Oliver Carroll

The Economist The white metal gates creak open, revealing spruce trees and sandbags. “Welcome to the fortress,” says a presidential aide. Squinting, you can see the snipers: left, right, up and down. The air-defence systems, huge chunks of metal, are easier to spot. When the gates close, a soldier picks up a red vertushka, a secure government phone from the Soviet era, and asks for orders. We’re moved towards a side entrance, then escorted inside through blacked-out corridors and stairways – up, down and deep into the body of the Ukrainian war machine.

It has taken nearly an hour for us to reach the gates of Volodymyr Zelensky’s compound, a journey that would normally last ten minutes. The cobblestone streets of Kyiv are largely free of traffic these days, but the city’s central arteries have been reconfigured to confuse the enemy. The route snakes its way to the grey Soviet monolith past anti-tank obstacles, past men with guns, and increasingly well fortified checkpoints. We change vehicles. The nervy state of readiness in Kyiv is reminiscent of February 2014, when the Russian government’s efforts to keep Ukraine in its grip led to “the revolution of dignity” and the deaths of more than 100 people. Now the capital is on a war footing once again.

Inside the presidential compound, we are asked to leave our phones, devices, electronics and pens at the door – anything that could be used to identify our exact location. As we are searched with mobile metal detectors, an office manager looks on anxiously from behind a large pile of toilet rolls. She is one of the few people still commuting every day: “It’s scary travelling in now, but what can you do?” Most other members of staff have been sleeping on site in camp beds since the start of war.

More fumbling along darkened corridors and, abruptly, we find ourselves in Ukraine’s situation room. With its white formica table, high-backed chairs and large screens, it could be a corporate meeting room, but for the words emblazoned on each side, yellow on blue: “Office of the President of Ukraine”. For the past four weeks, as Zelensky has posted, telegrammed and tweeted, this backdrop has become famous. A serious-looking soldier enters. “Uvaga!” he barks: “Attention!” Ten seconds later, the president bounces into the room, accompanied by a handful of men with machineguns. Zelensky seats himself at the head of the table, in front of a carefully positioned Ukrainian flag, and starts talking.

The evolution of Zelensky from comic actor and rookie politician to world statesman has taken just three years – the arc was yanked upwards in the past month. In the early days of his presidency in 2019, Zelensky was a pioneering postmodern leader who tried to be everything to everyone. He was elected not for his policies – he didn’t have many – but for his vague opposition to the corruption and ideologies of the political class. For three seasons he had played the part of a teacher-turned-president in a popular tv series, “Servant of the People”. But in the early days as the real president he sometimes seemed out of his depth; when the press asked him difficult questions, he seemed uncomfortable, even irritable.

Events have forged his presidency into something more substantial. When war broke out, he immediately ditched his dark suits and clean shave for green khaki and a short beard. He already had combat gear to hand for visiting troops at the front line – one set for winter, one for spring: “I had them, only not so many.” He is wearing the new role well. Though he’s tired, and fidgets endlessly, there’s a calmness beneath the swagger. Zelensky shakes hands respectfully with everyone (one person gets a hug) and leans in to make eye contact. He pulls up his own chair. He pours his own fizzy water into his own plastic cup.

He engages with the conversation, firing back quick, friendly, sometimes mischievous answers, and strokes his beard as he speaks. Asked what he needs most from the West he immediately responds: “Number one, aeroplanes,” a smile flickers across his eyes: “Number two, but it’s really number one, tanks.” It comes as a surprise when he occasionally breaks his flow. “What does a Ukrainian victory look like?” we ask him. He raises his eyebrows, winces and takes a full seven seconds before speaking – realising, it seems, that millions of people depend on his answer: “Victory is being able to save as many lives as possible.”

“I didn’t expect it to be this hard,” says Zelensky. “You can’t imagine what it means or how well you’ll do as president.” The Russian attack has pushed his leadership into the unknown. He leans back in his chair: “I’m not a hero”. That is the achievement of his people, he says.

