Vladimir Putin turns 70 today. Since he became Prime Minister of Russia in 1999, some of The Spectator’s greatest contributors have asked the perennial questions: who is Putin, and what does he want? We’ve compiled the following pieces from our fully-digitised archive. 

‘Joking with a nine-year-old boy at a televised awards ceremony by the Russian Geographical Society, President Vladimir Putin said: ‘The Russian borders don’t end anywhere.’’

Portrait of the Week, 1 December 2016

Appointment as Prime Minister 

‘Not surprisingly, given his background, Putin has a lugubrious and somewhat sinister manner. Perhaps more importantly he has never stood for election to anything and his one dabble in democracy, managing the re-election campaign of the former mayor of St Petersburg, resulted in disastrous defeat. The Family-controlled media will no doubt do their best to give him a rapid makeover and, as prime minister, he will enjoy some powers of patronage, but even in Russia’s cynical and limited democracy his chances of success are extremely slim.’

Julian Manyon, ‘Return of Rasputin’, 14 August 1999

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Accession to the presidency

‘Alas, Putin seems to represent a step backwards. If he maintains his close ties to the greediest and most alienated portion of the Russian elite, he will encourage them in their venality, and discourage others from behaving better. If he goes on repeating his admiration for dead KGB generals, he will distort the national historical memory further. One hopes he will behave otherwise, once he acquires the trappings of office, but the omens are not good. Russia has only one hope of recovery: its elite must begin to feel that they live in the same country as its people, its people must feel some pride in their non-imperial history. Both must begin to feel some mutual responsibility for their country – some desire, at the very least, to make Russia a bit better managed than it used to be.’

Anne Applebaum, ‘Give them back their country’, 25 March 2000

‘It is still impossible to assess Mr Putin’s personal qualities. In his inscrutability, he reminds one of a Christ-child in an early Russian icon, though no one is suggesting that Vladimir Putin is a holy man. Over time, we will doubtless learn what, if anything, the inscrutability conceals; it is far too early to make a judgment. But his KGB background may prove an asset, not a liability.’

Bruce Anderson, ‘Mr Putin’s KGB past may not be a problem’, 24 June 2000

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The end of history

‘We might have tolerated White House warmongering when the Reds were in the Kremlin bed. Now, when Bush pokes his finger in Vladimir Putin’s eye, it’s harder to justify: there is no looming threat from which the Prez is defending us. On the contrary, he seems to be landing the world in needless trouble.’

Jonathan Freedland, ‘The right turns against America’, 21 April 2001

‘One of the most unsettling things about post-Soviet Russia is the way in which the country’s past is recycled as kitsch. At Ismailovo — the giant tourist-trap flea-market in the shadow of the grotesque hotels erected for the 1980 Olympics — there’s row on row of matryoshka dolls. Lenin nested in Stalin nested in Krushchev nested in Brezhnev nested in Andropov nested in Gorbachev is the old joke. Now, under the thin snow, you can get Osama bin Laden with a succession of other terrorists nesting in him. Or, adding copyright infringement to bad taste, SpongeBob SquarePants. An array of pewter busts — Lenin having been the essential desk ornament for the 1980s student — contains Marx, Trotsky, Stalin and a figure that at first I take for Dobby the house-elf from Harry Potter. Oh. Vladimir Putin.’

Sam Leith, ‘Diary’, 14 January 2012

‘I emerged from the Lexington Avenue subway to find an ambulance and a fire engine parked in the middle of Wall Street. The barricades were up, police were everywhere, and outside the New York Stock Exchange, six marksmen in blue helmets had their machine carbines at the high port. What drama was this? Could Richard Grasso, the Exchange’s embattled chairman, be holed up in his great stone fortress, refusing to leave unless he could take his $140 million pay-packet with him? No such luck, I was told – all this was standard procedure when Vladimir Putin was in town. (In the event, Mr Putin preferred to stage a photo-opportunity beside a Lukoil petrol pump, eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut, to show what globalisation could do.)’

Christopher Fildes, ‘Come on out with the money, chairman’, 11 October 2003

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Up close

‘In person, Vladimir Putin is surprisingly natural and pleasant, even warm. I’ve only met him once, very briefly after he voted in the 2008 election. But he told me, without being asked, how much he watched the BBC to improve his English, and enjoyed it; you wouldn’t have thought that from some of his public comments over the years. He was even nice about my own performances. Perhaps, having just handed over the presidency for the time being, he felt uncharacteristically relaxed and friendly. But I was left with the feeling that he was a man who wanted to be loved.’

