John Sweeney Killer in the Kremlin: The Explosive Account of Putin’s Reign of Terror (Bantam Press, London, 2022, 288 pp.)
Vladimir Putin is a dark character, straight out of a novel by Dostoevsky. His whole coterie of kleptocrats and thugs and neo-fascists come across as though they were the realization in actuality of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground or The Possessed. The question hanging in the balance, as we fly into 2023, is what could possibly be an appropriate punishment for the carnage and destruction he has inflicted on Ukraine?
John Sweeney, a veteran war correspondent and prolific author, has written a new book, from the frontlines in Ukraine, about Putin and his crimes. For anyone who continues to give the Russian tyrant the slightest benefit of doubt, this book is required reading. In personalised and highly accessible prose, Sweeney steps through the nature of Putin’s war, his life and rise to power, his staggering corruption and his many brutal crimes.
What are Sweeney’s credentials? He is a writer and journalist who worked for the BBC for years, until his hammering of Putin made some of his bosses uncomfortable – given the amount of Russian money in the City of London and the demonstrated willingness of Putin to have critics assassinated, even on British soil. He has written scathing books for years about brutal dictators from North Korea to Zimbabwe and from Romania to Russia.
He is scathing but very good at what he does. He has, in a career spanning many decades, won an Emmy Award, two Royal Television Society Awards, a Sony Gold Award, a What the Papers Say Journalist of the Year Award, an Amnesty International Award and a Paul Foot Award. In other words, he is credible and well-established.
He begins his book with an account of his hair-raising experiences of the war in Ukraine and an eye-witness account of Russian atrocities. Then he takes us back to Putin’s early life, in an effort to establish what makes of any human child the kind of individual who can rise to supreme, arbitrary power and be a ruthless killer. One is reminded, in this respect, of efforts to fathom the characters of Hitler or Stalin – not least Allan Bullock’s dual, comparative biography of those two catastrophic totalitarian figures of the 20th century.
At a pivotal point, in Chapter 4 ‘A Bomb Made of Sugar’, he addresses the controversial question of the 1999 Moscow bombings used by Putin to catapult him into the Presidency and dictatorship. Whole books have been written on this subject. He has read them. His argument, clearly laid out, is that the bombings were what is known as ‘false flag’ operations, carried out on the instructions of Putin and his FSB (the former KGB rebadged), in order to generate fear and nationalist outrage.
Is this an unwarranted ‘conspiracy theory’, like the various nutty conspiracy theories about 9/11 being an ‘inside job’? No. There are good grounds for suspecting that those bombings were a state provocation. David Satter’s The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin (Yale University Press, 2016) is the most systematic account of the case.
What is beyond dispute is that, in the wake of the bombings, Putin launched a savage war against Chechnya and systematically went about dismantling anything that embodied political opposition, freedom of the press, human rights activism or rule of law in Russia. All this, of course, in the name of a muscular and reactionary nationalism. Sweeney covers it crisply and authoritatively.
He makes three other absolutely crucial points, in forensic detail: Putin’s regime is a massive kleptocracy, driven from the top by him, the uber kleptocrat; his regime has used guns and poisons, including Polonium-210 and Novichok, to assassinate leading journalists, political oppositionists and defectors; and he sits on the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, threatening to use it if pushed. He is, in short, a terrifyingly dangerous international criminal of the highest order.
Sweeney marshals fairly persuasive evidence that Putin is seriously ill with some kind of cancer that is being treated with steroids. He worries that the man, a psychopath on drugs, losing face and possibly dying, may ‘push the button’ and take many of us down with him. He reasons that this, surely, will not happen, but the worry is one we would do well to share. Had Hitler possessed nuclear weapons in 1945, there is every reason to believe he would have used them, regardless of the consequences.
He names for us the many prominent victims of Putin’s assassins, from Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov to Boris Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko – there have been many others. He provides chapter and verse on the Malaysian Airlines shoot-down and on the attempted killing of Sergei Skripal. He identifies two women as Putin’s mistresses – Svetlana Krivonigikh and Alina Kabaeva.
He also excoriates a number of prominent Western politicians, from Boris Johnson to Donald Trump and Gerhard Schroder, for toadying to Putin. He doesn’t hyper-ventilate. He writes in the tradition of George Orwell: in plain language, scandalized by the horrors of our time. Then takes heart from NATO’s stand. It’s all here. Compelling reading for this summer. Don’t miss it.
Paul Monk is a Fellow of the Institute for Law and Strategy (London and New York) and the author of eleven books, including Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018)