Penguin paperback first edition - 2023
What a gruesome story; what an evil man. No excuses - Putin is a narcissistic, psychopathic, sociopathic, plain evil creature. Sweeney's chapter headings chart the remorseless path The Killing Machine - Rat Boy - Once and Future Spy - The Poisonings Begin - Mr Pleonexia (I had to look that up!) - The Underpants Poisoner - This Ends in Blood. Although this book might be regarded as a polemic, it is one that I totally subscribe to.
John Sweeney calls himself an 'old school' reporter and says his philosophy is I poke crocodiles, if crocodiles they be, in the eye with a stick. He seems to have poked Putin in every orifice available; it's a wonder Sweeney is still alive, as his account of Putin's systematic murders/assassinations of those opposed to him stretches back to over a quarter of a century. Sweeney has gone undercover to Zimbabwe, Chechnya, twice, and North Korea. He upset Donald Trump by asking him about his links with the mob, and infuriated that sinister cult the Church of Scientology. An ideal man then for recounting Putin's unsavoury past, present and ? future.
What Sweeney has done for me, above all, is to link all those Putin involved 'episodes' together. I clearly recall reading about the bombing in Moscow in September 1999 - of two separate working-class blocks of flats - killing 222 men, women and children. Chechen terrorists? That was the official finding; more likely Putin's KGB (FSB now). Then the rash of poisonings of (sometimes potential) opponents: Anatoly Sobchak, Putin's 'oldest friend' in politics, who died of a 'heart attack' in February 2000; Yury Shchekochikhin, a tough liberal democrat M.P., died in July 2003 due to 'toxic agents of an unknown origin'; Anna Politkovskaya, a forthright Russian journalist, gunned down by a lone assassin in her Moscow apartment block in October 2006; Alexander 'Sasha' Litvinenko, dying in a London hospital, from drinking tea AND 26.5 microgrammes of Polonium-210; Boris Berezovsky, whose body was found by a bodyguard in a locked bathroom, with a ligature around his neck, in March 2013; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, sent to a Siberian labour camp; and his British lawyer Stephen Curtis, whose helicopter fell out of the sky approaching Bournemouth airport in March 2004 Worse was to come: an Air Malaysia Boeing flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine was shot down on 17 July 2014 - by a Russian BUK surface-to-air missile. 298 people were killed. It emerged that it was downed by the Russian army. Putin, ever the narcissistic psychopath, denied involvement to Sweeney's face. The murders continued: on 27 February 2015, on a bridge one hundred yards from the Kremlin, Boris Nemstov - who nearly became leader instead of Putin and was now leader of the opposition - was shot dead. Events came much closer home to the British, with the Salisbury poisonings of Sergei Skripal, once in the GRU Russian military intelligence, and his daughter Yulia. Sergei's 43-year-old son had already died of a 'mysterious' illness on a trip to St Petersburg in 2017. Sergei and his daughter survived but an unlucky woman, Dawn Sturgess, who ended up with a so-called perfume bottle, did not. The poison was Novichok. Then, in April, 2018 Maxim Borodin, a brilliant investigative journalist, fell off his balcony on the fifth floor of a Moscow apartment block. Official verdict - suicide. There have been several other 'falling out of a window' deaths in the last few years. And now we have that very brave (foolhardy?) opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who recovered from poison smeared on his underpants in August 2020, languishing in a Russian prison.
What rankles is that British politicians such as Peter Mandelson and George Osborne (as shadow chancellor) snuggled up to Oleg Deripaska, one of the very shady Russian businessmen. The Conservative Party certainly accepted 'Russian money' - Tories mentioned by Sweeney include John Whittingdale, Carrie Symonds and Matthew Elliott. Boris Johnson's friendship with Evgeny Lebedev (now Baron Siberia - you couldn't make it up!), the son of a KGB colonel, is worthy of comment. Then there's Donald Trump! Sweeney writes: Was Trump the Kremlin candidate?...once in power, Trump did pretty much everything the Kremlin would have wanted him to do: sow division in NATO, weaken the European Union, kowtow to Putin.
And now (April 2023) it's the tragic plight of Ukraine and its people - being bombed to smithereens, murdered in cold blood, forcibly removed to Russia. Sweeney may be partially correct, when he calls the instigator of this inhuman crime (worthy of his predecessor Stalin) a fragile monster, but it is more blunt than that. Putin is purely a monster. Blood-soaked, evil, tyrannical, who is not fit to live.
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