John Simpson, ‘Putin power’, 3 March 2012

‘A bizarre thing happened to me the other day: I was invited to a posh London hotel to meet a mysterious apparatchik from the Kremlin. He asked me enigmatic questions about my biography of Prince Potemkin. Did I feel that Potemkin could be a role model, or even a hero, for Russia in the 21st century? The Soviet leaders, particularly Stalin, had admired Ivan the Terrible, but ‘the powers above’, as he put it, no longer felt that those blood-spattered tyrants were appropriate for a democracy. Potemkin and Catherine the Great possessed the right mix of humanitarianism, reform and autocracy, he suggested. Were there any parallels between the era of Potemkin and that of President Putin? He asked me to write a memorandum for the ‘powers above’. I delivered my homework secretly and heard no more about it until I recently happened to hear President Putin being interviewed. He was asked about his historical inspirations. To my amazement, he replied that the era he most admired was that of Catherine and Potemkin. The book is being published in Russian later this year.’

Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘Diary’, 9 February 2002

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Putin’s ideology

‘While Putin is indeed an autocrat, he is no Red Tsar. He is a typical Soviet radish — red on the outside but white at the core. He is the heir not of Lenin and Trotsky, but of the White officers who fought to save Russia from communism in the civil war of 1917 to 1921. Depending on one’s view of the Whites, that may or may not be a good thing. But, to most, White is undoubtedly better than Red, and Putin’s authoritarian rule gives Russia comparatively little to fear.’

Paul Robinson, ‘Putin’s might is White’, 10 January 2004

‘What was Peter’s cause? In essence, to make Russia a European great power, capable of matching the likes of Austria, Britain, Prussia and France in both military might and the economic and bureaucratic foundations on which it is based. No historian would dispute that he achieved that. At the Battle of Poltava (8 July 1709), Tsar Peter won the most important victory of his reign, defeating the army of Charles XII of Sweden, which had been one of the great powers during the 17th century. Poltava lies about 200 miles east of Kiev, not far from Luhansk and Donetsk. This is the history that inspires today’s Tsar Vladimir, much more than the dark chapters of Stalin’s reign of terror.’

Niall Ferguson, ‘Vlad the Invader’, 26 February 2022

‘I wish people would not say Vladimir Putin is mad. One understands him much better if one says he is bad. In some ultimate sense, evil is a form of madness because it brings destruction to its perpetrators as well as its victims, but Putin is not mad in the ordinary sense of the word. He knows what he is doing.’

Charles Moore, ‘The Spectator’s Notes’, 12 March 2022

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Chechnya

‘I would like to add that I am not in the least anti-Russian. I’m just not in favour of murder, torture, rape, hostage-taking and assaults upon innocent civilian non-combatants. They are war crimes. The bomb blasts which immediately preceded the war were not war crimes. They were murders in the tradition of Joseph Stalin.’

Jeremy Pulley, ‘Getting away with murder’, 26 October 2002

‘The crisis in Chechnya extends much further than the so-called war against terror. Putin, like Yeltsin before him, has behaved like a butcher there. And his attitude towards his country’s media is barely more enlightened than that of the Soviet leaders who preceded him.’

Stephen Glover, ‘How Putin silences the journalists who criticise his brutality in Chechnya’, 11 September 2004

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Putin and Blair

‘One of the most serious mistakes that George W. Bush and Tony Blair made was their belief that Vladimir Putin was a man they could do business with. Both came to regret the decision.’

James Forsyth, ‘Brown’s stand on Russia is a welcome correction’, 21 July 2007

‘Why, then, has relatively little so far resulted from this long courtship? Mr Blair is often, of course, accused of undue reverence towards the powerful, be they President Bush or captains of industry; of being too willing to accede to their agenda without a clear bottom line of his own. But, if you think about it, Russia isn’t actually all that powerful. It may even be less powerful than Britain. Yet perhaps Putin’s greatest feat has been to emerge almost with the upper hand, to persuade the Prime Minister and others that he is a man worth taking veg seriously indeed. The element of ingratiation in the Russia-Britain relationship will not have been lost on a student of human pyschology like Vladimir Putin. Does the iron man of the KGB recognise a pushover when he sees one?

