Killer in the Kremlin: The instant bestseller - a gripping and explosive account of Vladimir Putin's tyranny

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Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, chief of the defence staff, said last weekend: “Some of the comments that he’s not well… I think they’re wishful thinking.” Sweeney may be correct in suggesting that Putin has been an expert conman and that his victims included former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, UK prime minister Tony Blair and the billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Despite his extremely unsavoury reputation, Berezovsky was given asylum in London, having become one of Putin’s enemies. The phrase “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” comes to mind. Words have power, Putin is afraid of the truth, I have always said that.' ALEXEI NAVALNY, LEADER OF THE RUSSIAN OPPOSITION John Sweeney is an award-winning journalist and author, who brings a novel to the layman that truly confirms the Russian powers mindset - "Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate so long as they fear."

Sweeney outlines briefly Putin's early life - some fascinating suggestions on his treatment as a child - to his KGB career - again suggesting why Putin languished in Russia and Dresden - and then onto his rise through domestic politics to leader of Russia. Who did you take to Palazzo Terranova in 2018? Have you ever received money or favours in kind from the Lebedevs beyond the ones that you’ve declared? Did you tell them what went on inside the Nato meeting? Have you been talking too much to a Russian spy?” Though the book can at times feel too personal and he does portray himself as a lad journalist against the world (this was in no part helped by the books narrator who injected the reading with the bravado of a nuts magazine editor). He accuses the bureau of siding with the Russian government to preserve its access to insiders. “The BBC Moscow office’s relationship with the Kremlin… there was something wrong and rotten about it,” he says.In his book Sweeney moves methodically through the violence in Russian recent history where he sees Putin’s prints on them all. He gives oxygen to multiple conspiracies about Putin’s wealth, mental state, personal health and sexual interests. Yuri Shchekochikhin was a Russian MP and journalist investigating these mass killings. He had courage, tremendous energy, a nose for a story and, I’ve been told, a fondness for Armenian brandy. In January 2003, he told a friend, “For the first time in my life I feel frightened.” Heavily engaging and informative, sweeneys personal recount of the tsar of is gripping. Following Putins rise to power as a low ranking KGB officer to Yeltsins successor, Sweeney is funny and opinionated throughout. Some of his conclusions about Putin's direct involvement in terrible events and murders are a little assumptive. There is not a smoking gun of evidence linking Putin to them directly. That said, I do agree with each of the author's conclusions, because knowing what Putin is capable of and the acts of aggression perpetrated by the Russian Federation, it is hard to come to any other conclusion about the man pulling the strings. Among those said to have attended are Elizabeth Hurley and Elton John, Shirley Bassey and Stephen Fry – and in 2016, Boris Johnson.

An explosive account of Putin's presidency and his long-term ambitions, including first-hand reporting from the invasion of Ukraine. The reason Sweeney can say all this now is that he feels “liberated” by the independent work he has done since, especially his Hunting Ghislaine podcast about the Jefferey Epstein scandal, which he is adapting into a book, and now his reporting from Ukraine. That tenacity is what won him Private Eye’s first Paul Foot Award in 2005 for his four-year investigation into mothers wrongly imprisoned over the cot deaths of their children, among other prizes. The last chapter of this book easily merits five stars! However, the rest of the book reads like a gruesome list of murder, mayhem and torture.

Diaries & Calendars

John Sweeney has a long career in investigative journalism and as such his experience of and interest in Russia and Putin helps to create a very readable and useful book. In Killer in the Kremlin, the story of Ukraine is bookended at the start and finish, using Sweeney's own experiences in Kyiv and elsewhere, with the wider story of Vlad the murder's executions and assassinations. The “drunken rage” may exist in Sweeney’s imagination and the “might of Russia” that he refers to was non-existent at the time. Untrained conscripts were sent to their deaths against tough Chechen fighters led by experienced commanders, including Dzhokhar Dudayev and Aslan Maskhadov, who had been senior Soviet officers. Sweeney’s polemic largely consists of digging up everything possible that shows Putin in a bad light, which admittedly is not a difficult task, but suggestions that he was simultaneously a paedophile and a womaniser, a supplier of arms to the Baader-Meinhoff gang, a hypochondriac and the richest man in the word are all open to question.

A former colleague says that while he has done some brilliant work, “he used to give his producers kittens”. Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown Her lover was so unrecognisable that Alyona could not find him in the morgue until the supervisor pointed out his name tag to her. This was in 2003. The poisonings and the shootings had only just begun. Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya? Poisoned, later shot. Human rights activist Natasha Estemirova? Shot. Politician Boris Nemtsov? Shot. Opposition leader Alexey Navalny? Poisoned, now in jail. Labour has been demanding answers about Johnson’s meetings. Evgeny Lebedev insists he is “ not some agent of Russia” but the opposition has called for him to publish texts between him and Johnson. Yvette Cooper, the shadow Home Secretary, raised the issue again in the Commons this month.While unreservedly condemning his brutal murder I should admit that Nemtsov did not make a similar impression on me. When I spoke to him of the bravery of Yuri Shchekochikhin, Nemtsov scoffed and put down his death, not to poisoning, but to his “fondness for Armenian brandy”. It was a comment that lowered him in my estimation. Putin subsequently invaded Georgia and hundreds more lives were lost. He helped Assad in Syria kill around half a million. In 2014, he invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine leading to 15,000 deaths. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine this February has added to the butcher’s bill: maybe 40,000 Russian soldiers, 15,000 Ukrainian troops and many thousands of Ukrainian civilians have died so far. Leaving aside Syria, the master of the Kremlin is directly responsible for the deaths of some 150,000 people. I share many of the author’s views on the current Kremlin regime, especially that the invasion of Ukraine was not only morally indefensible but was also a serious military mistake. There is one section of the book, however, that I found to be infuriatingly selective with the truth. This brings us to another Russian whose career was brought to a premature end. Boris Nemtsov was shot dead late at night while walking near the Kremlin. His death made a striking impression on Sweeney: “Nemtsov was an extraordinary man, the sweetest, funniest and most human Russian I’ve ever met. His brutal snuffing out caused me to sink into a profound depression.” 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.

By the time I get to the Post Office building a great curl of sound walls up in front of me like a monster wave at sea. It’s the air-raid siren, going off big time, warning of incoming Russian artillery or mission fire. The noise is obscene.

Creative Play

Afraid this is just poor. The book starts out with some passionate, melodramatic self-aggrandising about Sweeney's adventures in Ukraine, which could have been interesting if spun out into an examination of the present, Russia's crimes and the impact he's observed in Ukrainian society. Instead, the bulk of the book is focused on paraphrasing the works of other, better books with the addition of being written by a somewhat manic Steve Zissou figure. He's obviously been reading Masha Gessen, heavily - no bad thing because her books are great - but if you want a book examining Putin and taking guesses as to what's wrong with him then read The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, which is truly excellent. Sweeney argues the suggestion that Putin has cancer “isn’t just gossip”. He points to a Russian investigation that indicated a cancer doctor had accompanied Putin on 35 trips between 2016 and 2019: “That’s good journalism.”