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Killer in the Kremlin by John Sweeney: book review


 


Killer in the Kremlin: The Explosive Account of Putin’s Reign of Terror by John Sweeney (2022) is based upon the BBC journalist’s long association with the Russia and Ukraine. Sweeney is a prize-winning war correspondent and author of several books.

 

He writes from his on-site reporting location in Ukraine in February 2022, stating, ‘I still don’t understand why Vladimir Putin started his idiot war. So the best way of answering that question is to write a book about him.’   

 

The book was written between February and June 2022, but spans 22 years of Russian history from 2000 to 2022 – the period of Vladimir Putin’s prime ministership and presidency of Russia, serving continuously since 1999 when he followed Boris Yeltsin. 

 

Vladimir Putin was 70 years old on 7 October 2022. John Sweeney begins with a brief overview before commencing with Putin’s youth and military history although this is not a biography of the man. It is the coverage of Putin as a leader, and a strongly worded account of his actions. 

 

John Sweeney states at the beginning that ‘Vladimir Putin is not, I believe, mad … But Putin’s understanding of the world is maddeningly narrow, reduced to a gloomy tunnel vision, locked into a false narrative of betrayal.’ 

 

Over the 22 years, Sweeney writes about Chechnya in 2002; the Beslan school hostage seige in 2004; the poisoning of former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service Alexander ‘Sasha’ Litvinenko in 2006; the annexation of Crimea in 2014; the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines MH17 in 2014; the poisoning of former Russian military officer and double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, United Kingdom, in 2018; and the poisoning of Russian opposition leader and lawyer Alexei Navalny in 2020 and his imprisonment in January 2021. 

 

Sweeney uses his first-hand interviews and eyewitness accounts to present a testimony of events of brutality and assinations while Putin has been in government. Putin’s war on Ukraine is mentioned as a continuation of this historical aggression.

 

Not entirely objective, this brief, easy-to-read, well-structured, best-selling book is an account of Putin’s potency, with the author having no problem interjecting his strong personal views about the leader, the war, and the killings. The war on Ukraine continues under Putin’s watch, and John Sweeney is at a loss at the West’s inadequacies to address the situation and Vladimir Putin.   









The photographs were taken in Kyiv in June 2013. 

 

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

 

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