Putin is a rational actor inside a bunker, so deep, so deprived of light and information, that he is pulling levers without understanding how the mod… - John Sweeney

Andrei, easily the most intelligent and sophisticated of the long-lasting sycophants, could well have behaved decently – in return for what favours one can only guess. Perhaps he was genuinely a good man. Perhaps.

The reality was for a long time that Putin, when facing off against Navalny, felt fear. People forget that before the 'swaggering... sneery... dismissive' strong man Putin, witnessed during the time of the Iraq War by Alastair Campbell, there existed a weak man Putin, who carried the bags of Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg; who meekly said 'yes, boss, no boss' to Boris Berezovsky when the oligarch was fishing around for a replacement for Boris Yeltsin; who conned the Yeltsin family too with his subservient act; then did the same thing for Blair and George W. Bush. The tricky thing to get your head around is that weak man Putin was a performance but it was also part of the truth, that when up against an unflinching enemy, he has history of backing down, of being far more fearful than the far better understood sneery side of his character would suggest.

Navalny's documentary is gripping because it reveals both the immensity of the tsar's wealth but also the shabbiness of his soul.
Dictators murder decor like they murder people. Idi Amin's sordid bungalow, Saddam's pre-cast cement palaces in Northern Iraq, Kim Il Sung's waxwork house, I've seen them all and they smack – how can I put this diplomatically? – of Cupid Stunt. [...]
The palace estate stretches out for 70 million square metres, is owned by the FSB, fully leased until 2068 for 'research and educational activities', boasts state-of-the-art communication towers, its own gas station and boilers. There is an almighty fence to keep out the riff-raff, an amphitheatre, a secret tunnel leading from the palace to the beach, a window cut in bare rock so that the dictator can admire a sea view just like a Bond villain from his lair.