John Sweeney Quotes

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 said that Anna was a woman whose influence was 'extremely insignificant'. The truth was that she was extremely significant, very dangerous to his hold on power. No one else was asking the questions she was.
And then her voice was silenced.

Once again, the only credible explanation for the siege of Beslan is that the Russian secret state orchestrated an attack by terrorists and then used maximum force to destroy the evidence of its complicity. So not one black operation by the machinery of fear, but three: the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999; the Moscow theatre siege of 2002; the Beslan massacre of 2004. The goal was to create a state of terror; the victims the ordinary people of Russia in their hundreds; the only true beneficiary the master of the Kremlin.

The deal between the Russian state and the oligarchs was pretty clear: keep your nosy beaks out of politics, out of power, and enjoy your money. But if you ask the wrong kind of questions, things will not go well for you. It was a recipe for the zombification of Russia.

Everything about the loss of the Kursk in 2000 prefigures the 2022 invasion of Ukraine: the Kremlin's lack of interest in its own people; their shoddy and obsolete kit; the contempt for proper scrutiny; the silencing of honest criticism. The lesson Putin learnt from the sinking of the Kursk was entirely fascistic. He had suffered a lot of heat from Russia's free and independent media for his slow and heartless response. The solution was to switch it off.

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.

If Litvinenko, Felshtinsky, Satter and I could discover the truth about the Moscow apartment bombings, so could the CIA and MI6. What happened instead was a sick-think by the Western foreign-policy establishment. They wanted to believe that Putin was a democrat, a friend of the West, someone with whom they could do business. They set out to bury the evidence to the contrary.

It is hard, virtually impossible, to convey just how cruel the Second Chechen War was, how pitiless the master of the Kremlin's killing machine. The hardest thing for me, as a reporter, as a human being, to bear was to witness the colossal mistake made by the West's leaders who cuddled up to Vladimir Putin while the evidence of his war crimes in Chechnya, and the crimes against humanity committed when the FSB blew up Moscow apartment buildings, was overwhelming.

September 1999 is the time, the way I see it, when Russia ceases to be a democracy. The Moscow apartment bombings were Vladimir Putin's original sin, and any Russian who dared to investigate them lived in mortal danger.

The evidence is compelling that the very thing which galvanized Vladimir Putin's career in Russian politics – his fightback against Chechen bomb outrages – was, in fact, a black operation by the secret police.
That Vladimir Putin blew up Russia.

Common sense says it would be madness for a group of Chechens to smuggle explosives all the way from Urus-Martan to Moscow. Since the First Chechen War, Chechens are routinely singled out for harassment by Russian police, vehicles are stopped and searched, identity papers demanded. Besides, there has long been a strong Chechen mafia in Moscow, very capable of getting its hands on arms or explosives in the city. In Russia, in the 1990s, you could bribe your way into a nuclear rocket silo. The 'Chechen terrorists' would have been risking a great deal by hauling their explosives roughly 1,000 miles to Moscow when they could have bought them at the back of a local flea market.

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?'

The Chechens had humiliated the might of Russia in the First Chechen War (1994–6), which [Boris] Yeltsin had started in a drunken rage. The Russian Army had fought the war with great brutality and greater incompetence. The Chechens fought them to a kind of stalemate, partly because Yeltsin, when he had sobered up, realized that he had been stupid and cruel.

Putin's understanding of the world is maddeningly narrow, reduced to a gloomy tunnel vision, locked into a false narrative of betrayal. He once declared the fall of the Soviet Union 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century'.
What?
Worse than the First and Second World Wars? Worse than the Holocaust? The Soviet Union was, in reality, a dark totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin that slowly morphed into a gloomy senility.

The Soviet Union could not afford to feed or house or care for its people, so it started to implode. Putin, the secret policeman in Dresden, never properly grasped the power of these three failures [the invasion of Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster, and the collapse of the command economy]. His tragedy – our tragedy – was that he had no first-hand knowledge of the three catastrophes. He was too high up in the secret police food chain to be sent to Chernobyl; too pathetically low to be sent to the fag-end of the failing war in Afghanistan; let alone to the fleshpots of the West where he would have seen the stark evidence of how ordinary people in New Jersey or New Brighton in the Wirral lived so much better than in Moscow, let alone Omsk or Tomsk. He never saw the comparative evidence of Soviet economic failure with his own eyes or, if he did, he was too brainwashed to understand what he was looking at.
Instead, from the bowels of Stasiland, he came to internalize a dark nonsense, that his country's collapse was due to Western trickery and domestic betrayal, rather than the simple facts that the Soviet Union had run out of cash and self-belief and purpose. It was a failed state, just like the Kaiser's Germany became a failed state after it launched its own stupid war in 1914. Like Hitler in 1923, Putin from 1991 onwards breathed a poisonous fiction, that his country had been wronged, that it 'had been stabbed in the back'. In truth, it fell apart because it had been wrong, it had stabbed itself in the front, three times over.