![]() But it's clear that he admired him, and Putin must have realized this, he must have seen this, and tried to use it to his advantage. Who knows? Anything's possible with Trump. I mean, we don't know yet whether Trump actually gave him secrets. And this reinforced the growing idea in his mind that they were weak and he was strong.Īnd I think the four years of Trump in the White House really helped seal the deal in his mind - this guy who was clearly obsequious to him. So there was this kind of drip, drip, drip of Putin behaving like a rogue, but it was just drip-drip enough for the Western powers, anyway, to still argue that they could somehow deal with him - it was better to keep him in than to keep him out. And within Georgia as well.Īnderson: Of course, and within Russia as well. The murders in foreign countries like Britain, the killing of Anna Politkovskaya. Then began the murders of journalists, of critics, the skirmishing with other oligarchs. Chechnya happened a long time ago, right in the kind of cowboy days after the fall of the Soviet Union. The stuff he had done that was violent seemed to be skirmishes along the Russian frontier. But he still appeared at, you know, the summits of the G8 or the G20. And everybody sort of went along with it, partly because I think they knew he was obviously dangerous and had been for some time. ![]() He did this Kabuki dance, he did this mask dance. This was somehow a kind of warmer, gentler time this was Putin's Russia with the mask on, even though we could see that it was fake, that it was false. ![]() It was always a bit of a misnomer, calling them that - it made them sound cute, like Smurfs, but they were Russian special forces. I remember eight years ago when Putin went into Crimea with the so-called Little Green Men, you know. The Rise Of Prigozhin: 'Putin's Chef' Steps Further Into The Limelight You see these characters emerging from the wars that he has unleashed, who are now these powerful figures when he commands to go and wreak more havoc on Ukraine.Īnd the appearance now of this dark character, Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner group, taunting the world with what he's doing, openly sending mercenaries from different countries to fight… They even look like villains from some bad movie. And maybe it's a superstitious faith in "what goes around comes around," but one senses that Russia today under Putin is a much more precarious place, a violent place, even in the halls of power around him. He has harnessed too many cyclones and nightmares. It's difficult to imagine that Vladimir Putin, after what he's done, will simply die an old man, you know, in his mansion in Sochi or wherever he is, with his grandchildren running around him, petting a dog. Jon Lee Anderson: Maybe? One has the impression that it can only end badly. Do you reckon you'll get to write something along those lines on President Putin, too? The humbling comes in myriad forms, but what is revealed is always the same: the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear." This is the opening of your piece, titled King Of Kings, describing the last days of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi. He is dragged, bloody and dazed, through the streets, then executed. "How does it end? The dictator dies, shriveled and demented, in his bed he flees the rebels in a private plane he is caught hiding in a mountain outpost, a drainage pipe, a spider hole. RFE/RL: Over your long and storied career, you have had to deal with many controversial characters and become a chronicler of sorts of dictators of various kinds. Anderson describes a "drip, drip, drip" of rogue behavior long before Putin's "little green men" invaded Ukraine, an awkwardly "atomized" Russian public, and the former KGB officer's eventual unmasking. RFE/RL Georgian Service correspondent Vazha Tavberidze caught up with Anderson by telephone in Brazil, and he asked him about the course of the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin's past and future battles, and where the Kremlin leader could go from here. He has profiled iconic Latin American strongmen from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez and Augusto Pinochet. War correspondent, biographer, investigative journalist, and New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson has reported from conflicts from Afghanistan to Northern Ireland to Uganda, and throughout the Middle East.
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