth degree. Never mind the fake sun shining from behind North Korea's fatty-fat despot, Kim Jong-un, or the Hollywood stars worshipping the leader of the Church of Scientology, Vladimir Putin's cult of personality is the richest, the most well-funded in the whole world. [...] To me, it looks as though this is a man who had an unexceptionally unhappy and unloved childhood, who fears mockery and being laughed at, who wants to show to the world that he is the master of all he surveys, but comes across as a small boy, out for revenge. But then I'm not the target audience."

"He wanted Ukraine like he had wanted all the other things that rightfully did not belong to him. Time and again, he had probed the West's steel and found jelly. But this time, Ukraine, its president, its people and its army had other ideas. This time Mr Pleonexia found people who said, 'No, that's not yours. It's ours. Give it back'. No wonder he seems so surprised that Ukraine played hardball. That was not supposed to happen."

"The received story of Putin's two decades plus in power was of his tolerance of a monstrously corrupt system. The trade-off with the oligarchs was they were allowed to keep much of their fortunes so long as they paid the master of the Kremlin homage and tithes. And they had to keep their snouts out of power. Or else. But that description masks what's really going on. Putin is stealing Russia's wealth, big time, personally, but he cannot be seen to be doing so – psychologically, he hates the idea of being caught out – so he employs proxies to do the stealing for him. True, the oligarchs emerged from the road-crash of the Soviet Union's implosion and Boris Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence. But with Yeltsin out of the way, a new president had an opportunity to strip the oligarchs of their ill-gotten and obscene wealth and start afresh. Instead, Putin cemented the oligarch system because it best suited his secret urge to take things that rightfully belonged to others."

"I asked him what he thought was the single biggest terrorist attack against his country and he replied, thankfully, there hasn't been one. Then I mentioned MH17, where 193 Dutch citizens died. It wasn't Islamist extremists who killed those people. He didn't like that but then he is, as I told him to his face, a bit of a fascist."

"In the flesh Vladimir Putin is nattily-dressed, very short and a dead ringer for an Auton, the ultra-creepy monsters in Doctor Who that morph into wheelie-bins and gobble you up and spit you out as plastic. His cosmetic surgery is not a great advert for Botox but if you get to be the master of the Kremlin no one's going to tell you your skin-job sucks."

"We don't know the whole story, and probably never will. But we do know that Vladimir Putin exhibits multiple signs of being a psychopath: smooth lying with no tics; fearless dominance; blame externalization; unexplained easy life."

"[[Boris Nemtsov|[Boris] Nemtsov]] was an extraordinary man, the sweetest, funniest and most human Russian I've ever met. His brutal snuffing out caused me to sink into a profound depression."

"He was shot in the back of the back several times one hundred metres or so from the walls of the Kremlin, one of the most closely CCTV-filmed areas on earth. The official narrative was that a bin lorry obscured the Kremlin's cameras from capturing the killer or killers. Attentive readers will have already got it, but for the avoidance of any doubt the official narrative is a load of old hogwash. In my four decades-plus of reporting, I have never been detained by police officers more often than outside the Kremlin. You cannot move five yards without a cop demanding to see your passport. The idea that Nemtsov was assassinated but that none of the Kremlin's cameras captured critical evidence is absurd."

"I say it to my Ukrainian friends again and again: there is another Russia. The problem is that the alternatives to Vladimir Putin are either dead or not very alive."

"What remains extraordinary about the Salisbury poisonings is the seeming stupidity of it. How so? Novichok is, like polonium-210, a very expensive poison. The two murderers were sent to Salisbury with their poison bottle but with no regard to the simple fact of modern British life, that the country is littered with six million CCTV cameras, more units per person than any other country apart from China. Whoever sent the GRU officers is a fool. Reflecting on this anomaly – multi-million-dollar secret poison delivered on candid camera – makes me draw a harsh and, perhaps, novel conclusion about the Russian secret state in the twenty-first century. [...] The ideological power of Communism's appeal [...] is long dead; so, too, is its darkest enemy, Hitler; so, too, is the state that created the KGB. In its place you have the Russian Federation, an ethno-nationalist kleptocracy run by a pleonexiac with too long a table. The West should not be surprised that the quality of the servants of the Russian secret state in the twenty-first century is, frankly, a bit rubbish."

