Dead Tsar Walking: Putin at 70
Dead Tsar Walking: Putin at 70
Dead Tsar Walking: Putin at 70
John Sweeney
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying tsar, Vladimir Putin turns seventy on October 7th but his brutal war against Ukraine is exploding in his puffy, currants-in-dough, steroid-addled face. Cargo 200s – Sov slang for soldier corpses – are piling up; surviving troops are voting with their feet; draftees are running for the border; their mothers and wives are hitting the streets to protest. You might wager a fiver on the master of the Kremlin making it to seventy-one but I wouldn’t bet on it. Like Shelley foreseeing the end of George III, the Kremlin’s grave-diggers are smacking their chops, spades at the ready.
How on earth could the man who, on February 23rd this year, stood proud as the ruler of the world’s biggest country, armed with the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, owning treasure in oil and gas, whose trophies include such Cold War Two victories as the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, have fucked everything up so badly?
The best, least bad answer is that Vladimir Putin lives inside a zombie fairy tale, an alternative living-dead fantasy land where the Soviet Union was a great power brought down by western spies and domestic traitors and his great mission is to revenge that reverse, to save the Russian world and return it to its rightful majesty, to bring back ungrateful Ukraine to its bed, to see the West’s timid and corrupt leaders bow before his throne. Putin is losing his grip on power, then, because he has no clear idea of how the world, Ukraine, the war he started and his own country and his army work in the twenty-first century. He is the great pre-modern dictator of our time.
Russia’s tragedy is that Putin has made it so that all the country’s truth-tellers have been poisoned or shot or fell out of a window or tripped down the stairs or are in a dungeon or have fled the country. In the early 2000s Anna Politkovskaya – poisoned, survived, later shot – warned that Putin’s was zombifying Russia. He succeeded. There is hardly no-one left in Russia and no-one at all in the Kremlin who has the courage or the truth in them to tell him that the Soviet zombie fairy does not exist and won’t come back, that (virtually) everyone in Ukraine would rather die than be ruled by the Kremlin, that the West’s new generation of leaders are not going to bow before him, not at all, that his army is rotten from the core, that he is losing his stupid war.
That he is a dead tsar walking.
Faced with two great battles lost – the first the Battle of Kyiv, in early September the Battle of the Kharkiv Oblast, with a third defeat looming in Lyman, a fourth in Kherson - the zombie tsar does what all autocrats love to do. He changes the subject, drafting the poor but not the rich and threatening the West with the end of times. When it comes to nuclear blackmail, Putin is a zombie Humpty Dumpty:
“But ‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
In Samarkand, at a meeting of TyrantsRUs, Putin who has been hinting at atomic Armageddon, accused the West of doing exactly what he has been doing. “Nuclear blackmail also came into play. We are talking not only about the shelling of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, encouraged by the West, which threatens a nuclear catastrophe…”
The Russian Army shelled the nuclear power plant. One rocket that didn’t go off clearly showed its trajectory from the way that its tailfin had got buried in the earth. The rocket had come from Russian-occupied Ukraine. Zombie Humpty was making it up.
“But also,” he carried on, “about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons against Russia.”
No western leader has done that. None at all.
The egg-man continued: “To those who allow themselves such statements about Russia, I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and in some components more modern than the NATO countries. And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It's not a bluff.”
The threat of nuclear war is echoed by his goons in the Kremlin patsy media. Andrei Gurulev, an MP in the Russian parliament, warned that Russia could turn Britain into a
“Martian desert” in three minutes flat. Zombie Humpty and his goon show are bluffing. By the way, I am writing this from Kyiv so I have skin in the game. I may be a fool but I am not an idiot. I would not be in Ukraine if I thought for a second there was a serious chance of Putin hitting the nuclear button. I don’t believe he wants to die. That is also the view of two psychiatrists, one Ukrainian and one American, who spend much of the time wandering around inside Putin’s brain, as it were. He knows we have nuclear weapons too. If his birds fly, Russia will also become a Martian desert. If I am wrong, I don’t believe the Kremlin’s machinery will obey him if he does, because they don’t want to die either.
The two moves, mass mobilisation and hints of nuclear strikes, are, on the face of it, scary. Very. But I have been studying Vladimir Putin closely since I first called him a war criminal in my old paper, The Observer, in 2000 after I had returned from an undercover trip to Chechnya and seen evidence of the Russian killing machine with my own eyes. He lies as he breathes, smoothly. The draft and the threat to nuke are self-conflicting, a sign of weakness, not strength, as we shall see later. For now, it is important to get inside Putin’s head and understand where this stuff is coming from.
