Vladimir Putin’s war
in Ukraine has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Russian
soldiers. Thousands lie unburied and left where they fell on the battlefield,
their badly maintained tanks and trucks abandoned for lack of fuel or bombed
into tangled wreckage.
These are not hallmarks of a
global superpower. They are signs of the decay and rampant corruption that characterizes
Russia under the rule of the paranoid, kleptomaniac tsar of a failing gangster
state.
Putin has milked billions of
roubles while his people starve and doesn’t give a tuppenny damn about the
lives lost in Ukraine
Chief prosecutor Yuri Skuratov
– an obstacle to Putin’s rise – was seen off by a grainy video purporting to
show Mr. Skuratov in the company of two Moscow prostitutes in the late-1990s
He is a man who is terrified
by the idea of his own death and about the betrayal of those around him to such
an extent that he didn’t even tell his generals they were to invade Ukraine
until the night before the tanks rolled over the border. He believed they’d be
victoriously parading through Kyiv’s main square within 72 hours.
I have followed Putin’s career
for more than 20 years, I have spoken to his opponents, to the politicians he
has had killed, crushed or driven into exile. I’ve even confronted the man
himself about his murderous policies – and can’t go back to Russia as a result.
