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" "The revolutionaries broke into Yanukovych's Mezhyhirya estate and found a temple constructed to the god of kleptomania. While millions of Ukrainians struggled on the poverty line, Yanukovych boasted a log cabin on steroids, a garage full of vintage motors, an exotic zoo and a ton of receipts proving his thievery. Expenses that stood out were $800 for medicines for his pet fish, $14,500 for tablecloths and $41 million on light fixures. Other boxes of files showed how much he spent on spying on critical journalists, $5.7 million for the month of December 2010 alone. [...] In June 2015, my former BBC Newsnight colleague and pal, Gabriel Gatehouse, got a scoop when he interviewed Yanukovych in his Russian exile. The disgraced president defended himself, saying the hoo-hah about the Mezhyhirya follies were 'political technology and spin: and that the estate did not belong to him personally'. When Gabriel challenged him about the exotic zoo, he replied: 'I supported the ostriches; what's wrong with that?'
John Sweeney (born 7 June 1958) is a British investigative journalist and author who has worked for The Observer newspaper and for the BBC's Panorama television series.
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He wanted Ukraine like he had wanted all the other things that rightfully did not belong to him. Time and again, he had probed the West's steel and found jelly. But this time, Ukraine, its president, its people and its army had other ideas. This time Mr Pleonexia found people who said, 'No, that's not yours. It's ours. Give it back'. No wonder he seems so surprised that Ukraine played hardball. That was not supposed to happen.
The Make America Great Again wing of the US Republican Party has been highly critical of Ukrainian attempts to police the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church, also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, not perhaps realising that its head, Patriarch Kirill, was an active KGB agent in Soviet times, has been mired in a cigarette smuggling scandal and is reckoned to be worth $4 billion. For the avoidance of doubt, Kirill has called Putin's presidency 'a miracle of God'. Praise be, some say.
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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.