DARKNESSRISING

ThethreatposedbyVladimirPutin
EARLYLIFE
VladimirVladimirovichPutinwasbornonOctober7,1952,inthecity
ofLeningrad(nowStPetersburg)intheSovietUnion.Hewasanonly
child.OnSeptember1,1960,justbeforehiseighthbirthday,Putin
beganattendingBaskovLaneElementarySchool,nearhishome.In1964
PutinwenttoHighSchool281andbegantostudyGerman,whichhewould
learntospeakfluently.WhileatHighSchoolhetookupJudosohe
couldbeliketheheroicKGBAgentsportrayedintheSovietmoviesof
thetime.Putinwasastrangeboyandwhenhewassixteenhevisited
thelocalofficeoftheKGB(thereviledSovietsecretpolice)and
beggedthemtolethimjoin.Hewasturnedaway,buttheKGBaskedhim
toservetheStatebyreportingonanyonehethoughtmayhaveanti
communistsympathies,orbeaspyfortheAmericans.
19701975
In1970PutinattendedSt Petersburg State University, where he became
a member of the Communist Party. At University he was in contact with
the KGB, who had undercover-agents on campus checking on dissent and
subversive behavior. The KGB were always happy to listen to a student's
suspicions about their tutors, Professors, or fellow students. Suspects
would be followed, monitored and phone-tapped, and if dangerous ideas
or behavior were detected the back-slider could lose their job, or
their house, or be imprisoned in the wastes of Siberia. One of Putin's
tutors was Anatoly Sobchak, an Assistant Professor of Business Law, who
in later years would play a crucial role in Putin's career.
19751985
AftergraduatingfromUniversityin1975Putinwasacceptedintothe
ranksoftheKGBandtrainedatthe401stKGBSchoolinOkhta,asuburb
ofStPetersburg.AftermonthsoftrainingandindoctrinationPutin
workedincounterintelligence,tryingtocatchforeignspiesandtheir
Russianaccomplices.Laterhewasinvolvedinmonitoringforeign
citizensandconsularofficialsinStPetersburg.
19851990
In 1985 Putin was sent to the KGB station in Dresden, East Germany,
where he worked as a spy whilst posing as a translator. The KGB were at
their worst in East Germany and Putin was promoted, which means he was
probably responsible for many people being interrogated and sent off to
the Siberian prison camps. The unlucky ones were sent to the gold mines
of Kolyma, where they were worked to death on little or no food. This
might not have concerned Vladimir Putin too much, as his indoctrination
by the KGB would have stressed that the needs of the State are of the
utmost importance, and human beings are expendable. On November 9,
1989, the Berlin Wall started to come down and it was the beginning of
the end of communism and Soviet control of East Germany. At his KGB

office Putin burnt files, dossiers and index-cards to prevent sensitive

information from falling into the hands of ordinary Germans.
1990-1991
In early 1990 Putin returned to his home town of St Petersburg and was
assigned to a job at the International Affairs section of St Petersburg
State University, the same University he had attended as a young man.
However Putin's real function was to 'talent-spot' students who could
be recruited into the KGB, and also to monitor the staff and students
for signs of dissent or disloyalty to the Soviet Union. At this time he
renewed his friendship with his former Professor, Anatoly Sobchak, who
was now the Mayor of St Petersburg.
Thanks to Putin's knowledge of foreign countries and languages, in May
1990 Mayor Sobchak appointed him to St Petersburg Council as his
Advisor on International Affairs. On June 28, 1990, Putin was promoted
to the position of Chairman of the Committee for Foreign and Economic
Relations, with responsibility for promoting foreign investment in St
Petersburg. Part of his duties included registering foreign companies
who wished to trade with the city and ensuring they had office-space,
communications, port, transport and industrial facilities with which to
carry on their business. Previously all of these things had been
controlled by the Soviet Government.
Former Putin advisor Stanislav Belkovsky has described St Petersburg at
this time as the 'gangster capital' of Russia and Putin's background in
the KGB secret-police gave him contacts in the underworld and police,
as well as the KGB. This meant that Putin was an excellent 'fixer' for
the St Petersburg Mayor's Office. In his capacity as Chairman of the
Economic Relations Committee, Putin decided which foreign companies
were able to operate in St Petersburg and which companies were denied
entry. For the chance to trade with Russia, some Western companies were
prepared to pay substantial bribes. During this time Putin's contact
details were as follows:
office phone: St Petersburg 278 1113
office telex: St Petersburg 121465
mobile phone: 812 3126217
On August 20, 1991, on the second day of an attempted coup against
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Putin
resigned from the KGB. However in the KGB there is a saying: once you
join, the only way out is in a coffin. During the indoctrination phase
of KGB training, which sometimes involved the use of sleep-deprivation
and other mind control techniques, the KGB was famous for messing
with the heads of it's Officers. So on August 20, 1991, Putin may have
thought that he'd left the KGB. But did the KGB ever leave him?
While working at St Petersburg Council, Putin had also been in charge
of the St Petersburg Food Aid program, which was intended to exchange
raw materials like gas, oil and timber, for food. The collapsing Soviet