Andrew Gilligan, ‘Putin’s not for trusting’, 28 June 2003

‘If Her Majesty’s ministers, who wrote such guff for her, seriously believe that we in this country share ‘values’ with someone so wedded to the notion of the abuse of state power as Mr Putin, then God help us… Out of respect for Western values, governments like ours need to become a lot more discriminating in their endorsements of and support for President Putin and his friends. Before enlisting him as our fully fledged partner in the war against terror, we should consider whether we are, in fact, fighting the same enemy.’

Simon Heffer, ‘Why we must not appease the Kremlin’, 11 September 2004

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Authoritarianism

‘Putin is like a mafia boss. He is ruthless and does not bother about public opinion. He knows what he needs, knows how to get it and is used to displaying strength, so the only way to oppose him is to show strength back. But the strength shown by the great Cold War leaders — Reagan and Thatcher — is absent in the West at present.’

Garry Kasparov, ‘How Putin’s poker game makes fools of the West’, 14 December 2013

‘For a brief period, in the early 1990s, it looked like the KGB was finished. Now it is back, and more important than ever. If nothing else, the past decade has proven to Putin and his colleagues that the values they imbibed during their years in the Soviet secret services were the right ones. They no longer care if others disagree.’

Anne Applebaum, ‘Why Putin will stop at nothing to smash the new Russian revolution’, 21 April 2007

‘Putin has quickly reversed the judicial achievements of the chaotic Yeltsin era and reconstructed a command structure in which, in the words of Natan Sharansky (who knew KGB justice from inside), ‘institutions that seem powerful – the courts, the legal profession, the parliament … are actually elaborate frauds whose power is largely theoretical’. Khodorkovsky, who before his arrest – had made his business activities transparent and used his great wealth and organisational skill to promote democracy and civil society in Russia, was a serious enemy. His challenge to the power of the Kremlin was Promethean; foolhardy, many say. As the destruction and expropriation of Yukos has revealed, the ‘siloviki’ who surround Putin were prepared to do anything to gain control of his assets.’

Rachel Polonsky, ‘Russia in the dock’, 2 April 2005

‘A few months ago I asked a Kremlin grandee, who worked with both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, which president of Russia he preferred. I expected him to favour the warm but shambolic Yeltsin rather than the competent but icy Putin. I was wrong. ‘The difference,’ he explained, ‘is that Yeltsin was a capricious Tsar; Putin’s a practical politician.’ But who, I asked was the more lovable? ‘Putin,’ he replied, ‘because he’s always direct and he keeps his word.’’

Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘True democracy may die with Boris Yeltsin’, 28 April 2007

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The gulf widens

‘In Mr Putin’s trip to Maine last week, it was Mr Bush who was doing the back-pedalling, agreeing to ditch the Pentagon’s plans for the missile interceptors in Poland. They joked, shared a speedboat, ate lobster and played fetch with their dogs. But it is now time for realpolitik. The free market has perished in Russia, and a petro-economy has taken its place. Russia is no longer a junior partner for the West, but a growing adversary. Mr Putin will smile — but rearm Russia as he smiles. And the new arms race continues apace.’

Fraser Nelson, ‘The new Cold War’, 14 July 2007

‘Remember the months before 9/11? The new US President had his first meeting with the Russian President. ‘I looked the man in the eye and found him very straightforward and trustworthy,’ George W. Bush said after two hours with Vladimir Putin. ‘I was able to get a sense of his soul.’ I’m all for speaking softly and carrying a big stick, but that’s way too soft; it’s candlelight-dinner-with-the-glow-reflecting-in-the-wine-glass-just-before-you-ask-her-to-dance-to-‘Moonlight-Becomes-You’ soft. Even at the time, many of us felt like yelling at Bush: Get a grip on yourself, man! Lay off the homoerotic stuff about soulmates! This is a KGB apparatchik you’re making eyes at.’

