Once, he was seen as our best hope for permanent peace between West and East. Today, he is the embodiment of evil, a monstrous dictator who threatens a nuclear holocaust that could obliterate Europe.
But when Vladimir Putin was named as successor to the drunken president Boris Yeltsin a quarter of a century ago, on New Year’s Eve in 1999, he was a virtual unknown outside Russian politics. And even inside the country, his poll approval rating was low, with less than a third of the country backing his policies.
The former KGB intelligence officer had been the shambolic superpower’s acting prime minister for less than five months and was regarded both by the public and by the gangster oligarchs who controlled the economy as a political weakling.
Yeltsin saw him as reliable and obedient but lacking any sort of imagination or vision. Few others were so generous in their assessment. To them, Putin was totally without charisma, a dull bureaucrat who was essentially unelectable because he had no appeal to voters.
A quarter of a century on, Putin still lacks charisma, but no one regards him as a weakling. Those who underestimated him have paid the price, often with their lives. So have untold millions of ordinary Russians.
‘Today, Vladimir Putin is the embodiment of evil, a monstrous dictator who threatens a nuclear holocaust that could obliterate Europe,’ writes Sir William Browder
When Vladimir Putin (left) was named as successor to the drunken president Boris Yeltsin (right) a quarter of a century ago, on New Year’s Eve in 1999, he was a virtual unknown outside Russian politics
The toll of Russian dead and injured from the so-called ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine alone is approaching 800,000. Putin has ruled his homeland for longer than any leader since Joseph Stalin, who was dictator for 30 years until his death in 1953. But Stalin held his country together through World War II. Putin has ripped it apart.
The devastation he has wreaked on Russia for his personal gain is incalculable. So is the wealth he has plundered. A conservative estimate puts the amount he and a thousand of his associates have stolen at more than a trillion dollars.
I witnessed this process at first hand when I ran a multi-billion-dollar investment fund in Moscow during the early days of privatisation there.
When the Kremlin’s thugs turned on me and I was banned from returning to the country after a trip abroad in 2005, I waged a campaign against the regime’s corruption and became such a thorn in the president’s side that I acquired the status of ‘Putin’s No 1 enemy’.
Today, he clings to power by waging endless war. To prevent 140 million Russians from turning on him, he has to keep the country in a state of permanent siege and paranoia. He has taken a lead from the 16th century political strategist Niccolo Machiavelli – in order to stay in power, create an enemy and start a foreign war.
If overthrown, nowhere on the planet would be safe for the 72-year-old to take refuge, despite his staggering fortune. He would be extradited back to Russia, thrown into jail, tried and almost certainly executed.
It’s an unlikely prospect. The West has long underestimated Putin’s ability to manipulate power. It is a ruthless talent predicated on two psychopathic traits: a willingness to kill and an ability to tell lies with a straight face.
Many people are getting tired of Putin’s war on Ukraine, including Donald Trump, who returns to the White House this month, and thinks he can strike a deal. Pictured together in 2017
If we continue to underestimate him, by permitting him to strike a deal that ends the Ukraine conflict, he will wage war on us – by covert means such as sabotage and terrorism, by economic methods and, when these are not enough, by unleashing an armed assault on a Nato country that will plunge us into World War III.
Putin’s only way forward is to escalate until he achieves a complete victory. Many people are getting tired of this war, including Donald Trump, who returns to the White House this month, and thinks he can strike a deal.
But the only deal Putin will accept is one of total capitulation and the collapse of Ukraine.
The only deal Putin is ever interested in is the one where he takes everything. The West’s leaders have too often failed to understand that.
To grasp its implications, we have to go back to 25 years ago when Russia’s gang bosses were making the same mistake, and imagining they could make an advantageous deal with Putin.
When Yeltsin was so stewed in vodka he was sometimes unable to get off his presidential jet during state visits, Putin was not his first choice as successor. In fact, the short, sandy-haired man from Leningrad, who was then 47 years old, was his fourth choice after burning through the other three.
Yeltsin’s chief objective was to ensure he and his family would not face prosecution for his of naked corruption and bribery.
