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" "The gossip inside the Moscow beltway is that the assassination [of Boris Nemtsov] was commissioned by Putin's psychopathic quisling in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and that Putin was furious with him for ordering the hit. I don't know whether that is true or not. It's possible that Kadyrov did have Nemtsov killed of his own volition; it's also possible that Kadyrov over-interpreted a Putin criticism, a bit like Henry II's comment, 'Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?' on Thomas a Becket; it's possible that Putin had Nemtsov killed and his goons switched on the fog machine and pointed it at Kadyrov. Readers who find this unsatisfactory are asked to go back to the sentence in the introduction of this book: 'It's hard to check facts in Russia because if you do it properly you end up dead' and start again.
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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The reality was for a long time that Putin, when facing off against Navalny, felt fear. People forget that before the 'swaggering... sneery... dismissive' strong man Putin, witnessed during the time of the Iraq War by Alastair Campbell, there existed a weak man Putin, who carried the bags of Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg; who meekly said 'yes, boss, no boss' to Boris Berezovsky when the oligarch was fishing around for a replacement for Boris Yeltsin; who conned the Yeltsin family too with his subservient act; then did the same thing for Blair and George W. Bush. The tricky thing to get your head around is that weak man Putin was a performance but it was also part of the truth, that when up against an unflinching enemy, he has history of backing down, of being far more fearful than the far better understood sneery side of his character would suggest.