Once again, the only credible explanation for the siege of Beslan is that the Russian secret state… — John Sweeney
Once again, the only credible explanation for the siege of Beslan is that the Russian secret state orchestrated an attack by terrorists and then used maximum force to destroy the evidence of its complicity. So not one black operation by the machinery of fear, but three: the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999; the Moscow theatre siege of 2002; the Beslan massacre of 2004. The goal was to create a state of terror; the victims the ordinary people of Russia in their hundreds; the only true beneficiary the master of the Kremlin.
p. 100Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Squealer in Animal Farm but without the charm.
p. 268
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.
p. 260
He was shot in the back of the back several times one hundred metres or so from the walls of the Kremlin, one of the most closely CCTV-filmed areas on earth. The official narrative was that a bin lorry obscured the Kremlin's cameras from capturing the killer or killers. Attentive readers will have already got it, but for the avoidance of any doubt the official narrative is a load of old hogwash. In my four decades-plus of reporting, I have never been detained by police officers more often than outside the Kremlin. You cannot move five yards without a cop demanding to see your passport. The idea that Nemtsov was assassinated but that none of the Kremlin's cameras captured critical evidence is absurd.
p. 174