He repeatedly uses the word honesty. “You have to be honest, so that people believe you. No need to try. You need to be yourself.” This attempt to be authentic has generated adulation, even memes, as Zelensky has baited the Russians and inspired Ukrainians with social-media videos from the streets of Kyiv. “If I don’t go out even for three or four days, and only stay in my office, I won’t know what’s going on in the world,” he says. He doesn’t need to spell out the inference, but he does. Vladimir Putin has been on his own in his bunker “for more like two decades”.

Zelensky surrounds himself with a small assembly of journalists, lawyers, performers and self-help professionals, his war-time “pop-up government”, as Sergii Leshchenko, a former journalist, now a member of the presidential staff, labels it. The entourage – all also kitted out in military green – seem at ease with each other and their leader. But not everything is in place. There is a long delay in getting the presidential interpreter to the room. The message comes back: he is busy on a foreign call. “Something isn’t right when the president’s translator isn’t available to the president,” Zelensky jokes.

The president wonders aloud which language he should be using. “When you ask in Russian, I will answer you in Russian. When you ask in English, I will answer in Ukrainian.” His aides suggest he should be speaking only Ukrainian. The president agrees, but doesn’t always follow the rule, and at times speaks in accented English – which he speaks well, despite his apologies for forgetting words. (At one point he wags his finger at the translator: “That was not everything I said,” he laughs.)

It all comes across as a bit chaotic, and perhaps it is. And yet everyone seems to know what to do. They are getting on with the job, despite the constant threat of a bomb falling on them. They are doing their work without waiting for his sign-off. They are the power here. Zelensky, for his part, believes one man cannot and should not control everything. As the country looks for every way to defeat Russia on the battleground, that understanding – a belief in the power of individual people choosing to stand together as one – may turn out to be Ukraine’s saving grace.

Photo: Ron Haviv / vii

The Moscow Times The driver's voice teeters between depression and aggression. "What kinduva life do you call this?!" he shouts. "We’re all people … peeeeepul, for fuck’s sake! ... Fuck, Ruussia, yoo make me want to cry!" We veer from side to side of the snow-covered track. Outside, the mercury pushes twenty under, and the black cloak of Siberian night is falling. "Thiz iz ah crrrriminal ... village" the driver says. "We had a shooting here ... police un' everything".

Turning back, the driver makes a frustrated gesture before opening his toothless mouth and releasing a putrid burst of ethanol breath. The car jolts and the driver returns his attention to the road. He continues his story: "The prisssnurs, they had guys in the school, taking tax from the kids, for fucks sake!...  'magine?! Poor ones had to give 100 rubles, the middle ones, 200, and the rich ones — fuckking 250 rubles, fuck me!"

The harsh Zabaikalsky region, some 4,000 miles from Moscow, is not, typically, a good news factory; locals do not leave their front doors in the morning expecting miracles. But two flashes of anarchy earlier this month have led some to wonder if the bad is about to get badder, and if the dark days of Siberia's tumultuous 1990s are returning.

The first episode, here in Novopavlovka, saw parents revert to mob law against a group of young criminals embedded in the local school. The second, in nearby Khilok, saw institutionalized teenagers attack a police station with stones and metal weapons. Separated by just a few days, the episodes were sufficiently unnerving for Moscow to send investigative teams to the region.

According to excitable local media, the root of the problems was a movement pushing youngsters into the criminal underground. This movement has a name — AUE — standing for "Arestantsky. Uklad. Edin," or "Prison. Order. Universal."

Ground Zero

Chita, the administrative capital of Zabaikalsky, is, on first appearances, pleasant enough. A smattering of historical buildings and bustling central streets set it apart from other Russian provincial capitals. But one only has to travel to Chita's more insalubrious and jobless outskirts, to see a different picture altogether.

"The default mode on these streets is crime," says my guide, Andrei Kulikov, 37, a former convict. "Chita is built on prisons, and no one is ever more than a phone call or family member away from the underground."