The first draft of Putin’s zombie fairy tale was written by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin at the midnight of the twentieth century in August 1939. The two monsters drew a new map, splitting the eastern half of Europe between themselves. Putin likes that map and, more or less, wants it back. But with deadly, almost carnal passion, he absolutely wants the map of the Soviet Union of 1989 back, with Ukraine subject to the Kremlin’s whims, a vassal region, not a nation.
Putin has never understood why the Soviet Union imploded. It was not stabbed in the back but collapsed because of its own internal contradictions. It did not tell the truth about the world. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a disaster for the victim country but also for the invaders. Thus far, Putin has generated in his big war of 2022 roughly three times as many as Cargo 200s as Brezhnev. The 1979 catastrophe happened because, although Brezhnev’s generals knew it would be a mistake, no-one in the Kremlin dared to tell the boss that. Same old, same old.
The Soviet Union collapsed because it did not tell the truth about itself or allow that to be told. In 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, on the border between Ukraine and Belarus, blew up and the relevant lowly officials were tried and convicted. Deputy heads must roll. But the system had covered up a previous near-miss accident before. It was the system that was rotten, not the relevant lowly officials.
And the Soviet Union collapsed because it could not fund itself. Its economy was
broken, half-cocked, failing, incapable of keeping pace with the West let alone overtaking it.
So what we are seeing right now is the last spasms of the Soviet Man, a zombie created by Lenin and Stalin and Brezhnev. Their direct heir, Vladimir Putin, does not tell the truth about the world or Russia and his economy can no longer fund his ambition, let alone his war. Of course, no-one in the Kremlin dare tell him that. But the Ukrainian people are suppling a serious reality check. Outgunned, outnumbered and over-run at the start of Putin’s big war this February, the Ukraine, more or less, tells the truth about the world and itself. It deals with the real world. Their army withdrew, retreated, waited for the Russian army to over-extend itself and then they pounced on its too lengthy and too feebly-defended supply lines. And then the Ukrainians fought. They are brave and good soldiers. The British, led by defence secretary Ben Wallace, got it first, sending buckets of NLAWs, the New Light Anti-Tank Weapons, which stopped the Russian tanks dead. The Americans, who have a habit of turning up late for wars but never mind that, are now beginning to supply the Ukrainians with the heavy metal they need to defeat Putin’s killing machine.
Wars are lost or won by possession of three keys: morale, logistics, leadership. The Ukrainian fighting spirit is extraordinary. In August in Bakhmut I stood in a trench, sipping a cup of tea while my pal Vlad Demchenko noted that my cup had “Best Grandma” on it in Ukrainian. Our friend New Yorker Chris Occichone cracks a joke that I can be a grandma if I want to be – that’s why Ukraine is fighting the war – and we all fall about laughing. The Russian army was maybe five miles away, maybe half a mile away – they come and go, they come and go – but we didn’t care. Perhaps that’s easy for me to write because I am not a fighter. But I have been a war reporter since 1988 and I have never seen an army with such a belief in itself as the Ukrainian one, transgender jokes and all.
The Russian fighting spirit is dire. Some Russian soldiers steal washing machines, some electric kettles without the bases, so ignorant they are of 21st century domestic appliances. Some do unspeakable things, raping Ukrainian women, castrating captured Ukrainian soldiers. There is one video of this happening online. I haven’t watched it – I have enough PTSD nightmares as it is thanks very much - but some of my friends have and say that the victim was conscious and it was cruel beyond belief. After the poor man was castrated, he was shot. Some Russian Army soldiers rape their fellow soldiers. The Ukrainian counter-offensive in the east hoovered up a lot of booty, abandoned by the retreating army, and its paperwork. One grimly fascinating document was a petition from the wives and mothers of soldiers in the 1stArmy Corps of the Donetsk People’s Republic from Dokuchayevsk, complaining that soldiers loyal to the Chechen quisling Ramzan Kadyrov raped two of their men in Berestovoye. This complete lack of military discipline, never mind common humanity, is not the signal of a winning army. Some abandon their dead and, as my friend and former British Army commando Johnny Mercer said, on the first visit by a British MP to Kyiv in mid-March, when the Russians were at the gates of the capital, “armies that abandon their dead tend not to win.” Part of the reason for this is that the vast majority of Putin’s cannon fodder does not come from the great cities of Moscow and St Petersburg but the sticks, Muslims from Chechnya and Dagestan, Buddhists from Buryat in the far east of Siberia. Don’t think of a unified army. Think of gangs of mobsters armed with tanks, vaguely allied to each other. These soldiers have so little common cause, apart from their semi-feudal overlords’ semi-fealty to the master of the Kremlin, that they can’t be bothered burying the other gangs’ dead.
