A gripping and explosive account of Vladimir Putin's tyranny, charting his rise from spy to tsar, exposing the events that led to his invasion of Ukraine and his assault on Europe. Shchekochikhin’s girlfriend Alyona Gromova recalled: “On the day he was taken to hospital, he felt very weak. After he had a shower, his hair was a mess. I went to stroke it and great handfuls of hair came out in my hand. The symptoms were confusing. First, it seemed like a cold but his face was very red, as if he had sunburn, then lumps of his skin started to flake off.” Sweeney, a much travelled, prolific and award winning journalist, lays out, in entertaining and informative detail, just what’s going on in the Kremlin, and it isn’t pretty. As a reporter, first for the Observer and then for the BBC, Sweeney has covered wars and chaos in more than eighty countries and been undercover to a number of tyrannies, including Chechnya, North Korea and Zimbabwe.

When major global news breaks, the Atlantic Council’s experts have you covered—delivering their sharpest rapid insight and forward-looking analysis direct to your inbox. John Sweeney has a long career in investigative journalism and as such his experience of and interest in Russia and Putin helps to create a very readable and useful book. In Killer in the Kremlin, the story of Ukraine is bookended at the start and finish, using Sweeney's own experiences in Kyiv and elsewhere, with the wider story of Vlad the murder's executions and assassinations. I am a student of the causes of WW1. One thing I am certain of is that if the Kaiser, the Emperor, the Tsar and the Caliphate knew where they would be five years hence from 2014, they would have done their utmost to have stopped that war from starting. I wonder if Putin will be in a similar situation. Once you start a war you never know where it will take you.Bem, este livro foi bastante interessante e mostra o nível de crimes que o Vladimir Putin praticou ao longo da sua carreira no KGB e no Kremlin. Foi um “zé ninguém”, que em curto prazo de tempo tornou-se o homem mais poderoso da Rússia e das figuras mais temíveis do Mundo. Other correspondents also have a sense of humour, he argues, they just have a different approach. “I very much admire Orla Guerin; I think she’s great. She only does doom and gloom on screen. Actually, when you meet her outside of that, she’s a riot.” John Sweeney enjoying his break in Italy (Photo: John Sweeney) Face-to-face with Vladimir Putin Civil Society Conflict Corruption Disinformation Human Rights Rule of Law Russia Syria Terrorism The Caucasus Ukraine Alyona went to say goodbye to her lover in the morgue. “It was a big place, a huge hall. There were bodies on slabs due to be buried the next day. I looked around. There were about 20 people but I couldn’t find Yuri. I went up to the supervisor and explained that I might be in the wrong place as I couldn’t find him. Through the corner of my eye I saw a dear old lady lying on a slab. The strangest thing, she reminded me of my grandma who passed away a long time ago. The curious resemblance of the two old ladies hit me. In my worst nightmares, I could never, ever have imagined that the dear old lady was in fact Yuri.” In the midst of one of the darkest acts of aggression in modern history - Russia's invasion of Ukraine - this book shines a light on Putin's rule and poses urgent questions about how the world must respond.

Heavily engaging and informative, sweeneys personal recount of the tsar of is gripping. Following Putins rise to power as a low ranking KGB officer to Yeltsins successor, That tenacity is what won him Private Eye’s first Paul Foot Award in 2005 for his four-year investigation into mothers wrongly imprisoned over the cot deaths of their children, among other prizes.

A former colleague says that while he has done some brilliant work, “he used to give his producers kittens”. At first I was worried this book wouldn’t offer much which was new, but Sweeney’s career holding Putin to account, as well as his highly personable writing style, ensured there was much new material to learn from in this book. The book is infused with anecdotes of Sweeney's own, which add a lot of kudos to the conclusions he draws. It also starts and finishes in Ukraine, where Sweeney based himself for 3 months of the start of the War, with the observations from that time well presented and documented. The reason Sweeney can say all this now is that he feels “liberated” by the independent work he has done since, especially his Hunting Ghislaine podcast about the Jefferey Epstein scandal, which he is adapting into a book, and now his reporting from Ukraine.