John Sweeney

Quotes

1. Sergei Sobyanin is a semolina pudding Putin loyalist, has been mayor of Moscow since 2010 and has a distinguished academic record. Actually, I made that last bit up. He did write a thesis for his degree on 'The subject of the Russian Federation in the economic and social development of the state. The competence of government bodies and methods of its implementation', but whole chunks were, according to a Russian anti-plagiarism website, copied on pages 32 to 35, 90 to 91, 105, 149 to 153, 161 to 165, 168 to 183, 185 to 194, and so on. If you get the drift, you get the pattern.

   p. 106

2. 

   It is extremely hard to come to a settled judgement on the weight of Russian opinion polls. My take is that if you say what you really think in twenty-first-century Russia, you are likely to jump out of a window very soon afterwards.

   p. 7

3. 

   For me, Navalny was killed in large part because of the West's appeasement of Putin that, even today, despite all the killings of innocent men, women and children in Ukraine, our leaders are afraid to stand up to the monster in the Kremlin, to properly enforce sanctions, to effectively arm Ukraine, to cut Russia off from the international financing system. The West is doing none of the above and is in danger of not just betraying Ukraine but its own security.

   p. 17

4. 

   We don't know the whole story, and probably never will. But we do know that Vladimir Putin exhibits multiple signs of being a psychopath: smooth lying with no tics; fearless dominance; blame externalization; unexplained easy life.

   p. 167

5. 

   The revolutionaries broke into Yanukovych's Mezhyhirya estate and found a temple constructed to the god of kleptomania. While millions of Ukrainians struggled on the poverty line, Yanukovych boasted a log cabin on steroids, a garage full of vintage motors, an exotic zoo and a ton of receipts proving his thievery. Expenses that stood out were $800 for medicines for his pet fish, $14,500 for tablecloths and $41 million on light fixures. Other boxes of files showed how much he spent on spying on critical journalists, $5.7 million for the month of December 2010 alone. [...] In June 2015, my former BBC Newsnight colleague and pal, Gabriel Gatehouse, got a scoop when he interviewed Yanukovych in his Russian exile. The disgraced president defended himself, saying the hoo-hah about the Mezhyhirya follies were 'political technology and spin: and that the estate did not belong to him personally'. When Gabriel challenged him about the exotic zoo, he replied: 'I supported the ostriches; what's wrong with that?'

   p. 120

6. 

   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.

   p. 144

7. 

   Nearly all my Ukrainian friends, whom I adore, believe there is something preternaturally wrong with Russia and the Russian soul, that Putin is just one monster among many from the swamp to the East. With love and with respect, I don't agree with them. This is Vladimir Putin's war. Like his wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria. Like his war without tanks and bombs against the West. Like his poisonings. It's down to him.

   p. 258

8. 

   It's hard to convey just how poor ordinary Russians are, but I got a flavour of that in 2007 when I made a BBC TV documentary, Vodka's My Poison. They called it the yellow death. It started in the summer when dozens of people turned up in casualty, a vile shade of yellow. The dozens turned to hundreds, then thousands. The better cases recovered, but will die long before their time. The worst cases? Natasha was not yet thirty, she had a seven-year-old boy called Maxim and she had less than a year to live. Her whole body had gone yellow, an instantly recognisable feature of toxic hepatitis. Something had destroyed her liver and now all the natural toxins in the body were stacking up. Her own body was poisoning her and there was nothing medicine – or at least nothing state medicine in Russia – could do about it. How come? Putin put up the price of vodka threefold in one strike. Craving alcohol, Natasha and her friends had added a new brand of handwash to their moonshine. The handwash was cheap and highly alcoholic, but also lethal. I remember the gloom in the hospital basement, steel doors slamming shut, dark yellow wraiths living out their last weeks, the lack of medicine, of care, of money, of light, of hope. It made me angry; it still does; and what I felt would be a fraction of the rage that consumed someone like Navalny who had a clear grasp of where the extraordinary riches of the Russian state were being siphoned off.

   p. 144

9. 

   Life inside the Kremlin must be extraordinarily unpleasant. The riches to be stolen are off the scale, but the consequences of failure are horrible too. And all the time the others are watching you, waiting for you to make a mistake.

   p. 143

10. 

    Paranoia is what ex-KGB spies do instead of playing golf.

    p. 13

11. 

    Some idiot is moving heavy furniture around in the flat above and I wake up with a start. I'm about to give Lambeth Council a ring to get them to sort him out when I remember I am in Kyiv and it's four o'clock in the morning, and it's not tables and chairs that are going bang but Russian artillery.

    The idiot is Vladimir Putin and his idiot war is two days old.

    p. 1

12. 

    One Chechen view was: 'If we had wanted to bomb Moscow, we would have blown up the Kremlin or a nuclear power station. Why should we blow up a couple of blocks of flats?'

    p. 61