economy had left the shelves empty in Russian supermarkets and the Food
Aid program was designed to replenish them using mainly German and
Scandinavian companies. However most of Putin's 'Food Aid' food never
arrived, and there were food-riots and street protests by hungry St
Petersburg residents.
1991-1992
Following the failures of the Food Aid program, a St Petersburg Council
Deputy named Marina Salye headed an investigation which found that
Putin and his underworld associates had stolen at least 124 million
Roubles worth of food, while people in the city were starving. An
elaborate network of shell companies with bogus addresses and nonexistent Directors had been set-up to launder the money and funnel it
into the bank accounts of Putin and his cronies. When confronted with
these allegations, Putin resorted to the old KGB tactic of denying
everything and blaming all the problems on foreigners.
Despite being presented with a mountain of evidence, Mayor Sobchak
refused to fire Putin, or prosecute him. Given Sobchak's rapid and
unexplained accumulation of wealth during this period, a likely
explanation is that Sobchak was involved in Putin's rorts and rackets.
Council Deputy Salye would eventually resign from St Petersburg Council
in disgust and retire to the countryside, but she still has documents
in her possession which prove Vladimir Putin's involvement in corrupt
activities.
Ex-Council Deputy Salye is believed to keep extra copies of these
documents with other people, including lawyers, who have instructions
to make the documents public if anything should happen to Salye. These
precautions are a form of 'insurance' that is necessary, because those
who speak out against Vladimir Putin have a habit of ending up dead,
sometimes as the victim of a hit-man, and sometimes in what appears to
be an accident. Even those who serve Putin, such as Officers of the FSB
(the new name for the KGB) can come to a bad end. Several FSB men who
were implicated in the Russian apartment bombings (more on that later)
would die of a drug overdose even though they never took drugs, or be
found with their neck broken in a dark alley, or die in a hit-and-run
car accident that was never solved.
1992-1996
While he continued as Chairman of the St Petersburg Economic Relations
Committee, Putin amassed a fortune in bribes and kickbacks. Corruption
Case 144128 was an investigation carried out by Lieutenant-Colonel
Zykov of the Russian Federal Police, into a construction company called
Twentieth Trust. After being registered by Putin's Economic Relations
Committee, 2.5 billion Roubles was transferred to Twentieth Trust for
building projects in St Petersburg, however most of the projects were
never started. The money simply disappeared and Lieutenant-Colonel
Zykov's team traced some of it to Spain, where it had been used to
build large and luxurious villas for Putin and his underworld friends.

