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… - John Sweeney

A sea of fireflies, a watch, a yacht, a private jet for corgis, a multi-million-dollar duck house: Chaika, Peskov, Shuvalov and Medvedev and the rest have between them stolen billions of dollars of public money and diverted it to their own grubby and greedy ends. Putin's Russia is, not surprisingly, the most unequal big country on earth, where one per cent of the population own 58 per cent of its wealth, far worse than Brazil, India, the United States, Germany, China and the United Kingdom.

The Putin I had challenged in 2014 was a different man, subtle, supple, willing to engage with a difficult BBC reporter, albeit only to lie so calmly. The Putin of 2022 was hyper-aggressive. But the reason I felt fear was something else. The Putin I had met in 2014 looked like a ferret or a reptile, thin-faced, lean. The 2022 Putin looks like a hamster, his cheeks stuffed, unhealthy. He looks like a man on steroids and that made me full of fear.

[...] the very function of the House of the People was [...] to make concrete the social inequality between the dictator's lowly vassals and the pomp and might of His Majesty. The architect of the House had been selected by a competition. There were a lot of interesting and arresting designs, but, to put it rather brusquely, the architect who came up with the most banal, Stalinist pastiche appealed successfully to the Ceausescu's taste. The prizewinner, after the revolution, has disappeared from view because she has been battered by much hostile criticism.