We stop by School 17, an unhappy, drug-infested cluster of wooden huts on the edge of existence. School 17 has no street lighting, and utility supplies are basic, but the neighborhood is a reasonable first port for those recently released from any one of the region's ten prisons.

It is in places like this, says Andrei, that former inmates connect with keen teenage runners. The criminals call them the ragged ones, and they help with anything from drug deliveries to organizing "grev" — supplies of tea, cigarettes and cash for serving prisoners.

"This isn't the place to be walking around at night, mind," says Kulikov. "There are weapons on the street — and no one respects the understandings no more."

The "Understandings"

In criminal circles, the "understandings," or Russian prison code, are laws above laws. They forbid all cooperation with the police, establish an obligation to collect grev, and map out an alternative system of order and justice.

According to another former convict, Sergei Chugunov, the criminals' courts are the "fairest in all Russia." If someone has been unfairly imprisoned, he says, criminal authorities will "always" find out the truth via their networks outside. Chugunov himself spent four years serving alongside Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Chita's most famous inmate, in Krasnokamensk.

Keen to hit home the "morality" of Chita's underworld, Sergei invites me to one of its more notorious hangouts. The bar is named after Yermak Timofeyevich, the Cossack who conquered Siberia in a shower of blood. "It doesn't matter who you are, this place will always welcome you," says Sergei. "Just don't leave your valuables in the cloakroom."

The bar's color scheme is fecal brown, interrupted only by a mirror ball and fairy lights. From time to time, the DJ, a stocky man in his late forties, makes a weird comment few seem to register, but which adds to the otherworldly atmosphere. "Who likes to walk around their apartment naked?" he asks.

A bottle of vodka later, and news breaks that a lynx has run into town. Another half bottle, and the DJ returns to the microphone. With a wink to Sergei, he announces the presence of an "English guest," and dedicates a chanson, a traditional song from the criminal underworld, to the moment.

By the time the first verse of "District Prosecutor" is over, the room has reached transcendental highs; everyone is dancing violently, screaming with delight:

"For you I'm no one, and for me you're no one"

"I spit at the law, you send me to prison!"

In a town so obviously pregnant with prison culture, I ask Sergei about the process of recruiting kids to the AUE cause. He denies youngsters are actively recruited: "It is against the code; you can't recruit, but you can't push away either." Besides, he argues, the "whole of Chita is AUE" — "it's a mentality."

A rough street survey of two dozen Chita schoolchildren suggested almost all knew about AUE, about the understandings and grev. A few of them admitted to contributing for grev, and some said they knew someone who did. One said a book "How to become a Thief" was doing the rounds at school.

The older children become tight-lipped when asked about AUE — refusing to answer further questions.

Several hundred Chita teenagers are subscribed to AUE groups on Russia's most popular social network VKontakte. When contacted, the majority offered laconic responses of the sort: "Go f*ck yourself," "agent!," "AUE! Freedom to thieves" and "AUE! F*ck off." One 17-year-old AUE follower, Dmitry F., warned against unwelcome interfering. No one would speak to me, he said: "That's the deal. We didn't start this, but we'll finish it. Take my advice, you'll be better off that way."

A Village at War

If Chita's AUE teens want to stay in the shadows, the other side, understandably, are even keener to preserve anonymity.

"I want you to write everything down, but you must promise to change my name," says Lyudmila, one of Novopavlovka's 4,000 residents. "You can't imagine what we've come to. We're at war, terrorized by these kids, by their parents."

It has been three weeks since Novopavlovka residents saw their village shoot to the top of national news. It all started when a group of teenagers, working under a local criminal boss, began extorting grev payments in the local secondary school. Payments were set between 100 and 250 rubles per month per child. Those who couldn't pay accrued debts.

The children were sworn to secrecy, but parents eventually found out. The turning point came around the new year, when one indebted 13-year-old boy was stripped of his coat, on a day when the temperature outside was minus 40 degrees Celsius. One of the boy's classmates decided to raise the alarm, and told his father, Ivan, what was going on.

