In Killer in the Kremlin, John Sweeney walks the reader through Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. The book explains how he gained unimaginable wealth and hung on to it by murdering opponents and taking Russia to war, and how he has bought influence with Western leaders and institutions.
The rise of a tyrant
During his time working in the KGB, Putin had seen how political power could be used to amass a personal fortune. His political ambition accelerated when he was appointed as a deputy to St Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, his former Law Professor. By then, the Soviet Union was no more, and the reins of power in Russia were held by Boris Yeltsin, a friend of Sobchak. In 1996, Yeltsin gave Putin a job in the Kremlin.
By 1998, he was head of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), managing Russia’s internal security service and giving him the power to manufacture kompromat films or images to implicate potential opponents in various nefarious activities. In the dying days of Yeltsin’s rule, he was appointed as acting Prime Minister. Putin emerged from the shadows to become Prime Minister but was still largely unknown.
The author makes a case based on evidence collected by Alexander Litvinenko and others that the FSB orchestrated a number of outrages, killing hundreds, that would be blamed on Chechen terrorists. The public demanded strong leadership and revenge, which Putin delivered.
The 2nd Chechen War (1999-2009)
The war was bloody and merciless. Sweeny had been on the scene interviewing survivors and witnesses of the atrocity at Katyr Yurt, where the Russians bombed and killed hundreds of refugees. Then, there was the destruction of the Chechen capital, Grozny, flattened by Russian artillery, killing thousands.
The International Criminal Court will never hear the damning testimony of these war crimes. The War on Terror provided cover. With Western governments failing to act, Tony Blair declared: “Chechnya isn’t Kosovo”, and George W. Bush thought Putin was “a man deeply committed to his country”. According to Sweeney, the only MP to speak out against the war was Jeremy Corbyn.
The catalogue of victims
The author introduces us to the many journalists, dissidents and opponents silenced by Putin.
The Kursk submarine disaster generated a mass of negative media coverage. Sweeney asserts that Putin reacted by stripping Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire owner of the most popular TV channel ORT, of his assets and exiling him.
Others would pay a much higher price. Journalist Maxim Borodin exposed an operation by the Wagner group (Russian mercenaries) in Syria. Led by a close friend of Putin, 200 Russians were killed by the US Army. A year later, he mysteriously “jumped to his death from a window”. According to Sweeney, the BBC in Moscow stopped him from reporting on Borodin’s death.
Alexander Litvinenko, a senior figure in the FSB, was sacked for exposing corruption and defected to MI6. He revealed that when Putin was appointed as director of the FSB, one of his first actions was to destroy the kompromat held on him.
In November 2006, Litvinenko would take tea with two Russian friends in a London Hotel, and the world would soon learn about the deadly effects of polonium-210. Later, the attempted poisoning of another defector, Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury would alert the world to the use of the nerve agent Novichok and the total disregard shown for the lives of the British public and officials.
Prominent opposition figures murdered include Boris Nemtsov. He had missed out on being made Deputy PM before Putin and was shot on a Moscow bridge for his opposition to the Ukraine War. Alexei Navalny had stood for election as president and was first attacked with a chemical corrosive, half blinding him. Later, he would be another victim of poisoning by Novichok. From his hospital bed in Germany, he duped an FSB scientist into revealing that the nerve agent was hidden in his underwear. He died later in prison.
Money and Western influence
Putin is probably one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune Sweeney claims was stolen from the immense wealth of Russia and all done through proxies. Sweeney states in his book: “The Russian proxies do the stealing. The foreign proxies are the smoke engine”.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky made a fortune from oil and banking following the liberalisation of the Russian economy. He gave a presentation to Putin showing the impact of corruption. Sweeney claims that Putin’s response was to roll up Khodorkovsky’s banking operation, steal his assets and send him to Siberia for 10 years. Key members of his team were hounded, some dying in mysterious circumstances, including the managing director of his banking operation, who was killed in a helicopter crash in Bournemouth.
The political and financial establishment across North America and Europe are recipients of large amounts of Russian money, and it seemed that no matter what atrocities Putin was responsible for, Western politicians and media were prepared to give him cover. Tony Blair and the Foreign Office thought they could manage Putin. Bush “liked what he saw”. And Obama fell for believing that power had been transferred to Medvedev when he and Putin swapped jobs.
An Intelligence Security Report on Russia noted that Russian expats use UK politicians to exert influence in their interests. The Conservative Party accepted funds from prominent Russians. Questions remain about how Arron Banks was able to donate £8mn to Leave.EU. Boris Johnson ennobled Evgeny Lebedev Baron Siberia, son of a KGB General and owner of The Independent newspaper.
An episode of the BBC’s Panorama that Sweeney worked on explored whether Trump was the Kremlin’s candidate for president, with suggestions that kompromat was held by the Russians on Trump. In 2018, Trump would meet in private with Putin with no officials present.
Across Europe, the lure of Russian money attracted French & Italian right-wing politicians. German Chancellor Schroder supported the NORD pipeline and is still a favourite with Moscow.
Putin can and does take what he wants from whomever he wants to take it. Outrageous examples include a 124-carat diamond ring from Robert Kraft and a glass replica AK-47 taken from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
He believed that he could also take Ukraine.
The Ukraine War
The book starts and finishes with Sweeney in the Ukraine. He visited the front line to meet the Ukrainian soldiers and those left cowering in the ruins of their homes, “too poor to become refugees”. At Bucha, he saw where the retreating Russian Army killed at least 50 civilians, stating: “At the centre of Bucha was a scene that we have been told would never happen again. But ‘never again’ feels a bitter dark joke”.
For those who saw the pictures after the recapture of Bucha, the shock has gone. New atrocities are committed, and the impact has diminished. Those atrocities included the shooting down of MH17 that killed hundreds, the bombing of Kramatorsk Station and the total destruction of Mariupol.
Reflection
Whilst some of Sweeney’s allegations are difficult to verify, this is a compelling narrative of a regime maintained by murder. Today, Putin carries on, believing the world will move on and accept his reality.
Britain and Europe could have acted to curb Putin’s murderous regime during the Chechen War with trade sanctions, asset seizures and stopping the flow of Russian money. When Crimea was invaded, the West accepted “the new reality” too readily.
The assassinations committed in London and Salisbury haven’t stopped the flow of money into London’s financial institutions. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has had an economic impact around the globe. All but a few in this country are poorer, with many unable to heat their homes through the winter.
A rabbi interviewed at Bucha pleaded: “The world has to stop the war. It’s not only a Ukrainian problem. It’s a problem for the whole of Europe. For the whole world.”
With power in this country in the hands of the few, there is little prospect of change until we address the issues of representation and accountability in our parliament and stop those profiting from their suffering.
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