John Sweeney Quotes

Watch Putin's Palace. More than one hundred million people have. Think of the money squandered on dross while ordinary Russians live in poverty. Think, too, on Putin's taste. Get inside Alexei Navalny's head. Why did he go back to Russia to face near certain death? Because he was sick of Putin the thief, sick of his great robbery of Russian wealth and sick of Putin's fouler robbery of the Russian soul. Navalny went back to Moscow because the other tsar, while controlling perhaps the greatest accumulation of private wealth in human history, built himself a temple to Cupid Stunt.

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.

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.

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.

Navalny's calculation was that Putin would not dare have him killed. But, once he had gone back to Russia and was locked away inside the gulag, two facts changed that materially altered that calculation: one, Western liberalism recalibrated its position on Navalny, selling his stock, making it easier for the Kremlin to have him snuffed out; two, Putin started Russia's big war against Ukraine, blurring focus on the fate of one prisoner so much so that he began to be forgotten, that he was in an oubliette from which there could be no return.

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.

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

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?'

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.

What's so pathetic about Putin's world view is that anything that makes him look weak can only be the work of the CIA. The possibility that Russian citizens working with free-spirited Western journalists and a Bulgarian Sherlock Holmes could get the better of him and his goons is not allowed.

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.

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

On Ștefan Andrei, p. 177

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

He [Prigozhin] became the Kremlin's court jester, but beside the jokes he was, in essence, the psychopath's psychopath, Putin's personal cook and personal sadist, a killer, torturer and hot-dog salesman turned multi-billionaire, troll farm boss and mercenary warlord.