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On New Year's Eve 1999, a young Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian TV screens - awkward, self-conscious. . .and the new President. Two decades later, Putin is still in power, standing self-assured and at ease on the world stage. How did a once little known KGB bureaucrat become one of the most dominant figures of 21st-century politics? I have never quite read about Russian history. It was always a bit of a mystery to me why Russia and US, after fighting on the same side in WW2 proceeded to have this nuclear arms race and cold war with USA. And why is Russia not as developed as US is, and was considered among the developing BRICS economies in 90s and early 2000's. Since then, China has zoomed ahead of course, and while Russia is still considered hugely influential in global politics, they don't have the economic might you might imagine.
Putin: His Life and Times review – the collapse that shaped Putin: His Life and Times review – the collapse that shaped
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. The result is a step-by-step journey, whose penultimate chapter is a little surprisingly called “The Endgame”, hobbled by being published as the climax approaches, not after the event. Short, let alone history, has not had time to judge the success or failure of the latest horrifying act in Putin’s astonishing drive to make Russia great again.Mikhail Khodorkovsky has seen behind the mask of Vladimir Putin. Once an oil tycoon and the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky spoke out against the corruption of Putin's regime - and was punished by the Kremlin, stripped of his entire wealth and jailed for over ten years. In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes readers from the heart of Putin's Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine. Strikingly, the occasions Short records when outsiders have witnessed Putin’s inscrutable mask fracture nearly all relate to these “lost” lands, countries whose independent existence was to him an impossible outrage. There is the rant about Estonia to the British ambassador or former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s magnificent record of Putin’s “violent diatribe” over Georgia and its leader, who should be “hung by his balls”. That only ended when Sarkozy retorted: “So your dream is to end up like Bush, detested by two-thirds of the planet?” Putin burst out laughing. “You scored a point there.” Finally, most importantly, over Ukraine, which, whisper it quietly, in its present shape truly was a creation of Stalin and Khrushchev. The tragedy may be that it has taken Putin’s actions, the atrocities committed by the Russian army and tens of thousands of deaths, to finally prove Ukraine’s existence to the man himself.
Books UK The Russia Conundrum - Penguin Books UK
In the midst of one of the darkest acts of aggression in modern history - Russia's invasion of Ukraine - this book shines a light on Putin's rule and poses urgent questions about how the world must respond. Now freed, working as a pro-democracy campaigner in enforced exile, Khodorkovsky brings us the insider's battle to save his country's soul. Offering an urgent analysis of what has gone wrong with Putin, The Russia Conundrum maps the country's rise and fall against Khodorkovsky's own journey, from Soviet youth to international oil executive, powerful insider to political dissident, and now a high-profile voice seeking to reconcile East and West. Another low point during the Putin years was the crisis in Ukraine where the ruling dispensation was trying to gain admission into the European Union. Putin convinced the Ukrainian Government to remain within the Russian sphere of influence and the uprisings that happened in Kiev were ruthlessly put down. Eventually, Russia invaded Crimea (a part of Ukraine) which was of strategic importance to Russia. This invited the wrath of the western nations in the form of sanctions. From Putin's point of view, he was probably right in his approach to the crisis because the western powers were trying to undermine the strategic interests of the country. I did not know snipers shot more than 100 student protestors in the Ukraine in 2014. Little green men, the locals called the soldiers that suddenly appeared in the city. A gripping and explosive account of Vladimir Putin's tyranny, charting his rise from spy to tsar, exposing the events that led to his invasion of Ukraine and his assault on Europe.It's the mental toll of doing the propaganda, but it's also the mental toll of being taken out as well," Mr Aslin said.
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