In March 1994 Mayor Sobchak promoted Vladimir Putin to be the Deputy

Mayor of St Petersburg. In May 1995 Putin set up the 'Our Home Is
Russia' political party, which supported the notoriously-corrupt
Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Putin managed the party's 1995
election campaign and was leader of it's St Petersburg Branch for
several years. In 1996 Sobchak lost the St Petersburg Council election
and Putin went to Moscow to work for President Yeltsin. As a Deputy
Chief of the Presidential Property Management Department, Putin was
responsible for administering Russia's foreign assets and overseeing
the transfer of Soviet and Communist Party assets to the Russian
Federation, which would have offered ample opportunities for selling
assets 'on the sly' and pocketing the proceeds.
1997
On March 26, 1997, President Yeltsin appointed Putin as Deputy Chief of
Presidential Staff and Chief of the Main Control Directorate of the
Presidential Property Management Department. Others to hold this
position were Alexei Kudrin and Nikolai Patrushev, both of whom went on
to become associates of Putin. Back in St Petersburg, ex-Mayor Anatoly
Sobchak was being investigated for corruption and abuse of power, and
after a police interview on Friday October 3, 1997, Sobchak appeared to
have a heart-attack and was rushed to hospital. The next few days were
a National Holiday long-weekend in Russia and as police resources were
stretched, Sobchak's hospital room was left unguarded. During the night
he was spirited away by people working for Putin, who booked Sobchak
onto a private plane which flew him to France. Sobchak was later seen
walking around the streets of Paris and looked very healthy for a man
who had supposedly nearly died of a heart-attack.
While Putin has shown no loyalty at all to the FSB Officers who did his
dirty work in the Russian apartment bombings, he had to help Sobchak
escape from Russia. If Sobchak had gone on trial and given evidence
against his 'fixer' Vladimir Putin, that would have seen Putin go to
jail. Putin could have arranged a fatal accident for Sobchak, but that
would have caused a scandal and displeased President Yeltsin. So
sneaking Sobchak out of Russia was Putin's best course of action.
1998
President Boris Yeltsin was old and in very poor health and he was
nervous about the corrupt practices that had made his family a fortune,
when they'd sold Soviet assets to Russia's business tycoons and
Oligarchs. Noting how Vladimir Putin had looked after ex-Mayor Sobchak,
it looks like Yeltsin did a deal with Putin. If Putin would be
'understanding' of the past corruption of President Yeltsin and his
family, then Yeltsin could return the favor by advancing Putin's career
at the Kremlin.
On May 25, 1998, Putin was appointed First Deputy Chief of Presidential
Staff for regions. Then two months later, on July 25, Putin was
promoted to the job of Director of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB).
As a security, intelligence and secret-police organization, the FSB is

a new name for the old KGB, and so Putin found himself running the
agency where he had once worked as a spy.
1999
President Yeltsin had already hired and fired four different Prime
Ministers when, on August 8, 1999, he appointed Vladimir Putin to be
the Acting Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. President Yeltsin
announced that he wanted Putin to succeed him as President, and Putin
agreed to stand in the forthcoming Presidential Election. As a largelyunknown 'backroom operator' Putin needed a major boost to his public
profile and Yeltsin arranged for a flattering and sympathetic biography
of Putin to be written and published.
But the thing which guaranteed Putin's win in the Presidential Election
was the wave of apartment bombings which took place in Russia during
September 1999. Four high-rise apartment towers in Moscow and other
cities were blown up by massive bombs at night, while their inhabitants
were sleeping, and 293 people were killed and over one thousand
injured. Putin appeared on Russian television, saying: 'Well be
chasing the terrorists everywhere. At the airports . . . or in the
toilet. Well waste them in an outhouse. End of story.' This tough talk
went down well with the Russian public and the largely-unknown Vladimir
Putin, who had only been Prime Minister for one month, suddenly became
famous. In this context Putin's past in the KGB and FSB was seen as a
'plus', and many ordinary Russians saw him as someone who could protect
them from the mad bombers and terrorists.
Putin announced that there was a 'Chechen trail' in the apartment
bombings and although he offered no proof to back up this claim, he
soon launched an invasion of the breakaway province of Chechnya, which
wanted independence from Russia. This invasion marked the beginning of
the Second Chechen War, which Vladimir Putin waged with unremitting
cruelty and brutality. Bands of FSB Officers acted as mobile deathsquads which roamed the Chechen countryside killing, raping and
torturing civilians, while the Russian military bombed and shelled
Chechen cities like Grozny to rubble.
Yuri Felshtinsky, co-author of the book 'Blowing up Russia', says that
the First Chechen War in 1995 had been started by President Boris
Yeltsin as a way of postponing an election that he looked certain to
lose. Yeltsin argued that you cant run an election in wartime and so,
because he had provoked a war with Chechnya, the election would have to
be delayed for a few months. The First Chechen War of 1995 distracted
peoples attention away from Yeltsins corruption and, by delaying the
election and appearing to be a war-leader and savior of the Russian
people, Yeltsin managed to win the Presidential Election.
2000
The ploy that had worked for Boris Yeltsin in 1995, also worked for
Putin five years later. In March 2000 Russia's new war-leader and
defender of the people, Vladimir Putin, was elected President of the