Mark Steyn, ‘The death of Mother Russia’, 22 October 2005

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Litvinenko poisoning

‘In the past year or so, that carefully calibrated tolerance for a manifestly weak political opposition has begun to deteriorate. The visits from the tax police are now augmented by visits from the secret police. Independent groups of all kinds — environmentalist, human rights, even educational — find it difficult to register legally. Most of all, two extremely open and brutal murders of two well-known people — Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko — appear to have changed the terms of the game. Politkovskaya was shot in broad daylight, in her apartment building, by a confident killer who left his weapon at the scene of the crime. Litvinenko, as we all know, was murdered in central London with radiation poisoning. These were not murders carried out by people who were anxious to prevent bad publicity, or indeed cared in the least what the rest of the world thinks about Russia.’

Anne Applebaum, ‘Why Putin will stop at nothing to smash the new Russian revolution’, 21 April 2007

‘‘Are you ever threatened, do you ever feel in danger?’ I asked. Litvinenko stared disconsolately at his trainers as if this was a question he couldn’t begin to answer adequately. Then a roar of laughter came from the armchair across the room.’

Neil Barnett, ‘Remember Trotsky!’, 25 November 2006

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Georgia

‘It was Vladimir Putin who described the end of the USSR as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century’. He will not be able to reverse the ultimate trend toward market states; this new constitutional order is too formidable an innovation meekly to give way. Indeed the Russian tactic of granting vast numbers of Ossetians Russian citizenship — which gave it the legal pretext that it used to intervene — is at bottom a market state manoeuvre which encourages multiple juridical identities. But the hope that the transition away from nation states could be done without bloodshed in Europe has been dashed. The end of the first era of globalised constitutional transformation has come with unpredictable consequences because war, as Clausewitz told us, has its own momentum. I should be surprised if there were no further violence in Georgia.’

Philip Bobbitt, ‘Russia’s aggression in Georgia is a portent of perils to come’, 16 August 2008

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Opposition

‘Contemporary Russia is a materialist, non-ideological society. It’s hardly surprising that the first political opposition movement to take a materialist, non-ideological approach has had so much success. Navalny is right to focus on what people care about. Once upon a time, Soviet dissidents worked to expose the hypocrisy of a regime that claimed to believe in peace and justice, and in fact promoted war and terror. Navalny and his ilk work to expose the hypocrisy of an authoritarian clique which claims to be making everyone richer but is in fact stealing most of the nation’s money for itself.’

Anne Applebaum, ‘Russia’s new dissidents’, 31 December 2011

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Ukraine and Crimea

‘If democracy fails here, it will be a colossal failure for the European project marking an end to the transformative power that changed regimes in central and eastern Europe without firing a single shot. What is more, EU interests are at stake as well as values: 85 per cent of Europe’s gas travels through Ukrainian pipelines. Yulia Mostovaya calls her country ‘Europe’s throat’ — unless we defend it we could find ourselves strangled by Putin’s iron fist.’

Mark Leonard, ‘Yuschenko: ‘We are living in historical times’’, 19 May 2007

‘If Russia’s corrupt business elite, together with Ukraine’s corrupt business elite, can derail yet another Ukrainian revolution, bribe yet another group of politicians, then yes, they could yet again prevent Ukraine from reforming its economy and returning to a path of growth and prosperity. It’s almost too bitter to imagine: ten years from now, another generation of young Ukrainians would have to face snow, cold and bullets with the dream of getting their country to change.’

Anne Applebaum, ‘The power of provokatsiya’, 1 March 2014

‘If Russia didn’t grasp how angry Washington would get over Syria, did the West realise how furiously Russia would respond to the EU Association Agreement and to the fall of Yanukovych? Perhaps not. Fearing above all the irrecoverable loss to Nato of its treasured naval station in Sevastopol, Russia reacted. After 23 years of sullenly appeasing the West, Moscow finally said ‘enough’.’

Peter Hitchens, ‘The empire-builders’, 7 March 2015

‘David Cameron says that Russia’s annexation of Crimea ‘will not be recognised’. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk promises that ‘we will take our territory back’. They are both misguided. Let Crimea go: it will be the making of Ukraine.’

Owen Matthews, ‘Putin’s poison pill’, 29 March 2014

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Sochi

‘A full-scale Olympic boycott seems unlikely; thus far, both sides prefer to pay lip service to the idea that Russia and the West are ‘partners’, as Putin puts it with a curl of the lip. But the pretence is wearing thin. Talk-show host Jay Leno, in his recent interview with Obama, compared Putin’s Russia to Hitler’s Germany; Obama didn’t disagree. The ‘reset’ is over. Russia is sliding decisively towards obscurantism and nationalism, its only friends the world’s remaining dictators. Putin seems bent on reviving a Soviet past — and on putting himself and his long-suffering country once again on the wrong side of history.’