Yes, Ukrainian logistics were poor at the start of the big war in February. Now the Americans are sending them HIMARS rocket artillery so that they have blown up pretty much every Russian ammo dump of any size in occupied Ukraine. They are getting US intelligence in real time, Australian armoured cars, Dutch self-propelled artillery, fancy French and German guns, British training and savvy, Baltic everything, etc etc etc. Russia is now sending its fresh draft of conscripts into battle with rusty AKs manufactured long before they were born. Their logistics are dire and getting worse.
Ukraine’s top generals are seriously good. This summer they proclaimed they would attack on the Kherson front in the south, sucked in some 20,000 of Russia’s best soldiers from the eastern, Kharkiv front, then socked the Russians in the east, reclaiming a vast swathe of territory and abandoned Russian heavy metal. Vladimir Putin is, according to the New York Times, personally taking charge of tactical decision-making. Shades of Hitler ensuring that Stalingrad was not a fighting retreat but a catastrophe. Once again, Putin’s grip on reality is weak and getting weaker by the day. A commander-in-chief who lives inside a tomb, surrounded by yes-men, believing in a zombie fairy story, cannot be a good leader of an army and he isn’t. The Ukrainians have all three keys essential for victory; Vladimir Putin has none.
I have been inside Putin’s tomb, by which I mean the Kremlin, only once, in 2006, to challenge Putin’s press officer, Dmitry Peskov, about the poisoning of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko by polonium 210 for BBC Panorama. To project the majesty of the tsars, the Kremlin was built on an inhuman scale. The red walls towers above you, the main doors are so big they could fit a troop of Indian elephants but I recall going through a side-gate with a crappy plasticky door, then through a murky warren of passageways, heavy red drapes everywhere, the atmosphere gloomy, sepulchral. The Kremlin struck me as a once grand funeral parlour, down on its luck, Peskov the junior undertaker, minding the shop until his master returned from his latest embalming. You sensed hidden tape recorders whirring behind the drapes, that people who worked here were – are now - morbidly afraid to speak their minds, with reason.
Litvinenko had blogged in 2006 that Putin was a paedophile, after the Russian President had stopped his motorcade and knelt before a small blond five-year-old boy, lifted his T-shirt and kissed his tummy. It was weird and peculiar and you can see it on YouTube to this day. I asked Peskov whether Putin was, indeed, a paedophile. He said no and I was aware that he didn’t care for the question. So be it. For the record, creepy as the sight of Putin kissing the boy on the tummy is, it’s not proof that he is a paedophile and Litvinenko provided no further evidence to support his claim. But it is beyond doubt that the former KGB officer was poisoned by polonium 210 manufactured and delivered by the Russian secret state. About that, Peskov lied unctuously. He then went on to hint, in his soft, creepy, semi-fluent English that Marina Litvinenko had better watch out lest someone in Britain, maybe our intelligence people, maybe Boris Berezovsky – who was still alive back then – might poison her too.
Reflecting now on Peskov’s silicone-oiled deceit back then, if you sit inside the Kremlin’s lie factory, pumping out fabrications all the live-long day, how do you know anymore what is true and what is false? At what point do you stop lying and say, “Boss, this isn’t going to work? The Ukrainians aren’t the pussies you expected. They’re tigers.” The answer to the question is when the Ukrainian Army knocks the Russian Army flat, again and again, so much so that lying on an industrial scale no longer cuts the mustard. The great much parodied scene in Downfall, when Hitler’s yes-men in the bunker finally find the courage to tell their Fuhrer that there is no fresh army to save his skin, will be replayed in the Kremlin for real. Not tomorrow or the next day, but Putin’s Downfall moment is coming soon.