"It is fair to say that the Russian secret state succeeded in getting worryingly close to serious political leaders in the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Time and again the Kremlin turned Western democracy into a game of matryoshka dolls. Lift out the Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Jeremy Corbyn or Matteo Salvini or Marine Le Pen dolls, and you come face to face with Vladimir Putin – smirking at you."

"As American and British politicians slowly began to see Putin for who he really was, Corbyn decided to echo, albeit in a faltering and weak voice, some of the Kremlin's messaging. This was because he was navigating simply by holding himself in constant opposition to American power. By doing so, he made himself yet another of the Kremlin's useful idiots. George Osborne and Peter Mandelson cosied up to Kremlin proxies for their own self-interest; Corbyn lost his bearings because his political ideology was so strong it twisted reality."

"The break-up of the European Union is a Kremlin goal and Brexit was a great Kremlin success."

"Nearly all my Ukrainian friends, whom I adore, believe there is something preternaturally wrong with Russia and the Russian soul, that Putin is just one monster among many from the swamp to the East. With love and with respect, I don't agree with them. This is Vladimir Putin's war. Like his wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria. Like his war without tanks and bombs against the West. Like his poisonings. It's down to him."

"The Putin I had challenged in 2014 was a different man, subtle, supple, willing to engage with a difficult BBC reporter, albeit only to lie so calmly. The Putin of 2022 was hyper-aggressive. But the reason I felt fear was something else. The Putin I had met in 2014 looked like a ferret or a reptile, thin-faced, lean. The 2022 Putin looks like a hamster, his cheeks stuffed, unhealthy. He looks like a man on steroids and that made me full of fear."

"Squealer in Animal Farm but without the charm."

"God knows how many civilians have been massacred by the Russian Army in the port city by the Black Sea. There are stories of mobile crematoria vans turning corpses into ash; there are satellite photos of more and yet more mass graves. The chances that the people of Ukraine would agree to a negotiated peace, leaving some of their country permanently under Russian control, is zero or so close to zero as not worth bothering about. Zelenskiy isn't going to try. The war is not going Russia's way, once again, because the morale of the Russian Army is poor; their logistics are rotten from the head down; their leaders are bad in both senses of the word; bad evil and bad incompetent."

"Russia does not tolerate failure for long. My sense is that Vladimir Putin no longer properly controls the machinery of the Kremlin in the way that he did at the start of 2022. And that the Kremlin machines no longer obey their master as before. He's beginning to look like the Wizard of Oz. All we are waiting for is the little dog to pull aside the curtain, and the shrunken faker bellowing into a loudhailer will be revealed to all."

"That Putin ends up poisoning himself is an ending fit for Shakespeare. Fortune, turn thy wheel."

"It's hard to check facts in Russia because if you do it properly you end up dead. If you doubt my word, you will get a lick with the rough end of my tongue. Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Esterimova, Boris Nemtsov and [[Alexei Navalny|[Alexei] Navalny]] all challenged the Kremlin's magical untruths to me in person. Now, they are no more: in sequence, poisoned, then shot; shot; shot; poisoned, twice, then murdered, precise method as yet unknown."

"Nothing official in Russia is true; or stays true for long. The poisoning of the well of information in the Western world through bots and counter-facts and internet rumours, dark fairy stories boosted on social media sites, is no accident but one of the most successful exports of the dark Russian state. Everything Putin does in the West, he's tried out back home before."

"Navalny's death brought forth tributes from around the world, but, more to the point, hundreds of people were arrested in Russia for daring to mark the passing of their hero. One noted exception to this outpouring of grief was Vladimir Putin. The day the news broke, he was hanging out in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals. Ordinarily a miserable git when he takes part in official ceremonies, Putin, parked a safe distance from any potentially infectious mortals, was full of fun, laughing, teasing and high as a kite. And why not? He'd just had the leader of the opposition murdered."

