This Is the Book to Read If You Want to Discover the True Face of the Kremlin Dictator Vladimir Putin.
Catherine Belton's book will help you understand why the West must support Ukraine at all costs.
For all those who want to learn more about Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia, this is the book to read this year 2022. Because this book reveals the true nature of Vladimir Putin's regime, the czar who decided to go to war against Ukraine and beyond all the West. That of an authoritarian regime that dreams of greatness for Russia and, at the same time, mafia-like, the two aspects reinforcing each other.
Secondly, this masterly work reads like a police thriller, with its spies, its godfathers, its crooked Siberian businessmen, its financiers from Geneva who take orders, its courtiers ready to do anything, and its unscrupulous London commodities traders.
Finally, it is also a lesson in journalism. You can imagine the difficulty in finding sources willing to talk about the master of the Kremlin - hence the fact that many testimonies are anonymous - and the tenacity it took for the author.
The Putin system analyzed in depth
In a breathtaking investigation of nearly 600 pages, Catherine Belton examines in the book “Putin's People” the career of Vladimir Putin, and the men he relied on to rise to power and stay there.
This British journalist, former correspondent in Moscow for the Financial Times, now at the Washington Post, dismantles the Putin system, the tutelage of the oligarchs, the networks of influence, and the money, which often passes through European financial centers, London, and Geneva, in particular, thanks to bankers with a strong presence on the street.
In the mid-1980s, the young Vladimir Putin found himself a KGB officer in Dresden. The location is important because the city is located in a country bordering the West and is less guarded than Berlin. He is in charge of recruiting agents operating on the other side of the Iron Curtain and his presence in Germany will allow him to establish relationships across the Rhine, including Matthias Warnig, a former member of the Stasi, the East German political police, and current boss of Nord Stream.
The collapse of the USSR surprised Putin and even shocked him.
But other KGB agents sent to the West anticipated the end of the communist empire and started to set up financial networks to recycle dirty money. Putin's membership in the KGB is crucial because the former Soviet secret service is a clan. And it is its members as well as those of the security services - the Siloviki, in Russian - who allowed Putin to become the right-hand man of the mayor of St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 1990s, to take possession of the very lucrative port of the city through which hydrocarbons transit, by ousting the mafia gang “owner”, then to integrate the entourage of Boris Yeltsin and, finally, to appear as the successor of this president, hated by the Russians.
We find them today in Putin's entourage, such as Igor Sechin, the former deputy prime minister, or Nikolai Patrushev, head of the secret services, two men who knew the current president of Russia in Saint Petersburg. And since the arrival of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin in 2000, at the head of the country, all these ex-KGB, who have never digested the end of the Soviet empire, are working to amass money and “to revive imperial Russia”, as Catherine Belton explains.
For them, the end justifies the means. The capture of the country's wealth - the raw materials sector in particular - with the help of the state apparatus, organized corruption of the justice system, intimidation, imprisonment, violence ... everything is good to succeed.
Undermining Western democracies to weaken them
At the same time, these means and those of the Russian state are also put at the service of another cause: to make Russia a power that counts on the planet after the humiliation of the Cold War. And for that, it is a question of undermining the Western democracies, buying their elites - it is the case in “Londongrad” - and of financing or helping all those who can weaken the West from within.
The KGB men are very good at this. They have even been trained for it, Vladimir Putin being the first. Financing extremist parties, launching operations to hack into the opponent's networks, recruiting relays of influence. It is a real destabilization operation on which the Russian government embarked a little over twenty years ago.
The proximity of the Kremlin to Marine Le Pen, the Italian Matteo Salvini, leader of the League, the Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and even Donald Trump has only one goal: to overthrow the established order and strengthen the Russian position in the world. Putin's so-called anti-system side is only aimed at increasing his power.
We can see that we are very far from the defender of Christian and Western values that a part of the extreme right sees in Putin. As for the anti-Americanism of the dictator of the Kremlin, we understand from Catherine Belton's reading that it should not be enough to seduce anyone who remains attached to the democratic idea. With the war in Ukraine and the tensions with the Europeans, at the dawn of a difficult winter, reading this book is a work of public salvation.
It will help you to better understand why the West must continue to fight against Putin, no matter what the cost. Because opposing the tyrant Putin in Ukraine is to oppose his plans to take over Europe. The fight of Ukraine against Putin is therefore the fight of Europe, as Zelenskyy has already reminded us several times.
Some reading
“Putin’s People” — Catherine Belton
Focus on the System That Keeps Vladimir Putin and His Oligarchs Afloat in Russia. Anyone who wants to denounce this system risks their life.
Who Is the Current Winner of the War in Ukraine? America and It Is the US Dollar That Tells Us So. The impressive strength of the US dollar does not lie.
Vladimir Putin’s Hidden Plan With Ukraine. Putin is carrying out a large-scale industrial and agricultural hold-up.
Vladimir Putin’s War in Ukraine Is Accelerating Russia’s Demographic Decline. Putin is jeopardizing the future of his country.
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