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 agend… - John Sweeney

It's hard to convey just how poor ordinary Russians are, but I got a flavour of that in 2007 when I made a BBC TV documentary, Vodka's My Poison. They called it the yellow death. It started in the summer when dozens of people turned up in casualty, a vile shade of yellow. The dozens turned to hundreds, then thousands. The better cases recovered, but will die long before their time. The worst cases? Natasha was not yet thirty, she had a seven-year-old boy called Maxim and she had less than a year to live. Her whole body had gone yellow, an instantly recognisable feature of toxic hepatitis. Something had destroyed her liver and now all the natural toxins in the body were stacking up. Her own body was poisoning her and there was nothing medicine – or at least nothing state medicine in Russia – could do about it. How come? Putin put up the price of vodka threefold in one strike. Craving alcohol, Natasha and her friends had added a new brand of handwash to their moonshine. The handwash was cheap and highly alcoholic, but also lethal. I remember the gloom in the hospital basement, steel doors slamming shut, dark yellow wraiths living out their last weeks, the lack of medicine, of care, of money, of light, of hope. It made me angry; it still does; and what I felt would be a fraction of the rage that consumed someone like Navalny who had a clear grasp of where the extraordinary riches of the Russian state were being siphoned off.

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'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.