Russian Federation. What no-one realized was that Putin loathed

democracy, which his KGB training had taught him was 'decadent Western
weakness'. As soon as Putin got his hands on the levers of power he
immediately set about removing civil-rights safeguards, brought the
media under government control, increased Kremlin powers at the expense
of the regions, and changed Presidential Election processes so that it
became easier to rig the outcome. From now on the Russian people would
have no rights and the only news they would hear was what a great job
Vladimir Putin was doing. As for democracy, they could vote for whoever
they liked, because Putin was going to win anyway.
But the families of the apartment bombing victims were finding it hard
to believe the explanation that was being offered to them by the Putin
government. The story that the bombings had been carried out by Chechen
terrorists had so many gaps and inconsistencies in it, that some of the
victims' families hired a former KGB/FSB Officer, Mikhail Trepashkin,
to conduct his own inquiries. Contacts in the FSB told Trespashkin that
the apartment bombings were 'not what they appeared to be' and warned
him that digging into such matters could be bad for his health. Despite
this Trepashkin went ahead with his investigation, but he found that he
was blocked at every turn. The authorities refused to cooperate with
him in any way, all facts in the apartment bombings were classified Top
Secret and thus unable to be discussed, or even divulged. Worst of all
vital crime-scene evidence, including human remains, was destroyed
within days of the bombings, when the authorities sent in bulldozers to
clear away the rubble of the apartment towers.
Four high-rise apartment blocks had been leveled by the attacks and a
fifth in the town of Ryazan had been targeted for destruction, but the
Ryazan apartment tower was saved when watchful residents saw strangers
dragging large sacks down into the basement. The local police were
called and when the strangers were arrested, the police were shocked to
discover they were FSB Officers, not Chechen terrorists. The large
sacks turned out to be full of a powerful Russian Army explosive called
'Hexagon' which was wired-up to Russian Army detonators. Hexagon is the
Russian equivalent of the explosive RDX and it's only made at one
factory in the whole of Russia. Hexagon is tightly controlled and not
available to anyone except the Russian military and the FSB. When the
FSBs involvement at Ryazan became public, the FSB announced that a
'training exercise' had been underway at the apartment tower. But the
FSB never explained why a 'training exercise' would involve wiring-up
real detonators to enough real explosive to demolish a high-rise
apartment tower with hundreds of people living in it.
2000-2005
Whenever he is confronted with evidence of his own vile and murderous
behavior, Vladimir Putin always falls back on the old KGB tactic of
keeping a poker-face, denying everything, and trying to brazen it out
by blaming it all on foreigners. When faced with the evidence of
official Russian Government involvement in the apartment bombings Putin
has followed this same pattern. With a blank expression, he denies