Putin gave him assurances and the pair set about creating a political persona that would make him electable – because in those days, Russia had a broadly democratic voting system.
Putin wanted to portray himself as the law-and-order candidate, the strong man that Russians always respect. To do this, he needed a national enemy.
He picked Chechnya’s Islamic separatists, who wanted to break away from rule by Moscow. Bombs that killed more than 300 at apartment blocks in Moscow and two other cities in September 1999 gave him the excuse he needed.
The atrocities were blamed on Chechnya – when in fact the explosives were planted by Putin’s own henchmen, agents from the Federal Security Service (FSB), of which he had been director before taking on the premiership.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent and defector to the West, revealed that the bombings were carried out on Kremlin orders. With the utter lack of conscience that has been a hallmark throughout his reign, Putin denounced the claim. ‘The very allegation is immoral,’ he said. ‘There are no people in the Russian secret services who would be capable of such a crime against their own people.’
Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent and defector to the West, was poisoned in 2006 with polonium and died in November that year. Pictured at the Intensive Care Unit of University College Hospital, three days before his death
His popularity soared when he announced a military operation against Chechen rebels, which spiralled into a full-scale war.
Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed, and probably more than 100,000 Chechen civilians.
War is a powerful tool for shaping public opinion. In the presidential election of March 2000, Putin took 53 per cent of the vote.
That was an outright majority but not enough to give Putin the security he needed. For the first three years of his reign, he needed to achieve public approval by legitimate means, which meant he was obliged to act more or less in the national interest of Russia.
By engaging in economic reforms and making tentative approaches to the West, he not only projected an image of himself as a mature, responsible leader but also governed in a way that benefited ordinary people.
He craved the popularity commanded by a leader such as Lenin, with a personality cult that would endure for centuries.
But his absence of charisma was something that could not be fixed, despite all his posturing in shirtless photographs of him riding or fishing – palpably fake pictures that make him appear pathetic instead of macho. His position as president in those first years was equally fake. Putin did not rule Russia. The oligarchs did.
These gangster plutocrats who had carved up the assets of an entire superpower were the richest people on Earth and easily the most powerful organised crime network.
But in October 2003, Putin did the unthinkable. He arrested the wealthiest and most influential of the oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who controlled the Yukos oilfields in Siberia, and put him on trial for fraud. He was sentenced to nine years in jail. The first reaction of the other oligarchs was disbelief. Then fear set in. The spectre of imprisonment for all of them became real.
That’s when Putin struck a deal that changed the course of history. He could have continued with his assault on corruption, and dragged Russia out of the dark ages into the modern era. If he had acted for the good of his country, it could now be a greater oil-driven economic powerhouse than Saudi Arabia.
Instead, he proved himself the biggest gangster of all. He granted the oligarchs their freedom and his protection, in exchange for 50 per cent of their wealth. By that single edict, he made himself phenomenally rich, and forced all the criminals in Russia to work for him. And then he embarked on a corruption frenzy that makes the activities of Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe or Colonel Gaddafi look like petty theft.
Putin was not only taking 50 per cent of the oligarchs’ income. He looted the state coffers, stealing money from the military, from income tax, from education and healthcare budgets, from infrastructure projects and all the public services that keep a country running.
He also took revenge on anyone who had dared try to expose his methods – such as Litvinenko, who was poisoned in a London hotel.
And thanks to the wars in Chechnya, he had a tried and tested formula for deflecting public anger. Whenever public unrest was building, he simply started a war – invading Georgia in 2008 and seizing Crimea in 2014, when his approval ratings were sagging – they then went through the roof.
After his ratings slumped during Covid, he invaded Ukraine in 2022, a move which gave him an immediate boost.
But as the conflict drags on, his support is waning again. What he needs is for the West to capitulate and give him complete victory, in order to reorganise his forces before the inevitable next war. But even for those in the West who don’t care about Ukraine, a complete victory is not the end of the problem.
Russia’s economy is completely dependent on military manufacture now. Up to 35 per cent of the government budget is devoted to maintaining and equipping the armed forces.