The extortioners were well-known to police, but had dodged prosecution because of their age. Over the years, they had developed a sense of invincibility, and things looked to be going the same way again.

At the end of January, however, a group of parents led by Ivan took matters into their own hands.

The results of their action left several of the gang with injuries, though Ivan says reports of him inflicting "serious injuries" on the boys are exaggerated. "It's said that we crippled a 17-year-old … The maximum we did was break a nose or two." Ivan says the physical showdown was initiated by the boys themselves, when they challenged his son to a fight.

The AUE boys, however, went to the police to file a complaint, and now the vigilante parents are anxiously waiting to hear whether they will be prosecuted themselves.

According to Lyudmila, about 40 percent of the village youngsters are AUE: "The only thing our village gave them is hopelessness, but the criminals made them feel wanted. Children sense when they aren't wanted."

Putin's Children

The harshness of Siberian life hits home when we make our way to the neighboring town, Khilok (population 10,000). Set in beautiful snow-covered hills and conifer forests, Khilok could be in Switzerland, were it not for everything else. Most locals live in damp, unforgiving wooden huts, without heating or water. Pensioners and children wheel water cans along the streets.

"We know its shitty living but we're resilient and we've got used to life's little hardships," says Yury Lukyanov, 62, a railway worker now on his pension. "It's the crime we can't cope with."

Like the majority of residents, Yury says he is unnerved by the boys from the state juvenile correctional school on the northern edge of town. He says he is scared to go out at night, and complains of unrelenting robberies. "If you leave the house unattended, they'll come around to steal something," says Yury. "They watch and gather intelligence for more serious criminals too."

Yury says locals are infuriated the youngsters appear to live both above the law, and better than the rest of the town: "They get fresh fruit and vegetables, more than our kids could dream about. And yet 17 of them head off to trash the police station!"

"These kids are untouchable" he says. "You can't put them in prison and you can't arrest them. Because they're protected by the state. Because they're Putin's children."

Syria? No Problem!

After negotiations through a fence, we meet with four of "Putin's children" — Sasha, Seryoga, Ilya and Lyokha — all of them "heroes" of the police station rampage.

So were they brave or just dumb? "Brave," they say in chorus, laughing. "The pigs started it anyway," says Lyokha. "They arrested our mate, and that's not on." Their friend's only crime was being drunk at school, they say.

The boys admit to being attracted by the romance of prison culture — the tattoos and the understandings. But when asked about AUE, they look to the ground and claim ignorance.

As for the future, well that is a choice between crime and the army. "It's not a bad career in the army right now," says Lyokha. "Yeah, I'd have no problems going to Syria," agrees Seryoga.

We say our goodbyes and head for the local restaurant. The menu is limited: fried sausage, buckwheat, chocolate, vodka and cognac. "Soup might be on later," says the waitress. We opt for the cognac.

"You're here about the boys, aren't you?" says a woman, a rare voice in a town that doesn't speak. She moves closer to our table. "I'm a dermatologist, I used to work at the school and I can tell you they are out of control. Every year, we'd get several cases of syphilis. In 13 year olds!"

The woman drops to a whisper. "You ask anyone — they're terrified of them boys. They only know how to rob. They've started stealing sticks and garden equipment. God only knows what they're planning."

The last stop of the evening is the police station, where the story began. When we arrive, seven officers are sitting behind the metal grill in various states of blankness. Some are reading magazines, some drinking tea. Others are filling out crossword puzzles.

I knock on the window, and ask if I can get a comment. The receiving officer looks at me, then at his colleagues.

"There's no one who can talk to you here," he says.

A Message to Nowhere

Pursuit of an official commentary turns into a fruitless ring-a-roses around the regional offices of official government bodies.

Eventually, the region's deputy governor agrees to meet. A doctor by profession, Sergei Chaban was happy to see me, he said, provided I was "objective in my reporting."

