John Sweeney Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Squealer in Animal Farm but without the charm.