In John Sweeney’s timely new book, Killer in the Kremlin, he recounts an episode from 2005 when Vladimir Putin was visiting New York. Putin was a guest at the Guggenheim Museum when he “clocked a glass replica of a Kalashnikov filled with vodka.” What followed was extraordinary. The Russian President “gestured to one of his security team, who nicked it” but, as with so many other incidents before and since, “the museum worthies [didn’t] call the cops. So he got away with it.”
Sweeney’s point, more broadly, is that Putin is the gangster who crawled from the sewers of Leningrad to exploit the power vacuum of post-Communist Russia. He is the muculent thug who learned along the way that very few will stand up to him. To that end, the British government did a particularly good job at affirming his delusions in the shameful aftermath of the Salisbury poisoning when a weapon of mass destruction was casually released on British soil, killing one member of the public, Dawn Sturgess, and harming many others. If you want to understand our current energy crisis, largely precipitated by Russian violence in Ukraine, it lies in the story of that glass Kalashnikov and many like it: forgotten crimes that helped establish a sick and deep pathology that would eventually consume the world. As Sweeney might put it, history, as we’re living it, is “a frosted window into Vladimir Putin’s soul”.
All of which brings us to the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s country club at Mar-a-Lago. So much commentary depicts the raid as provocative and certain to inflame tensions. Some argue that it will strengthen Trump’s bid for a second term, whilst others suspect it might yet save the Republican Party from the intentions of the 45th president. Whatever the outcome, Monday was a seminal moment when America’s legal system finally accepted that just because something is politically inconvenient doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. This was a necessary step in stopping Trump (or, indeed, future presidents) from sharing Putin’s delusion.