"Like Terminator 2, Navalny was an awkward sod but that comes with the territory if you have the balls to stand up to Putin. He was also charismatic, very; tall and blue-eyed, a natural leader whose love of the absurd saved him from turning into a full-blown messiah."

"It is extremely hard to come to a settled judgement on the weight of Russian opinion polls. My take is that if you say what you really think in twenty-first-century Russia, you are likely to jump out of a window very soon afterwards."

"Tucker Carlson was at one time the most watched cable news presenter in the States until he was sacked from Fox News. [...] On 9 February, Carlson, now freelance, interviewed Vladimir Putin in Moscow. What you got was a sometimes surreal but most often extremely boring encounter in which the Russian president lectured the far-right American television personality on abstruse bits of Russian history that set out his junk case that Ukraine belonged to Russia. Putin talked rubbish but Carlson let him get away with it. [...] The interview lasted two hours but Carlson failed to mention the fate of Russia's most famous political prisoner once. Is it possible that Putin banked Carlson's lack of interest in Navalny and steeled him to have him murdered a week later? I believe it is. [...] I struggle with this. I struggle with how someone as fluent as Carlson could be so wittingly ignorant of the succession of people critical of Putin who have ended up dead. I struggle with knowing the torture Navalny suffered in the Russian gulag, that his lawyer was so shocked on seeing her client's face gone grey, but that Carlson, given a two-hour slot with the man responsible for the killings of so many, with the man ultimately responsible for creating Navalny's airless isolation cell, could not be bothered to mention his name. It is as if Tucker Carlson is Moscow's creature."

"For me, Navalny was killed in large part because of the West's appeasement of Putin that, even today, despite all the killings of innocent men, women and children in Ukraine, our leaders are afraid to stand up to the monster in the Kremlin, to properly enforce sanctions, to effectively arm Ukraine, to cut Russia off from the international financing system. The West is doing none of the above and is in danger of not just betraying Ukraine but its own security."

"What was supposed to be a safety test at the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April 1986 was the sickest of jokes. The RMBK reactor was the Soviet solution to big oil prices. But it had a series of horrible design flaws. It couldn't tell its operators what was really happening in its guts. Operators could turn a valve by moving a helm-sized wheel and not know whether this would make things more or less dangerous. And the designers' safety test could could lead to a disastrous chain reaction which boiled the nuclear kettles. That had happened eleven years before in 1975 in Soviet Leningrad, now St Petersburg, when Putin was just starting his career inside the KGB in his home city. The secretive Soviet state covered up the huge leak of radiation. The exposed population were not told of the danger. The accident was not reported in the media. The Ministry of Medium Machine Building blamed the accident on poor construction, not terrible design. The commission investigating the incident made several recommendations. None were implemented. No one complained because no one knew. Welcome to the Soviet Union."

"Chernobyl scarred Navalny like Voldemort scarred Harry Potter, the scar so deep he could never root it out. From the age of ten, Navalny saw how a state that lied to its people was a thing of evil, that, in politics, in power, you must tell the truth to people. After seeing what moronic, lying power did to his childhood idyll, he spent the rest of his life not lying to people."

"The fall of the Soviet Union delivered real change. The old nonesense of Communism did start to die, but far more slowly than appreciated back then. Ordinary Russians for the first time in their lives could read honest newspapers, watch good telly, go abroad, buy fancy foreign cars, own their own homes. The idea of a free market was embraced, but a system without the functioning machinery of the rule of law was bound to struggle. The rhetoric of a free market masked the reality of a bloody anarchy where the people who came out on top were the most cunning, the most pitiless and the greediest. Russia turned into an oligarchy, the country's resources carved up and seized by a few rich men, but an oligarchy with democratic lipstick. [...] The problem was that political power was in the wrong hands. As the nineties wore on, Boris Yeltsin morphed from being an inspirational and courageous leader, willing to stand up on a tank to defend Russia's infant democracy, into a senile alcoholic, guarded by some of his hopelessly corrupt family. The president of Russia needed to be fighting like a tiger to stand up for the rule of law, to defend democratic principles, to strengthen Russia's fragile open society. Instead, he took the pith."

