Squealer in Animal Farm but without the charm. — John Sweeney

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.

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.

What remains extraordinary about the Salisbury poisonings is the seeming stupidity of it. How so? Novichok is, like polonium-210, a very expensive poison. The two murderers were sent to Salisbury with their poison bottle but with no regard to the simple fact of modern British life, that the country is littered with six million CCTV cameras, more units per person than any other country apart from China. Whoever sent the GRU officers is a fool. Reflecting on this anomaly – multi-million-dollar secret poison delivered on candid camera – makes me draw a harsh and, perhaps, novel conclusion about the Russian secret state in the twenty-first century. [...] The ideological power of Communism's appeal [...] is long dead; so, too, is its darkest enemy, Hitler; so, too, is the state that created the KGB. In its place you have the Russian Federation, an ethno-nationalist kleptocracy run by a pleonexiac with too long a table. The West should not be surprised that the quality of the servants of the Russian secret state in the twenty-first century is, frankly, a bit rubbish.