The other sharks in the sea of tyranny are beginning to scent blood. The world’s top four autocrats, Vladimir Putin, President Xi of China, President Erdogan of Turkey and prime minister Modi of India hobnobbed in Samarkand the other day. Erdogan was openly contemptuous of Putin’s failing war, Modi impatient with the Kremlin and even Xi, behind the arras, reportedly gave Putin short shrift. Chinese and Russian strategic interests are at loggerheads. Putin’s goal is to divide and demoralise the West, the better to tell his people that they should holds hands with nurse, for fear of something worse. The Chinese Communist Party hates western freedom with a passion but wants us to buy their stuff. China wants the American and European economies to prosper, not to break down; Russia wants the opposite. China may have put up with a short three-day war for Russia to capture Kyiv and decapitate Ukrainian democracy. But a long war? One which a fellow autocrat is losing, badly? That was not what the Kremlin had promised. By the way, one of the future war games the Pentagon liked to play back before Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the USA siding with Russia against a Chinese invasion of Siberia. If Putin’s Russia continues to crack, don’t be surprised if the Chinese turn on their supposed ally. If the Chinese do strike against Russia, the West are hardly going to risk a single Alabama grenadier to save Putin’s bacon.
Putin is, then, a fragile monster. Let’s look more closely at Shelley’s HIMARS attack on the Russian equivalent of George III: an old, mad, blind, despised, and dying tsar.
Old? You betcha. Gone are the days when Putin, topless, sat astride a horse or fished for carp or swam the butterfly in a freezing Siberian lake. The funny peculiar homoeroticism of these images produced by the Kremlin’s lie factory aside, that was then. Just before the big war, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, Putin couldn’t bear to breathe in the same oxygen as the President of France. The Kremlin’s serfs set an extraordinarily long table between the two, “the distance,” as Ukraine’s great psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman told me, “between Putin and his death.” As the war began to come unstuck and the Russian killing machine left the Battle of Kyiv with its tail between its legs, Putin met his defence minister, once a jobbing builder, never a soldier, Sergei Shoigu. What was striking was the death grip Putin used to grasp the table between the two. This was the hallmark of an old man, afraid of a fall. By way of contrast, when Putin dropped in on the ayatollahs in Tehran, he bounded down the steps of his plane, as happy as Larry to hobnob with Mullah This and Mullah That, leading to a number of commentators to wonder aloud whether the man in Iran wasn’t the real Putin but a double. I wonder about that too. Elderly dictators are sometimes better than young ones. They tend to spill less blood. But Putin is an exception to that rule. The many, many people in the Kremlin and thereabouts who have good reason to hate him – the generals mocked for their failure to win an unwinnable war they were never properly consulted about, the oligarchs who have seen billions of dollars go up in smoke, the Russian elites who know they will live in shame for decades to come – note his age and note, too, the only end of age. And that is not good news for Putin.
Mad? Putin is not clinically mad as psychiatrists Semyon Gluzman – who spent ten years in a KGB gulag – and Jim Fallon, prof at the University of California, have told me. He does not hear voices and he does not see hallucinations. But mad in the ordinary sense of the word? Well, hell yes. He launched a war against a country at peace, proclaiming a casus belli that made no sense. He was so paranoid about preserving secrecy that many of the serious planners in the Russian Army had no idea that the big war was going to happen. Without proper planning, there can be no effective co-ordination between infantry, artillery, special forces, air force, air defence and, critically, boring old logistics. The Ukrainian Army is now the best in the world at this game; the Russian Army’s reputation is sinking by the hour. But the one person who is directly responsible for this catastrophic failure of military co-ordination is the commander-in-chief who, of course, cannot be blamed at all by anyone for anything. And that is a systemic madness overlaid onto a personal madness – again, in the ordinary, layman’s understanding of the word.
Blind? Not in the medical sense, no, but as a metaphor for his failure to understand the twenty-first century it is on the money. I’ve only met Vladimir Putin once, when I challenged him in Siberia about the shooting down of MH17 in 2014. The Boeing has been blasted out of the sky by a Russian BUK missile, fired from Russian-occupied Donbas by mistake. The Russian rocket soldiers thought they were firing at a Ukrainian military jet, not innocent people. The reason for their murderous mistake was that they had dumped the necessary radar wagon on the Russian side of a river crossing because the pontoon they had taken couldn’t support the weight of rocket and radar.
Back then, he was supple and wily and street-smart enough to read the room, to know that the optics of turning his back on a BBC reporter asking tough questions about the killing of 298 people on a passenger jet would look bad. He didn’t answer my question but blocked out enough time in Russian blaming the Ukrainians so that it looked like he was behaving like a politician in a democracy.
But since then his carapace has cemented. The suppleness has gone. In its stead is a rigid belief in some kind of imperial Russia and that anyone who disagrees with that and him is automatically a Nazi. COVID made everything worse. He lived down the end of a very, very long decontamination tunnel. So not literally blind, no, but as blind as a creature, a mole or a worm, who lives permanently without light and fresh air.
