In fact, I'm shocked Sweeney still gets away with it and has gone this far without getting himself harmed. It thrived during Yeltsin’s time in power, it was there in the background in the Soviet era and emerged into the foreground in the early 1990s in the immediate aftermath of the USSR’s demise. Een van de voorbeelden is de financiering van extreem-rechtse Europese politieke partijen, de Brexit en support voor Donald Trump in de campagne tegen Hillary Clinton. I knew Yuri and often shared a glass or two with him in his office when he was a Duma deputy for the Yabloko party and deputy editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

I appreciate John Sweeney's courageous investigative journalism on the Kremlin's dirt, risking himself from getting the Novichok treatment. Over the course of his career, John has won an Emmy, two Royal Television Society Award and an Amnesty International Award.

Ukraine, always in our thoughts today, and John Sweeney gives an insight not only into Putin the man but also hardships faced by frontline war correspondents. I won’t give away any secrets by mentioning that the main point of this book, accompanied by dozens of examples, is that Vladimir Putin is a mass-murdering despot.

Sweeney labelled the clips "attack videos" and others say they were produced to discredit himself and the documentary. As a reporter, first for the Observer and then for the BBC, Sweeney has covered wars and chaos in more than eighty countries and been undercover to a number of tyrannies, including Chechnya, North Korea and Zimbabwe. There is one section of the book, however, that I found to be infuriatingly selective with the truth. a Royal Television Society prize (2004) for "Angela's Hope," a BBC One documentary about a woman wrongly convicted of murdering her three babies. He also co-authored the investigation into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Murder On The Malta Express.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. No one is completely sure but a history of events sure gives us a good idea of the evil that is Putin. The evil dwarf-president is merely another one of those damn fool misfits like that scrappy little Stalin, or wee little Lenin. John tells brings together the narratives which have marked Putin's rise from figure of hope for the West to the biggest threat to world peace we have seen for 60 years!

I didn't find many book reviews or author interviews (although the author does his own podcast I might yet check out). I must admit that still plowing through John Sweeny's excellent paperback edition "Killer in the Kremlin", so it really a brief review of what I have read. Without any in-text citations and a sparse bibliography, I only had confidence in claims Rennie or I had read elsewhere. In a disturbing exposé of Putin's sinister ambition, Sweeney draws on thirty years of his own reporting - from the Moscow apartment bombings to the atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya, to the annexation of Crimea and a confrontation with Putin over the shooting down of flight MH17 - to understand the true extent of Putin's long war.Just a true and distinctly scary account of an idiot full of his own paranoia that somehow, scariest of all, made it to the top of his political field. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because mixed with the many factual data is a mix of gossip and speculation (X said Y but only one source for it so hard to validate). Other non-fiction books: The Life And Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991); Trading With The Enemy: Britain’s Arming of Iraq (1993); Big Daddy – Lukashenka, The Tyrant of Belarus (2012); Church Of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology (2013); North Korea Undercover: Inside the World’s Most Secret State (2013); Murder On The Malta Express: Who Killed Daphne Caruana Galizia (co-authored with Carlo Bonini and Manuel Delia, 2019).