knowing anything about the murder of innocent Russian apartmentdwellers, then he points to Chechen separatists as the perpetrators.
But no Chechen terrorists have ever been charged over the apartment
bombings, despite the fact that they were used by Putin as an excuse to
send the Army into Chechnya and start the Second Chechen War. Several
people have been found guilty of the bombings, but as the trials were
held in secret, there is a possibility the suspects were tortured into
making a confession. Many of those who tried to investigate the Russian
apartment bombings have been assassinated, including:
Yuri Schekochikhin (a member of the Duma Russia's Parliament)
Sergei Yushankov (another member of the Duma)
Alexander Litvinenko (a former KGB/FSB Officer who went into exile
in London, where he was killed by being given a cup of tea laced
with radioactive Polonium)
Anna Politkovskaya (a journalist, author and human-rights activist
who held joint Russian and United States citizenship. She was born
in New York City, where her parents were Soviet diplomats, and she
was shot dead outside her apartment in Moscow on Vladimir Putin's
54th birthday, October the 7th 2006)
Three attempts were made in the Duma to examine the apartment bombings
and all three attempts were voted down by Vladimir Putin's United
Russia Party. When former KGB and FSB Officer Mikhail Trepashkin helped
a Duma Member to investigate the bombings, Trepashkin claims the police
warned him off. When he ignored the warnings his car was stopped at a
roadblock and a police officer put a bag with a gun in it onto the back
seat of his car, then charged him with being in possession of an
unlicensed firearm. A Court found Trepashkin guilty and sent him to
jail for two years. When he got out and continued to speak about the
apartment bombings, Trepashkin was stopped by the police again, 'loaded
up' with a weapon and sent to jail for another two years.
Russian expert David Satter says that while the apartment bombings
killed hundreds and led to the invasion of Chechenya, which killed tens
of thousands, it is considered a 'success' by Putin because it brought
him into power and entrenched the Yeltsin system of corruption, which
has made Putin and his cronies rich beyond the dreams of avarice. If
Putin were being honest, which he seldom is, he would probably argue
that he has made the Russian State 'strong', and that the vast numbers
of dead people are just 'collateral damage'. Whether he is aware of it
or not Mr Putin is still following his KGB training and indoctrination,
which holds that the needs of the State are of paramount importance and
human beings simply dont matter.
In March 2000, Putin's first act as President was to grant former
President Boris Yeltsin immunity from prosecution for any crimes that
he had committed. When Lieutenant-Colonel Zykov of the St Petersburg
Police tried to pursue Vladimir Putin in Corruption Case 144128, the
Prosecutor-General of Russia ordered the case to be dropped because, as

President, Mr Putin cannot be investigated. In 2003 the CEO of Yukos

Oil, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, embarrassed Putin by asking him what he was
doing about corruption. A few months later Khodorkovsky was arrested
and sent to a Siberian prison-camp for ten years, while Yukos Oil was
broken-up and sold to Putin loyalists. Today Mr Khodorkovsky lives in
exile in Switzerland and he believes that Vladimir Putin is sliding
towards a fully-totalitarian regime. Khodorkovsky maintains that what
we are witnessing in Russia is not a 'failure of democracy', so much as
the deliberate 'rise of a kleptocracy'.
In 2003 the German police raided a company called SPAG in Frankfurt, in
connection with investigations into money-laundering by the Tambovskaya
Mafia of St Petersburg. Real Estate transactions were being used by
SPAG to launder the proceeds of drugs, prostitution, illegal-gambling,
people-trafficking and standover rackets, and German police were
shocked to discover that on the Advisory Board of SPAG were the German
Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, and the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Schroder and Putin are old friends who celebrate birthdays together,
and after consulting Chancellor Schroder the German police shut down
their investigation into SPAG money-laundering. In 2005, two weeks
before he lost the German Federal Election, Chancellor Schroder
authorized a one billion Euro loan guarantee for Russia's natural gas
pipeline into Europe, and after retiring from politics Mr Schroder was
made Chairman of the pipeline consortium.
2005-2011
Edward Lucas of 'The Economist' says of Vladimir Putin: 'He was trained
by the KGB to deceive Westerners. He has a sharp eye for human weakness
and is very good at persuading and intimidating people. He's been doing
this with Western leaders, sometimes with charm and sometimes with
threats, but boy does he do it.' Each time Putin succeeds in fooling
Western leaders it proves to him that the West is weak and decadent.
This emboldens Putin to take ever-greater risks and implement the most
extreme measures. Deep inside Vladimir Putin's head, the KGB training
and indoctrination once implanted the idea of 'decadent Western
capitalists' and, even though he is now a capitalist himself, Putin is
still operating like the heroic KGB Agent in a Soviet-era comic-book.
He seems to be hell-bent on destroying the Western Powers.
It's almost as if he gets bored running Russia with his peculiar mix of
corruption and tyranny, and by destabilizing the Western world Putin is
somehow able to 'let off steam'. It's also possible that he gets his
kicks by playing-out boyhood fantasies of himself as the hero KGB
Agent, carrying out the sacred KGB mission of sowing fear,
uncertainty and chaos in the West.
According to some reports, Putin sometimes insists on senior Russian
Government officials calling each other 'comrade' during meetings. The
word 'comrade' harks back to the way that Russians addressed each other
in the days of Soviet communism. In Soviet times the law was often
applied arbitrarily and harshly, and many ordinary Russians dreamed of

