John Sweeney - Killer in the Kremlin. The Explosive Account of Putins Reign of Terror

John Sweeney

KILLER IN THE KREMLIN

The Explosive Account of Putins Reign of Terror

Contents

About the Author

John Sweeney is a writer and journalist who, while working for the BBC, has challenged dictators, despots, cult leaders, con artists and crooked businessmen for many years. As a reporter, first for the Observer and then for the BBC, Sweeney has covered wars and chaos in more than eighty countries and been undercover to a number of tyrannies, including Chechnya, North Korea and Zimbabwe. Over the course of his career, John has won an Emmy, two Royal Television Society Awards, a Sony Gold Award, a What the Papers Say Journalist of the Year Award, an Amnesty International Award and the Paul Foot Award.

Also by John Sweeney

NON-FICTION

The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu

Trading with the Enemy: Britains Arming of Iraq

Purple Homicide: Fear and Loathing on Knutsford Heath

Rooneys Gold

Big Daddy: Lukashenka Tyrant of Belarus

The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology

North Korea Undercover: Inside the Worlds Most Secret State

Murder on the Malta Express: Who Killed Daphne Caruana Galizia? (with Carlo Bonini and Manuel Delia)

FICTION

Elephant Moon

Cold

Road

The Useful Idiot

CHAPTER ONE

The Killing Machine

Some idiot is moving heavy furniture around in the flat above and I wake up with a start. Im about to give Lambeth Council a ring to get them to sort him out when I remember I am in Kyiv and its four oclock in the morning, and its not tables and chairs that are going bang but Russian artillery.

The idiot is Vladimir Putin and his idiot war is two days old.

I grunt, fall asleep again, get up and go out, try to buy some loo roll, fail. In front of me in the shop are an old geezer and a housewife. The old guy buys ten packets of the same cigarettes and nothing else, his unique vice on vulgar display to the world. The housewife snaps up every saveloy in the shop, anxiety buying on a comic scale. It is funny but its not amusing.

The walk from my Airbnb near the Olympic stadium to the centre of town takes half an hour. Khreshchatyk, the great street of the Ukrainian capital, has the flavour of a neo-Stalinist take on Baths great Georgian Crescent with extra vodka shots. Its so wide you could drive three tanks abreast down it. This is Putins plan. Halfway along I start chuntering into my phone camera when a tough-looking dude with a very pukkah British accent points out that I am walking past the town hall and that is not a good place to be today. I explain to my fellow Brit that the Russians are not going to hit the town hall today thats for later and move on smartly. 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. Its the air-raid siren, going off big time, warning of incoming Russian artillery or missile fire. The noise is obscene.

They call it Putins lullaby.

I record a little piece to camera into my phone and tweet it as the sirens wail: Im worried about Roman Abramovichs yacht. I do hope its ok.

Someone on Twitter replies: Sink the yacht.

Up through Maidan Square to the rented flat of my pal, Oz Katerji, a British-Lebanese reporter who is half my age. Oz offers me a cuppa of Earl Grey. We sip our tea like the English milords we might be in some parallel universe and through the window we hear a big crump of artillery. Its not close but this is never a good sound.

Crump. Vladimir Putin takes me back to revising for A-level English in 1976 and Wilfred Owens great poem, Anthem for Doomed Youth: Only the monstrous anger of the guns

Both Oz and I are freelance, hoping to scratch a living by doing two-way interviews with radio stations BBC Northern Ireland, Scotland, LBC and RTE in Dublin. Each hit doesnt earn much but after a run you can buy a kebab or two.

We faff about for a bit trying and failing to get a cab or someone to drive us towards the war. Nothing doing. Anyone with a vehicle is driving their loved ones to the train station, to get them out. We take the Metro. You see anxiety scribbled on peoples faces, a mum slapping her kid doing no wrong, an old lady mystified while her daughter barks into her phone, tough men in combat uniform surging in and out of the tube carriages as if there is a war on. Which, of course, there is.

We get out at the Arsenal stop, the deepest underground station in the world. It is built into the side of the cliff that makes Kyiv a natural citadel, one where the Rus civilization was founded a thousand years ago. Moscow was, is and always will be the branch office. Out of the carriage, we are hit by a tide of human misery. It feels like walking along a tube platform during the London Blitz in 1940. Hiding from Russian bombs in February 2022 are an old couple, fast asleep; an old woman, surrounded by shopping bags full of stuff, the muscles on her face twitching uncontrollably; two sweet kids transfixed by a film on their phone, a silly dog at their feet.

Damn you, Vladimir Putin.

We ride the escalator out, walk to the west bank of the River Dnipro, edging north. The Russian Army is rumoured to be up ahead. I have to stop to talk to Jeremy Vine for his BBC Radio Two show hes middle England but a vital conveyor to ordinary people and Oz moves on. Thats the last I see of him, this day. As I walk along I film myself and in the distance capture a couple of Ukrainian soldiers hovering near the Triumphal Arch to the Friendship Between the Russian and Ukrainian Peoples no irony here, folks. A soldier shouts at me to stop filming. I put my camera down, walk on another hundred yards and start filming some more.

Fool, Sweeney, fool.

A young Ukrainian with a rifle starts shouting at me in Russian. Kyiv is a majority Russian-speaking city. He is not dressed in full camo but sports plain green trousers. Other guys wave guns in my general direction.

Mr Green Trews wants my phone, to see the videos I have taken.

Do I look like a Russian spy? Im wearing an orange beanie, a camel-coloured duffle coat as first worn by Trevor Howard playing Major Calloway in The Third Man , and a brown corduroy jacket with elbow patches. I look like an unemployed geography teacher from Dorking.

He demands my phone.

Its bonkers. Do I look like a Russian spy? Im yelling at him, and I can holler. If you doubt that, ask a member of the Church of Scientology.

The guns are no longer waving in my general direction. They are pointing at me.

I hand over my phone, passport and NUJ press card and, with my hands in the air, they walk me to their base. A steel door closes behind me. No one has seen me enter it; no one has seen my arrest. I am in trouble.

Were in a pumping station that keeps half of Kyiv supplied with fresh water. It smells of old ironmongery, properly oiled.

Someone makes a phone call to Ukrainian intelligence, the SBU, the Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny. I keep on saying, look at my Twitter banner.

Green Trews whistles up his commander and his second-in-command, who are the real thing, fully attired in Ukrainian Army uniform. The boss is a big man, bigger than me and Im no petit four. The deputy is smaller but sharp. He eyes me up with amused irony. I suspect that he knows Im no threat. The two men remind me of Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson from Dads Army. But the boss scowls at me and says Russkiy shpion. I did Russian at school and have forgotten nigh on all of it but I can work out Russian spy. At this, I sit down and start laughing uncontrollably.