"Zhirinovsky was a fool's bladder on a fascist stick, using his cruel wit to malign opponents of Vladimir Putin, further the Kremlin's far-right agenda and consign his immortal soul to darkness. I met him once and reader, do not be surprised, we ended up shouting at each other."

"When the Soviet Union collapsed, Yavlinsky set out sober, sensible reforms which would lead to a properly policed free market. His ideas were passed over in favour of a plan roughly summarised as 'Let's Make the Oligarchs Get Rich Quick' which led to massive wealth inequality."

"What the fuck was Navalny doing? The evidence points to the videos being made when Navalny's fury at the ineffectiveness of the liberals to land a punch on Putin was at its most extreme and irrational and that he later regretted them but, Navalny being Navalny, he couldn't bring himself to take them down. Over the next three years he pursued his grand strategy of trying to get the nationalist right to wake up to the threat from Putin's fascism. When he realised that strategy wasn't working it was, for him, too late, and a tad embarassing, to delete the videos, so they stayed up. He didn't get it, that the liberal world hates this kind of stuff and the stink of it followed him down the years even though he had turned himself into something quite different. [...] When one avenue of fire failed, he would pursue another, and then another. The goal was to defeat Putin; he didn't realise that with the NAROD videos he ended up defeating himself."

"So was he a bit of a fascist? Yes, for a time. But I suspect that his spell in America changed him. At Yale, he could have hung out with all sorts, including white conservative neo-fascists in one of their yucky alpha beta frat houses. Instead, his gang were an African called Lumumba, a Nicaraguan and a black guy from Brizzle. His three months at Yale would have opened his eyes to the land of liberty, its absurdities, its crassness, its cult of money, but also to the fact that power is, more or less, democratic, that the authorities, more or less, respect the rule of law, that liberal democracy, more or less, works, that an open society open to all talents is so much brighter than the dark Soviet basement he had been born into and the place Vladimir Putin wanted Russia to return to. After Yale, the fascist in Navalny slunk off into a dark corner."

"With the benefit of hindsight, the two outstanding qualities of Medvedev for Putin's benison are that he is the shorter man and that he would never dream of saying boo to the boss. [...] For a time, Medvedev steered or appeared to steer a path to a different future. That was a charade. In fact, he owed fealty to Putin. What you got was liberal lipstick but fascist substance. For far too long, the West went along with Medvedev's schtick as a reformer with an interest in new tech, blah blah, blah blah."

"An election where one of the candidates has total control over who the other candidates are is not an election but a coronation. With Yavlinsky out of the way and Navalny not well known enough to run, Putin's hand-picked opponents were Gennady Zyuganov, an elderly Commie, trusted to rock the boat of his geriatric supporters and that alone, Mikhail Prokhorov, a giraffe-like oligarch, Vladimir Zhirinovksy, the fool's bladder on a fascist stick, and Sergey Mironov, a nonentity with the flavour of the actor who gets killed in the first five minutes of a movie."

"How Putin must have hated him. Navalny was the tsar of charisma, courage and connecting with people; Putin the tsar of the knout, the cosh and the hypodermic syringe."

"For the avoidance of doubt, I do not believe that the evidence is anything like strong enough to call Vladimir Putin a paedophile. True, in the summer of 2006 he got out of his Kremlin motorcade, walked a few hundred yards, came across a slight, blond young Russian boy, knelt before him, lifted up his T-shirt and kissed him on the stomach, patted him on the head and then hurried off to his high castle. You can see it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uWEaKLzwUg It is beyond creepy but that one instance is not enough to jump to the conclusion that Putin is a paedophile. Alexander Litvinenko was the former KGB colonel who clashed bitterly with Putin over corruption inside the renamed FSB, so much so that he had to flee the country for London. After he saw this video, he wrote a blog, alleging that the reason that Putin got a poor posting when he started out in the KGB was because the high-ups discovered he was a paedophile and felt they could not trust him to serve in the West, so he had to work first in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, then Dresden in East Germany where they could keep an eye on him. Litvinenko cited sources, old KGB officers, for this allegation, but he never came up with any written or other corroborating evidence. Artyom Borovik and Antonio Russo are believed to have been working on the 'Putin may be a paedo' story before they were killed in 2000. Once again, Putin's fog machine is working full blast here. Of course, there are many other reasons why these three men could have been killed. But both Paul Joyal, a former US intelligence analyst, and I are confident that Litvinenko was poisoned with Polonium 210 because he blogged that Putin was a paedophile."