Owen Matthews, ‘Putin’s own Cold War’, 17 August 2013

‘Even Putin has realised that he has to dial down his homophobia. His recent interview with Andrew Marr, in which he declared that he has gay friends and said that gays are welcome in Sochi, was a clear attempt to defuse the situation in the run-up to the Games — though he rather spoilt it by adding the proviso that homosexuals should ‘leave children alone’, which is a bit like inviting a black family into one’s home and then greeting them with a warning that they mustn’t make off with the silver.’

James Kirchick, ‘Putin’s pink peril’, 1 February 2014

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Syria

‘Putin has emerged from his Syria gamble looking decisive because he at least knows who his allies are — and, no less importantly, who his enemies are. The US and UK, on the other hand, are against almost every major group fighting in Syria.’

Owen Matthews, ‘How Putin outwitted the West’, 10 October 2015

‘When Russia entered the Syrian civil war in September 2015 the then US secretary of defense, Ash Carter, predicted catastrophe for the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin was ‘pouring gasoline on the fire’ of the conflict, he said, and his strategy of fighting Isis while backing the Assad regime was ‘doomed to failure’. Two years on, Putin has emerged triumphant and Bashar al-Assad’s future is secure. They will soon declare victory over Isis inside the country.’

John R. Bradley, ‘Putin the peacemaker’, 17 October 2017

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Brexit

‘One government minister tells me: ‘Putin sees Brexit as weakening any effective system of European and transatlantic co-operation.’

James Forsyth, ‘Project Fear’, 16 January 2016

‘It’s sometimes claimed that Vladimir Putin would want Britain to vote for Brexit. This is unlikely: what could suit the Kremlin more than European security being entrusted to the most dysfunctional organisation in the West?’

The Spectator, ‘Out – and into the world’, 18 June 2016

‘Vladimir Putin will be happy. A bit like the Hitler stuff, making Vlad happy is seen as the sort of clinching argument in almost all political debates at the moment. Don’t vote Leave — it will make Vlad happy. Poland, get in line — you’re making Vlad happy.’

Rod Liddle, ‘Voters have no time for the flaccid centre’, 28 May 2016

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Trump

‘Why would they bother? Maybe it’s because Trump has said repeatedly that he admires Vladimir Putin.‘At least he’s a leader,’ he said. And indeed, Putin is the wealthy, vulgar boss of a system in which all of the political actors are oligarchs, and in which money and political influence work in tandem — exactly the kind of system that Trump and his children aspire to create.’

Anne Applebaum, ‘Trump ♥ Putin’, 30 July 2016

‘The subject of Russia and Putin was also used throughout this election as a shorthand way to malign the Trump campaign. But this was not based on anything more than a couple of complimentary phrases about President Putin. And though the commentariat likes to use Putin (like ‘progressive’ rights) as a way to demonstrate a candidate’s unfitness for office, there is nothing very clever about a stance of unbridled hostility, aggression and antagonism towards Moscow.’

Douglas Murray, ‘It’s time to consider the real Trump’, 12 November 2016

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Skripal poisoning

‘The point is that lying itself is the message. Putin’s lies are not about concealment but rather about his ability to assert his power over truth itself. He says, now, that the Kremlin had nothing to do with the attack on Sergei Skripal — and if British intelligence officers are convinced that the nerve agent used could only have come from a laboratory tightly controlled by the Russian government, well, that’s their problem. If the British want an explanation for what happened in Salisbury — by midnight on a Tuesday or any other time — why would they come to him? Putin doesn’t need to be honest. He believes that he controls the truth. He can make his own reality.’

Owen Matthews, ‘Putin’s poison’, 17 March 2018

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Covid

‘Russia, which had been seeking to hold a referendum granting President Putin sweeping new powers, claimed just two weeks ago to have coronavirus under control. Not long afterwards, Putin compromised with reality and initiated a lockdown so strict that no citizen is allowed more than 100 metres from his home.’