currying favor with someone in the Government who could afford them
'protection'. While he is not a communist, Vladimir Putin has created
exactly these conditions in modern-day Russia. Putin has taken the
worst aspects of communism and the worst aspects of Czarism, and
combined them together into his own hellish system of absolute control
and staggering corruption.
Former Russian tycoon Sergei Kolesnikov, now living in exile in
Tallinn, Estonia, says that to do business in Putin's Russia, you MUST
buy 'protection', which is referred to as 'buying a roof'. The more you
pay and the higher-up the people you pay-off, the more 'protection' you
get, and the more success your business will enjoy. If you give a
large-enough 'present' to Vladimir Putin, it's like having God looking
after you, but these days the 'presents' are so big they can only be
hidden in the companys books with collusion at Board level. So in
doing business with Russia, hitherto-clean Western companies run the
risk of becoming infected with Vladimir Putin's corruption at Board
level, which is probably exactly what Putin wants. The KGB training and
indoctrination may have created an emotional need in Putin, which is
beyond his control and which he may not be fully aware of, to sow fear
uncertainty and chaos in the West. What better way to do that than by
corrupting senior business executives, and conditioning them to think
and act in a corrupt manner? When they leave Russia many of them will
continue to act in a corrupt way, because after doing so for a period
of time, it will begin to seem 'normal'.
Kolesnikov describes how 'gifting schemes' are used to pay bribes and
launder money, with the untraceable proceeds eventually ending up in
something like RosInvest, in which Vladimir Putin owns 94 percent of
the shares. Kolesnikov used to own 2 percent of RosInvest and that 2
percent was worth millions. Former Putin advisor Stanislav Belkovsky
estimates that Putin has a personal wealth of 40 billion US Dollars,
and this figure has apparently been confirmed by the CIA, which means
that Putin is one of the richest men in the world.
So Vladimir Putin is very definitely a capitalist, yet he sometimes
makes Government officials call each other 'comrade', like they did in
the days of Soviet communism. And all the while, Putin is relentlessly
trying to destabilize the 'decadent capitalists' in the West. It's a
puzzle, and maybe it would take a psychiatrist to figure out Putin.
2011 TO PRESENT DAY
His enormoys wealth has become a problem, however, for if Putin ever
retires from political power, the next Russian President might go after
his money. And with so many crimes committed, and so many people
murdered, who can Putin trust? Like Stalin before him Putin is allpowerful and the undisputed ruler of the Kremlin, but also like Stalin,
all that power and wealth means he is stuck in the Kremlin with no way
out. Hell be there until they carry him out in a coffin. Unless, of
course, he can bring someone to power in another country. Someone that
Putin thinks he can blackmail into providing him with sanctuary, a

safe-haven he can escape to, should the need arise.