"One of the striking qualities about Vladimir Putin is his longing for legitimacy. Putin's thesis for his degree at Leningrad State University – he graduated in 1975 – was on 'The Most Favoured Nation Trading Principle in International Law'. When I met him in 2014 and challenged him about the Russian shoot-down of MH17, his answer was long and boring and overly legalistic. My working hypothesis is that Putin is a psychopathic serial killer who loves to dress up his bloodlust as legal necessity. Just like Joseph Stalin who always preferred his enemies to be convincted at a show trial before being sent to prison 'with no privileges', code for being shot."

"A word about the top lawman in the black hat. Aleksandr Bastrykin is one of the top law enforcers in Russia, roughly equivalent to the head of the FBI, but his performance harks back to the bad old days of the Feds, when J. Edgar Hoover made deals with the Mob and told his officers to target political figures who offended his dark sensibilities. Bastrykin is also a self-confessed kidnapper and a plagiarist. The facts about Bastrykin the copycat are well evidenced, embarassingly so. His 2004 book, Signs of the Hand: Dactyloscopy, about the science of fingerprinting, was a masterpiece of copying and pasting, principally from a book about forensics, The Century of the Detective, by German writer Jürgen Thorwald. [...] The great Masha Gessen noted in The New Yorker that Bastrykin, when he gave a talk at the Sorbonne in November 2013, remained calm when he was heckled about the Russian Investigative Committee's use of torture, but lost his rag when he was personally accused of plagiarism. Dear Reader: I hope you have already worked out the them here, that both Putin and his wannabe Sherlock Holmes steal other people's words."

"Sergei Sobyanin is a semolina pudding Putin loyalist, has been mayor of Moscow since 2010 and has a distinguished academic record. Actually, I made that last bit up. He did write a thesis for his degree on 'The subject of the Russian Federation in the economic and social development of the state. The competence of government bodies and methods of its implementation', but whole chunks were, according to a Russian anti-plagiarism website, copied on pages 32 to 35, 90 to 91, 105, 149 to 153, 161 to 165, 168 to 183, 185 to 194, and so on. If you get the drift, you get the pattern."

"Welcome to the 'systemic opposition'. It's a rather deadening phrase for patsy pretend opponents of the Putinist status quo, who exist to confuse ordinary Russians in the sticks and useful idiots in the West that Russia is a democracy when it isn't. They have all the appearance of a political party, leaders, members, logos, rallies, conferences, attempts to win power through elections. But none of the reality. On the corruption of Putin and his goons, they sit there like so many tapioca puddings, in silence. But they come to life again when a serious rival to the Putin system breaks surface."

"The revolutionaries broke into Yanukovych's Mezhyhirya estate and found a temple constructed to the god of kleptomania. While millions of Ukrainians struggled on the poverty line, Yanukovych boasted a log cabin on steroids, a garage full of vintage motors, an exotic zoo and a ton of receipts proving his thievery. Expenses that stood out were $800 for medicines for his pet fish, $14,500 for tablecloths and $41 million on light fixures. Other boxes of files showed how much he spent on spying on critical journalists, $5.7 million for the month of December 2010 alone. [...] In June 2015, my former BBC Newsnight colleague and pal, Gabriel Gatehouse, got a scoop when he interviewed Yanukovych in his Russian exile. The disgraced president defended himself, saying the hoo-hah about the Mezhyhirya follies were 'political technology and spin: and that the estate did not belong to him personally'. When Gabriel challenged him about the exotic zoo, he replied: 'I supported the ostriches; what's wrong with that?'"

