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For the avoidance of doubt, I do not believe that the evidence is anything like strong enough to call Vladimir Putin a paedophile. True, in the summe… - John Sweeney
" "For the avoidance of doubt, I do not believe that the evidence is anything like strong enough to call Vladimir Putin a paedophile. True, in the summer of 2006 he got out of his Kremlin motorcade, walked a few hundred yards, came across a slight, blond young Russian boy, knelt before him, lifted up his T-shirt and kissed him on the stomach, patted him on the head and then hurried off to his high castle. You can see it on YouTube here: <nowiki>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uWEaKLzwUg</nowiki>
It is beyond creepy but that one instance is not enough to jump to the conclusion that Putin is a paedophile. Alexander Litvinenko was the former KGB colonel who clashed bitterly with Putin over corruption inside the renamed FSB, so much so that he had to flee the country for London. After he saw this video, he wrote a blog, alleging that the reason that Putin got a poor posting when he started out in the KGB was because the high-ups discovered he was a paedophile and felt they could not trust him to serve in the West, so he had to work first in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, then Dresden in East Germany where they could keep an eye on him. Litvinenko cited sources, old KGB officers, for this allegation, but he never came up with any written or other corroborating evidence. Artyom Borovik and Antonio Russo are believed to have been working on the 'Putin may be a paedo' story before they were killed in 2000.
Once again, Putin's fog machine is working full blast here. Of course, there are many other reasons why these three men could have been killed. But both Paul Joyal, a former US intelligence analyst, and I are confident that Litvinenko was poisoned with Polonium 210 because he blogged that Putin was a paedophile.
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About John Sweeney
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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Alternative Names:
John Paul Sweeney
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Additional quotes by John Sweeney
No Marxist could take Ceausescu seriously after he was seen wandering around on state occasions carrying his sceptre in 1974, the one which so delighted Salvador Dali. The sceptre was the physical emodiment of Ceausescu's drift from the anti-statist, anti-personality bedrock of Marxist thought and practice. Of course, these principles had more often been breached than obeyed in the various communist states since the October revolution, but to play king so blatantly was thought somewhat indecent even among the unblushing despots of the Soviet empire. The 'Bourbonification' of the Ceausescu dynasty can be traced back to the early Seventies, but in the late Eighties it became more and more crass.
I am a sixty-three-year-old war reporter. I have covered wars and madness in Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa, the Romanian revolution, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I have seen babies with hacked limbs and an old man with his eyes blown in by an artillery shell and people with their lungs sucked inside out and a man with his brain sliced with a machete – and there is nothing worse than watching kids smile in war, watching the aristocracy of the human soul. It makes me cry – and cry I do.
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What was the value to the West of Ceausescu's dissent from Moscow's diktat? Was it of inestimable worth? Or was it, in fact, a marginal propaganda gain of little real substance? Ceausescu was an irritant to the Russians, but they never felt threatened by him. They did march their troops up and down near the Romanian border when Ceausescu was visiting China in 1971; but they invaded Czechoslovakia when the Prague spring got out of hand. The difference is clear. Dubček challenged the communist system. Ceausescu never did. He was not, then, a serious 'enemy of my enemy'. The West misread the cards.
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