After two four-year terms as Russian President, in 2008 Putin was
compelled by the Russian Constitution to relinquish the post, so he
arranged for his trusted yes-man Dmitry Medvedev to become President,
and then Medvedev appointed Putin as Prime Minister. The original plan
was for Medvedev to serve two terms as Russian President but in 2011
Putin was dismayed when the 'Arab Spring' saw many powerful dictators
fall from power and lose their lives. So, in the Kremlin-controlled
2012 election, Putin returned himself to the Presidency.
For years the Governments of some Baltic States claimed that Russia was
infiltrating agents and using, among other things, mini-submarines.
Some people in the West laughed at this idea, and thought no more about
it. Ukraine, which shares a border with Russia, complained that proRussian terrorists with names like the People's Militia had been
killing people and destroying property during their raids. Ukraine also
claimed these pro-Russian terrorists were receiving secret intelligence
assistance, weapons and ammunition from the Russian Army and FSB,
things which could only happen with the approval of Vladimir Putin. By
2014 the Russian Army was operating openly on Ukrainian soil and on
July 17 2014 a commercial passenger plane, Malaysia Airlines Flight
MH17, was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
Vladimir Putin, as usual, denied any Russian involvement, but by
October 2015 the Dutch Safety Board was saying that MH17 had been shot
down by a Russian-made Buk ground-to-air misslie fired from a proRussian terrorist enclave in Ukraine. In September 2016 the Dutch-led
Joint Investigation Team said that a Buk missile had definitely shot
down the aircraft, and added that they had proof the missile had been
transported from Russia into a pro-Russian terrorist-controlled area of
Ukraine, then fired from a field. Afterwards the truck drove back to
Russia. Video footage emerged showing the truck carrying the missile
from Russia into the terrorist-controlled area and then later returning
to Russia with no missile on board. Despite all this, Putin continues
to deny Russian involvement.
In 2015 US President Barack Obama began making overtures of friendship
towards Russia and Putin's KGB-trained mind interpreted this as a sign
of Western weakness, so he responded by sending Russian forces to back
the Syrian dictator Assad. They destroyed Syria's biggest city, Aleppo,
and the huge number of Syrian refugees de-stabilized the European
Union. But this is in keeping with the KGB objective of causing fear,
uncertainty and chaos in the West, so Putin would rate it a 'success'.
Hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrian civilians have been killed,
injured and displaced, but the KGB training always stressed that people
are expendable.
Putin's latest project has been to meddle in the US Presidential
Election and if that leads to chaos, Putin will count it as a win.
The Soviet Union is long gone, but the KGB is alive and well and living

inside Putin's head. So Putin continues to sow fear, uncertainty and

chaos in the West, just like the 'good old days' of the Cold War.
Meanwhile, with a median wealth of just 871 US Dollars, the people of
Russia are poorer than the people of India. Ordinary Russians are
bedeviled by a lack of democracy and by a legal system which, like
everything else in Russia, is controlled by the man in the Kremlin.
Vladimir Putin may believe that the perverted, tyrannical and corrupt
system he has created is good, because he thinks that in some strange
way it makes the Russian State 'strong', but with his increasingly
reckless actions, Putin is leading Russia towards disaster. By the
twisted logic of Vladimir Putin's KGB training, his ability to cause
chaos in Western nations shows that he is 'strong', but this viewpoint
overlooks one important factor.
Sooner or later his victims will realize what a dangerous menace he is.
His victims, in Russia and elsewhere, will realize that something has
to be done about the man in the Kremlin, and those who support him. The
world will realize that leaving Mr Putin in power is more dangerous
than taking him out, and so the world WILL do something about him.
That's a scary thought, but trying to imagine what goes on in Vladimir
Putin's head is even scarier.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. 'Putin's Way', a 2015 documentary by Neil Docherty. A FRONTLINE
WGBH Boston production with the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation. http://www.pbs.org/video/2365401766/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
3. 'Blowing up Russia', a study of the Russian apartment bombings.
Authors: Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky.
4. 'Darkness at Dawn', a study of the Russian apartment bombings.
Author: David Satter.
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17