Life inside the Kremlin must be extraordinarily unpleasant. The riches to be stolen are off the scale, but the consequences of failure are horrible t… - John Sweeney

Russia and the true nature of Russian power is fabulously hard to read. You can watch the Bentleys swish by and drink cocktails in the Metropol Hotel and not get it that you are living inside a twenty-first century kleptocracy which will crush you if you choose not to accept its crooked rules. All becomes much clearer, much faster, close to light-speed fast, when you challenge the source of that power, the secret police state within a state.

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.

Putin shapes his public image to the nth degree. Never mind the fake sun shining from behind North Korea's fatty-fat despot, Kim Jong-un, or the Hollywood stars worshipping the leader of the Church of Scientology, Vladimir Putin's cult of personality is the richest, the most well-funded in the whole world. [...] To me, it looks as though this is a man who had an unexceptionally unhappy and unloved childhood, who fears mockery and being laughed at, who wants to show to the world that he is the master of all he surveys, but comes across as a small boy, out for revenge. But then I'm not the target audience.