Don’t excuse Putin or defend his actions it’s the worst form of cowardly revisionism

As the geo-political world gets turned on its head I was thinking when the revelation came to me that Putin was bad news all round.

It was long before he invaded Ukraine, targeted women and children, committed war crimes,  abducted minors, had people thrown from windows, launched chemical attacks outside Russia or annexed Crimea. Or even sent thousands of his young citizens to die in the fields of Ukraine.

These are recent abominations. The signs were there long before if you wanted to see them.

I think it was in 2000 when the mother of a sailor aboard the submarine Kursk that sank whilst Putin was on holiday (and stayed too long) was literally injected by Russian goons live on TV because she was berating the navy for not doing enough to save those who were, when it sank, still alive inside.

He also showed himself when having risen to power as a relative unknown, the puppet of oligarchs keen to maintain their rapidly gained and enormous fortunes, he turned the tables on them in February 2003.

The ‘puppet’ cut his strings and became master.  As he has often done since, he did so publicly, when he turned on the lot of them in a televised meeting and railed against their corruption and greed. How the Russians cheered, at last someone had taken on these venal robber-barons.

People responded favourably ‘in the West’ to his tackling corruption, and I found myself like the boy in the story saying “But the king is naked”, and wondered why nobody was saying: “yes he’s stripping them of their wealth, but he’s taking it for himself”

The truth is I was too junior a reporter, to young a voice, to get traction, but it started way back then. The best expose of Putin’s theft and greed came from his nemesis, Alexei Navalny, now sadly dead in unexplained circumstances whilst held in a Russian prison.

A death that shocked many and surprised no-one.

For those here that admire him, just know, Vladimir Putin does not like Britain.

Yes he’s paranoid, like every Russian leader before him, about how every country in the West is Russophobic (they aren’t) how centuries of ‘disrespect’ must be met with cold hard threat, (it doesn’t) and how the once great Russian empire, that morphed into the monster that was the USSR, is missed and lamented from Moscow to Vladivostok (it isn’t actually)

As paranoid and distrustful of us as he is as a Russian leader, all this was crystallised long before by his formative years in the KGB.

In 2004 he said: “There is no such thing as a former KGB man”

Putin hates the UK because we humiliated him, and his associates, as inept failures.

Ben Macintyre’s excellent book “The Spy and the Traitor” about Oleg Gordievsky, one of our greatest double agents and a man I’ve been privileged to meet, contains the story of how Putin was personally affected by MI6 smuggling Gordievsky a KGB official himself – and for years a British agent – out of Russia under the noses of the same KGB. He was suspected and under surveillance at the time. Such an escape had never been achieved before, and the plan had a minimal chance of working, but it did.

Putin was part of the Leningrad KGB and it was they who lost their quarry as two British embassy cars crossed into Finland in July 1985. As McIntyre says:

“Everyone blamed the surveillance team, which, since it occupied the lowest rung of the pecking order, had no one else to blame. The Leningrad KGB, responsible for surveillance of the British diplomats, was held directly accountable, and many senior officers were either sacked or demoted. Among those affected was Vladimir Putin, a product of the Leningrad KGB who saw most of his friends, colleagues, and patrons purged as a direct consequence of Gordievsky’s escape.”

He really hates us for that. Donald Trump is not the only big character in politics to feel the bruise of a personal sleight for years.

Yet it is via Trump, and his unarguable success and political outlook that we have seen in recent years a bizarre phenomenon in the UK; the insidious growth of an admiration for the real dictator in the story, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

For well over a year in the Foreign Office as a special advisor, I had two policy areas to cover. Just two. Russia and China.

Supporting Ukraine – as Boris Johnson did, Ben Wallace did, the governments that followed did, the opposition did, the UN did, most of the world did, unless it was under Moscow’s thumb – was our day-to-day core business.

Putin did not invade because of NATO. That’s the Moscow spin, he (as is so often the case) said the quiet bit out loud before he invaded. Read him in his own words, he was empire building.

In 2022 Putin had to be stopped because if he wasn’t the world would return to what Thucydides described millenia before:

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”

That mission to pushback is as important today as it was three years ago when Z marked tanks tried to seize Kyiv. And god knows the Ukrainians turned out to be anything but weak. They have suffered. Putin could have had peace any day of those three years, by withdrawing, and now he’s laughing himself silly, at the prospect of being rewarded for his illegal aggression.

And yet despite all this some in the UK are becoming bolder in uttering their once hidden views.

When Russian troops executed civilians in Bucha, I don’t remember the loud voices we have now, saying “but too many people have died on both sides”

When Russian troops are forced into near suicidal assaults even this week, it’s NATO’s fault? Supporting Ukraine’s fight for survival and a just peace is not warmongering.

Trashing Zelensky is a form of support for Putin. I’m pleased to see neither the Government or Conservatives are indulging it.

When Dawn Sturgess died a horrible death in Salisbury having come into contact with a discarded bottle of novichok, a nerve agent from Russia, I don’t remember voices saying “well you know NATO really did bait him by expanding and he was only trying to target traitors”

Indeed back then, Putin’s only supporters were the hardest parts of the left. Not so now.

Sweden and Finland joined NATO because of the war not before it.

You’d have to be higher than Salisbury cathedral’s spire not to realise Russia is a kleptocratic police state, run by the chief-thief, a murderer and a thug. He does not allow the freedom to express individual thoughts unless they fit his Desinformatsiya. A freedom he denies his own people but that some in the UK use to excuse and defend him, often trotting out lines that literally came from the Kremlin playbook.

Long ago did post-Soviet external communications turn back to mendacity as an instrument of policy.

Yet, more and more in certain quarters, of social media, and traditional media, those lines are starting to emerge as if they are homegrown opinions. Peter Hitchens as one example has argued in his usual style certain lines that have emanated from Moscow for years.

Previous utterances on the subject of Putin have caused Reform’s MPs a headache this week.

So let’s, be clear, a lasting, just and protected peace in Ukraine is absolutely the desired outcome of this war. Not peace at any cost, because that will cost far more if Russia just takes a breather and then does it all again. It’s not desirable just so Trump can get a Nobel peace prize, either. And that’s not really what he’s after.

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall inherit the rare earth minerals”

You can argue that Trump may not be the bogey-man Democrats suggested, you can admire his war on government waste and attitude to illegal immigration, people have done on this site and that’s fine. But Putin hasn’t changed one iota from being bad news, and Trump’s growing alignment with him should worry everyone.

Sir Keir Starmer has played a tricky hand very well so far. On this topic he deserves the cross party support he’s getting, and he gave it to us when we were in Government, but the game is not over and how we handle Putin is not the irrelevance the White House seems to wish it.

America, for all our strong ties, that we should try to maintain, has just walked off the field of play, taking the ball. Exacerbated by that, Putin is going to be a massive geopolitical headache for us, and for Europe for years to come.

Beware the voices who try to excuse him. They’re just wrong. On every level.