Killer in the Kremlin Quotes

“Wars are lost or won by possession of three keys: morale, logistics, leadership.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Putin is a rational actor inside a bunker, so deep, so deprived of light and information, that he is pulling levers without understanding how the modern world is responding, without understanding that some of his levers at least are no longer working, without understanding that invading countries at peace is what the Nazis did.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“And I say to myself, please, John, don’t throw up over Vladimir Putin.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“I am a sixty-three-year-old war reporter. I have covered wars and madness in Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa, the Romanian revolution, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I have seen babies with hacked limbs and an old man with his eyes blown in by an artillery shell and people with their lungs sucked inside out and a man with his brain sliced with a machete – and there is nothing worse than watching kids smile in war, watching the aristocracy of the human soul. It makes me cry – and cry I do.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Rather, Putin cherry-picked a series of ideas that coalesced together and became his guiding star: ultra-nationalism; hatred of the other; contempt for a free press and free speech; intolerance of mockery and humour; profoundly conservative social values; an unfree market in hock to political power; a reverence for ‘the organs’, the KGB and its alphabetic spaghetti predecessors (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, MGB) and offshoots (SVR, FSB). Without articulating it, with no announcement, Putin was a Russian fascist.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Like Hitler in 1923, Putin from 1991 onwards breathed a poisonous fiction, that his country had been wronged, that it ‘had been stabbed in the back’. In truth, it fell apart because it had been wrong, it had stabbed itself in the front, three times over.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“Instead, from the bowels of Stasiland, he came to internalize a dark nonsense, that his country’s collapse was due to Western trickery and domestic betrayal, rather than the simple facts that the Soviet Union had run out of cash and self-belief and purpose”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“No, he is not mad. He is very bad. I am certain he is totally healthy. He has a very peculiar personality. Not that of a KGB officer. He’s different, sadistic, not thinking about other people, not even the Russian people, only himself. He has these predecessors like Hitler and Stalin. We can say they did bad things but that they didn’t do them because a voice told them to do it. They were evildoers. They were sadistic people. But they weren’t insane.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin

“My friend Oz Katerji once saw a great line of graffiti in Beirut that can work for every war reporter in every war: ‘I don’t believe in anything. I am just here for the violence.”
― John Sweeney, Killer in the Kremlin