‘The only deal Putin is ever interested in is the one where he takes everything. The West’s leaders have too often failed to understand that.’ Pictured: Putin, Angela Merkel and George W Bush in 2007
‘The chances of Putin falling to an assassin’s bullet are nil. He has the best security apparatus of any dictator in history.’ Pictured: Putin disembarking from his airplane as Geneva Airport in 2021
And there’s no going back, because all Russia’s international business relationships, revolving around the supply of oil and gas to the West, have been destroyed.
All Russians, like Putin himself, have become hostages of a kleptocracy, a dictatorship that exists to steal. Any deal we agree with Putin would be no different to Neville Chamberlain’s naive peace arrangement with Adolf Hitler in 1938.
The immediate effect of a deal with Putin in Ukraine will be to hand Russia effective control of much of the country. We have seen in Bucha and Irpin what Russian occupation of Ukraine means. The women are gang-raped, the men are shot in the back and the children are kidnapped.
Ukrainians lucky enough to avoid this horrific fate will flee immediately. Up to 15 million refugees will fan out across Europe, with several million coming to the UK. And with the shockwaves of that mass migration reverberating, Putin will begin his next invasion – targeting one of the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania.
These are Nato allies, and his action will call the West’s bluff. Are we really willing to embark on war with Russia’s battle machine, fighting an enemy that has proved itself capable of ignoring 2,000 killed in action on a daily basis?
We’d have no chance of retaking the Baltic countries without a protracted war, one for which our armed forces are currently in a poor state to undertake.
There’s a real danger that, with no Western leader willing to fight at all costs, we would capitulate. And that will only embolden Putin to turn his sights on other Nato countries – perhaps Finland, Sweden or Poland. Just as appeasement led to global war with Hitler, that is the surest route to World War III against Putin.
Putin rides a horse during a holiday in Siberia in August, 2009, almost a decade after he was elected
‘There is only one way to bring this monster to justice, and that is to support Ukraine to the hilt. As long as Putin’s army is fully occupied, there’s little danger that he will attempt to strike elsewhere.’ Pictured: Putin inspects an army training ground in 2022
It’s no good hoping the bogeyman will go away. Rumours of Putin’s ill health have swirled for years but I believe they are baseless.
And the chances of him falling to an assassin’s bullet are nil. He has the best security apparatus of any dictator in history.
There is only one way to bring this monster to justice, and that is to support Ukraine to the hilt. As long as Putin’s army is fully occupied, there’s little danger that he will attempt to strike elsewhere.
And the longer the ‘special military operation’ drags on, the greater the chance that the people themselves will rid Russia of this human bloodsucker. Three-quarters of a million grieving mothers are just the tip of the opposition to Putin.
The state of the economy is so desperate that the price of potatoes has almost doubled – up by 82 per cent – which means vodka is twice as costly too. Butter is so expensive that it has to be displayed in thief-proof packages at supermarkets.
Russia could be close to implosion. Putin’s best hope is that Donald Trump will hand him Ukraine on his first day back in the Oval Office, following his inauguration on January 20. Trump is hoping that by cutting military aid to Ukraine, Kyiv will be forced into some kind of Chamberlain-style deal. But we don’t have to leave the fate of Europe in the hands of Trump.
There is one obvious and painless way to do this – weaponise Putin’s money.
A week after the invasion of Ukraine, the West froze $300billion (£242billion) of Russian central bank reserves. About 95 per cent of that money is in the UK, the EU, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and other non-U.S. countries.
By confiscating that money and giving it to Kyiv, we can bankroll their resistance for at least another five years. Not only does it save Ukraine from capitulation but it saves the West.
We don’t face the prospect of 15 million Ukrainian refugees. We don’t face the hideous prospect of failing our allies in the Baltic.
And we hasten the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.
- Sir William Browder is the author of two books about his time in Russia: Red Notice, A True Story Of Corruption, Murder and One Man’s Fight For Justice, and Freezing Order, A True Story Of Russian Money Laundering, State-Sponsored Murder And Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath.
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