Despised? Take that as a given in Ukraine. But how is Putin viewed in Russia? Accius, a Roman poet, once wrote the tyrant’s best piece of wisdom: “Let them hate so long as they fear.” I don’t put any great value on opinion polls inside a country where everyone knows that if you seriously challenge the Kremlin, things will not go well for you. On September 25th, Russian performance poet Artem Kamardin took part in an event opposing Russia’s draft in Moscow along with his friend Alexandra Popova. Artem told the event: “Glory to Kyivan Rus — Novorossiya can suck it." Kyivan Rus is the founding civilisation of the Slavic world, point being it was created in Kyiv roughly a millennium ago. Moscow – Novorossiya – is just the branch office, set up centuries later. Moscow’s finest – by which I mean the police – arrested Alexandra and him. The next day Artem told the Kremlin’s patsy media that he was wrong to say what he did. His face was cut and bruised. Alexandra told reporters that the police had pulled her hair so that chunks came out, tried to seal her lips and mouth with superglue while her hands were handcuffed, threatened to rape her and showed her a video of them raping Artem by shoving a dumbbell up his anus. When western politicians, journalists and armchair generals suggest the best way to end the crisis is to offer Putin an off-ramp, an opportunity to save face, I want to ask them would they like a dumbbell up their bottom? That said, in Russia, to date, fear of Putin outweighs hate. Hatred of the draft for his stupid war is changing that calculation by the second.
Dying? Once again, the absence of truth-tellers – poisoned, shot, etc – makes finding out the true health of the zombie tsar extremely difficult. But not impossible. When I met in 2014, he looked like a weasel. Now he looks like a hamster, his cheeks stuffed full of straw. That’s evidence of steroid over-use or even addiction. The most common reason for taking steroids is to fight cancer. My friend Ashley Grossman, professor of neuro-endocrinology at Oxford, suspects that he has cancer of the lymphatic system. Proekt, a Russian website whose star investigative reporter is Roman Badanin, recently reported that Putin is followed by a cancer doctor wherever he travels in Russia. People inside the Kremlin pretend not to but they read these reports. They know that time is not on Putin’s side.
The other day I popped up on ITV’s Good Morning Britain with Ed Balls – Labour’s former Chancellor – as one of the hosts. I told the show that Putin is losing the war, that he is a dead man walking. Ed is a gracious human being who left politics, to make space for his partner, Yvette Cooper, and started a new career doing other stuff, sweetly. Ed asked what were the options that allowed Putin to “save face”. I bristled, and said that that there was no way Putin could have a new career hosting a TV show because “he has stolen too much money and killed too many people.” I predicted that the only option for him was to leave the Kremlin in a box. Ed looked aggrieved, upset. I get it that Ed comes from decent parliamentary politics where the be-all and end-all is to resolve arguments through deals and accommodations. But Zombie Humpty – as my nickname for Putin here suggests - doesn’t play that game. Or anything like it.
Ed then worried aloud about the prospect of nuclear war. Once again, I don’t think Putin is going to go there for the reasons set out above. Secondly, there is a grave downside to the near-universal draft that Putin has called for, six months after launching his big war. The real danger for him is that he will drive his surly, unhappy people from mute acquiescence in his war to open revolt. You don’t risk that massive unpopularity if you are going to blow up the planet. Why bother risk losing your grip on power by a nationwide call-up if you are intent on the end of the world?
He's bluffing. His hand is rubbish. The Ukrainians have three aces: morale, logistics, leadership. The West needs to keep on supplying them with the heavy metal they need and the good news, as I knock this out in a café in Kyiv, is that the Americans have just announced that they are going to send double the number of HIMARS rocket artillery to Ukraine that they have already sent. It’s sometimes nice when the CIA agrees with your analysis. I would only add that the agency costs $15 billion a year and my Patreon is so much cheaper.
Comedy aside, the war is not over. Vladimir Putin’s killing machine will hurt and harm many, many innocent lives before the job is done. But the Ukrainians are winning. Period. To mark his 70th birthday on October 7th, the Russians will celebrate Zombie Humpty’s party with pomp but no heart. Here in Kyiv, we are organising a Ukraine Lives: #VPDFO! Festival. To pump it out, I donned a Marilyn Monroe wig, put on rather too much red lip-stick on my beard and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr President.”
It's the kind of joke you can make in a democracy. We will know when Russia is free again when I can sing that at a party in the Kremlin. Looking forward to it, frankly.
John Sweeney is the author of the best-selling Killer In The Kremlin, published by Bantam Press.
Ukraine Lives:#VPDFO! Festival website is here:
https://vpdfo.org