What few people in the West properly understood then, and still don't, to this day, is the extreme… — John Sweeney
What few people in the West properly understood then, and still don't, to this day, is the extreme nervousness in the West Wing of the Biden White House that a Ukrainian victory in the war could lead to Russia becoming Iraq 2.0. Their number one neurosis is that a Ukrainian victory would lead to the fall of Putin and that, in turn, would end up with the breaking up of Russia liberating two dragons the Americans are very afraid of. The first dragon is an Islamist Chechnya getting hold of a nuke and holding the Western world to ransom while Donald Trump is on the stump. The second, more terrifying, dragon is of China seizing Siberia while Russia is in chaos. Overnight, China would become the biggest, most resource-rich country on earth. [...] The negative to promoting timidity as your number one strategy is that the other players in the game will notice and react aggressively, making the possibility of the things you fear the most coming true more likely than not. And there are three specific weaknesses: one, real Russian victory in Ukraine is a worst outcome than future possible Russian chaos; two, the break-up of the Russian Empire established by Peter the Great and Catherine is long overdue and trying to wallpaper over the Tsarist, Soviet and now Putinist cracks won't work; three, rewarding evil never ends well.
p. 261Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
His first downfall came in late 2004 when Putin sacked him. Kasyanov was considered to have been a good prime minister, but in the late nineties he was first nicknamed 'Misha Two Per Cent', a reference to the two per cent stake he allegedly took from government deals. Kasyanov says Putin himself brought up the nickname during their last meeting in December 2004: 'Remember that name if you ever decide to go over to the opposition', was Putin's threat. His second downfall was the sex tape during which the couple, as every political couple does the world over, slagged off their allies, Navalny included. Kasyanov carried on for a bit, a bird with a broken wing, but his career in Russian politics was dead.
That left only one man standing: Navalny.
p. 149
The whole point of Putin sending Navalny to Yamal was to break his spirit and within a month of arrival, he was cracking jokes about keeping warm in minus 32 degrees C inside the carcass of a hot, fried elephant. Once again, one is left thinking how much Putin must have hated him.
p. 267
Roughly a year before [his assassination], I had interviewed Nemtsov about Putin's grotesquely corrupt Winter Olympics in Sochi, asking him about the $5 billion road-rail link resort from the coast to the mountain ski resort. Nemtsov replied that: 'It would have been cheaper to have lined this road with Louis Vuitton handbags'. Before meeting Nemtsov, I had spent time with the comically stupid Putinist mayor of Sochi. He had knocked back my question about how gay Olympians would be treated in a city where the Kremlin's homophobic laws held sway by proclaiming: 'There are no gays in Sochi'. When I told Nemtsov about this, he laughed and laughed and laughed for so long we had to trim it down in the edit. He had a beautiful sense of the ridiculous and when I heard he had been shot, I burst into tears.
p. 146
