A brilliant demolition of Putin by one of the UK's best investigative journalists, written as he sat in various Kyev Airbnbs during the first months of Putin's all-or-nothing invasion. Sweeney has long been on Putin's case, one of very few who has managed to challenge the New Stalin to his face. And, on the subject of face - plastic surgery, overdone steriods, etc. - well, it's all here, all savagely done.
The main theme - the first three-quarters of the book - is what the title suggests: a chronicle of all those Putin has cleared permanently from his way. The bombings that cemented him in power around the Millennium, the poisonings, defenestrations and assisted suicides that have happened since. Navalny's murder came eighteen months after Sweeney finished the book, but Navalny's poisoned underpants are here. The crowning glory is that it was Navalny who tricked some FSB stooge into divulging the facts of the underpants. Navalny was already a hero to me; the genius of the underpants reveal elevates him to mythic.
Now, of course, Putin's death-toll is expanding daily. Thousands of duped Russian foot soldiers have met their end in the unwinnable war, poerhaps a tenth of that number on the Ukranian side who cannot countenance losing. The biggest number of fatalities, as in any modern war, are civilian. There, the Ukranian dead far outnumber the Russian. Putin has also killed the warlord-gangster-chef who led the Wagner rebellion. Prominent generals have gone the way of all flesh, Putin-style. He is running out of time, out of friends. Sweeney ends his war journal, the final quarter or so of the book, describing a summitt of autocrats at which even the Chinese seem to be having second thoughts about Vlad.
It is details like that, from the man in the know, the man on the spot, that make Killer in the Kremlin essential reading. That it is done in the Voice of Sweeney, the man who bawled out the Scientologist on Newsnight, is what makes it so damn enjoyable.
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