"When Putin stole Crimea back in 2014, he ripped up the order established after 1945, secured by NATO and what became the European Union, that there would be no more land grabs in Europe. Putin, his 1970s secret policemen sunglasses blinkering his vision, doesn't get it that he is reheating Hitler's chip. The move was hugely popular inside Russia and that caused Navalny, always with an ear for the mood of the Russian electorate, a major headache. Side with Putin on Crimea, and Navalny would keep in with the Russian public but fall out with Ukraine and the international rules-based order; side with Ukraine and, he feared, he would lose relevance back home."

"BBC Panorama sent me to the crash site [of MH17]. The Kremlin was furiously denying any involvement and its fog machine was working full-time. They were lying. I will never quite lose the memory of the smell of aeroplane fuel, human flesh and cornfield."

"Life inside the Kremlin must be extraordinarily unpleasant. The riches to be stolen are off the scale, but the consequences of failure are horrible too. And all the time the others are watching you, waiting for you to make a mistake."

"A sea of fireflies, a watch, a yacht, a private jet for corgis, a multi-million-dollar duck house: Chaika, Peskov, Shuvalov and Medvedev and the rest have between them stolen billions of dollars of public money and diverted it to their own grubby and greedy ends. Putin's Russia is, not surprisingly, the most unequal big country on earth, where one per cent of the population own 58 per cent of its wealth, far worse than Brazil, India, the United States, Germany, China and the United Kingdom."

"It's hard to convey just how poor ordinary Russians are, but I got a flavour of that in 2007 when I made a BBC TV documentary, Vodka's My Poison. They called it the yellow death. It started in the summer when dozens of people turned up in casualty, a vile shade of yellow. The dozens turned to hundreds, then thousands. The better cases recovered, but will die long before their time. The worst cases? Natasha was not yet thirty, she had a seven-year-old boy called Maxim and she had less than a year to live. Her whole body had gone yellow, an instantly recognisable feature of toxic hepatitis. Something had destroyed her liver and now all the natural toxins in the body were stacking up. Her own body was poisoning her and there was nothing medicine – or at least nothing state medicine in Russia – could do about it. How come? Putin put up the price of vodka threefold in one strike. Craving alcohol, Natasha and her friends had added a new brand of handwash to their moonshine. The handwash was cheap and highly alcoholic, but also lethal. I remember the gloom in the hospital basement, steel doors slamming shut, dark yellow wraiths living out their last weeks, the lack of medicine, of care, of money, of light, of hope. It made me angry; it still does; and what I felt would be a fraction of the rage that consumed someone like Navalny who had a clear grasp of where the extraordinary riches of the Russian state were being siphoned off."

"Roughly a year before [his assassination], I had interviewed Nemtsov about Putin's grotesquely corrupt Winter Olympics in Sochi, asking him about the $5 billion road-rail link resort from the coast to the mountain ski resort. Nemtsov replied that: 'It would have been cheaper to have lined this road with Louis Vuitton handbags'. Before meeting Nemtsov, I had spent time with the comically stupid Putinist mayor of Sochi. He had knocked back my question about how gay Olympians would be treated in a city where the Kremlin's homophobic laws held sway by proclaiming: 'There are no gays in Sochi'. When I told Nemtsov about this, he laughed and laughed and laughed for so long we had to trim it down in the edit. He had a beautiful sense of the ridiculous and when I heard he had been shot, I burst into tears."

"The gossip inside the Moscow beltway is that the assassination [of Boris Nemtsov] was commissioned by Putin's psychopathic quisling in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and that Putin was furious with him for ordering the hit. I don't know whether that is true or not. It's possible that Kadyrov did have Nemtsov killed of his own volition; it's also possible that Kadyrov over-interpreted a Putin criticism, a bit like Henry II's comment, 'Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?' on Thomas a Becket; it's possible that Putin had Nemtsov killed and his goons switched on the fog machine and pointed it at Kadyrov. Readers who find this unsatisfactory are asked to go back to the sentence in the introduction of this book: 'It's hard to check facts in Russia because if you do it properly you end up dead' and start again."