James Ball, ‘Don’t be deceived by Covid data’, 4 April 2020

‘The state’s rainy-day reserve fund stands at $570 billion, up $190 billion since 2014. That should go some way to covering coronavirus bailout measures.’

Owen Matthews, ‘Can Putin survive the coronavirus stress test?’, 2 May 2020

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Nuclear fears

‘The Russians, of course, didn’t get Grease 2. For all his protestations of culture, Vladimir Putin probably still hasn’t seen it. So he threatens nuclear war, in a narrow-eyed, muscular sort of way, and he probably expects outrage, or hysteria, or gibbering terror. Instead he gets wry nostalgia, and fun competitions in the tabloids. He’s probably wondering how the hell we spend our days.’

Hugo Rifkind, ‘The ultimate missile defence is that most Russians live in Britain now’, 16 June 2007

‘At the start of the war in Ukraine, I was given a recording made by the Ukrainian intelligence services. It was described as an intercepted call from an officer at Russia’s nuclear missile base in Siberia to a relative in Kyiv. The line crackles and a man speaks in Russian: ‘I don’t know what I should do… His [Vladimir Putin’s] finger is hovering over the button. Maybe the commander-in-chief knows he’s got no way out.’ The Russian says his base has been given three hours to put its nuclear weapons ‘into a state of readiness’. And – a terrifying further step – he has been told of orders from President Putin to enter the co-ordinates to target Kyiv and two other Ukrainian cities. With a tremor in his voice, he says: ‘He might just do it.’

Paul Wood, ‘Cornered: could Putin go nuclear?’, 24 September 2022

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The energy weapon

‘Worst case? Shale disappoints, no new nuclear, natural gas prices soar, and we’re back where we once feared we might be, at the mercy of Mr Putin and his pipelines. Watch this space.’

Martin vander Weyer, ‘On gas and hot air’, 15 June 2013

‘Putin may keep the gas flowing at a reduced volume. But what if he cuts Germany off altogether? To say that Germany has made itself reliant on Russian gas doesn’t quite capture the enormity of what is going on. Germans need Russian gas to heat their homes. The country’s heavy industry depends on Russian hydrocarbons. According to Robert Habeck, the German economy minister, any sudden stop in Russian gas flows would trigger a domino effect: an economic crisis which he compares to the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.’

Wolfgang Münchau, ‘Cold War: Putin’s plan to hold Germany to ransom’, 2 July 2002

‘Four years ago, at the United Nations General Assembly, the then President Donald Trump spoke about the dangers of such reliance. As he put it: ‘Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the western hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.’ But the Germans, and everybody else, knew better.’

Douglas Murray, ‘Green parties are facing a reality check’, 3 September 2022

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War

‘‘What follows plague?’ I asked a medieval historian at the start of the pandemic. ‘War,’ he replied.’

James Forsyth, ‘Putin’s on manoeuvres – are we ready?’, 24 April 2021

‘Gone was the calculating practitioner of realpolitik we have known for many years, and at least could rely on to pursue his imperial ambitions with some degree of rationality and realism.’

Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The West missed its chance to help Ukraine’, 26 February 2002

‘I know Ukraine well enough to be sure that surrender is not on the cards. A Ukrainian friend tells me that his people will fight Putin’s army the way the Afghan mujahideen fought the Red Army in the 1980s.’

Niall Ferguson, ‘Vlad the Invader’, 26 February 2022

‘The Pravda Brewery, which in normal times doubles up as a concert venue, has stopped making beer and is manufacturing Molotov cocktails. The label on the bottle says: ‘Putin – khuylo!’ (Putin is a dickhead).’

Freddy Gray, ‘Diary from Lviv’, 5 March 2022

‘What we are witnessing now is on another level: a full-scale invasion of a sovereign, independent European country. It belongs in another century – and Putin belongs in a war crimes tribunal.’

David Cameron, ‘Diary from Poland’, 26 March 2022

‘I wrote in these pages a few weeks ago that the alternatives to Putin are unlikely to be better. As poet and critic Dmitry Bykov says, Putin is not Hitler, he’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. After military defeat in Ukraine comes a new version of Versailles, Weimar and then the real disaster. ‘I’m not afraid of a corrupt Russia,’ Bykov says. ‘I’m afraid of a truly fascist Russia.’

Owen Matthews, ‘Diary from Moscow’, 1 October 2022

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