The local authorities understood the problem: "We're not ostriches burying our heads in the sand — it's there, we don't deny it exists, we see the graffiti around." But, he says, the media reports of a widespread AUE system were exaggerated. "There are individual episodes of criminals recruiting youngsters to the cause … but overall, juvenile crime is on the way down ... down by 20 percent over the last two years."

For Chaban, one solution would be to re-militarize the region. Until recently, Chita was the headquarters of the Siberian Military District, but a reorganization in 2010 saw resources move to the Far East Khabarovsk region, leaving the region's teenagers short on legitimate male role models.

The deputy governor says the government is looking to open new military, patriotic and sporting programs in the region. "We have just opened a new elite Suvorov military training academy," he says. "We hope boys can now start talking to military men, not criminals."

Roman Sukachyov, head of the region's Human Rights Center, is less confident about the governmental approach. He says tackling a problem like AUE requires "dealing with an entire philosophy" that permeates official life. "It's difficult to reduce the influence of criminal ideology when the [state-sponsored] Channel 2 put on a criminal chanson special on New Year's Eve," he says.

The regional government also needed to "get real" about the extent local police chiefs were cooperating with criminals. To demonstrate his point, Sukachyov plays me a video of a joint drinking session between a head of the local criminal police and a criminal underboss. "The whole system is intertwined: Police agree rules with crime bosses, and there is little local populations can do about it," he says.

Some locals seem to have given up on the power of government. The Novopavlovka parents, for example, say they have decided to take their problem to "higher instances." "The criminals' own rules say that you aren't supposed to involve the police," says Ivan. "So we've decided to make our own connection a little further up their chain of command."

"The only way our village can start sleeping soundly is if the criminal authorities put people back in their place."

Some identities and identifying features have been changed. 

The Economist The russians took the strategic rail-hub city of Melitopol on the third day of the war, their route apparently greased by Ukrainian turncoats. Controlling the city, a crucial segment of Vladimir Putin’s land bridge to Crimea, has proven somewhat trickier. Every few days brings a surprising report: an armoured train destroyed and a grenade attack on a command post (May 18th); railway tracks and a radar station blown up (May 22nd); a pro-Ukrainian rally (May 29th); and a collaborator’s house hit by an explosion (May 30th). Ukraine claims its partisans have killed more than 100 Russian soldiers behind enemy lines in Melitopol. “Our people are doing everything to make sure the land burns under the feet of the occupiers,” says the town’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov, now safe in Ukrainian-controlled territory.

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Melitopol is the unofficial capital of Ukraine’s resistance. Since mid-March the war maps produced by the American-based Institute for the Study of War show it covered in stripes, meaning it is territory where partisans are active. But it is far from the only place that has seen such operations. In neighbouring Kherson, a Russian-controlled airbase has been blown up nearly two dozen times. In Enerhodar, Andrii Shevchyk, the collaborationist mayor, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt. In Izyum, hungry Russian soldiers were purportedly given spiked pies by a seemingly friendly old lady, according to a telephone conversation between a Russian soldier and his girlfriend that was intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence; eight of them reportedly ended up dead. When Russians abandon tanks or petrol trucks, Ukrainian farmers tow them away. Reports of explosions at arms dumps trickle in from the occupied regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Fires and explosions at military facilities inside Russia itself are, apparently, becoming more common. In many cases, the evidence points to poor fire safety. But Ukrainian special forces do appear to be targeting supply chains in Russia’s border provinces. On at least one occasion a helicopter struck an oil-storage facility in the Russian city of Bryansk. Officials in Kyiv refuse to comment on the operations. Speaking off the record, a tight-lipped senior intelligence officer says it would be better to speak to a priest: “This is God’s work. God is punishing the Russian Federation. Maybe not directly. Maybe not with his own hands. Maybe he has to use helicopters.”

Ukraine’s underground resistance in occupied territories is co-ordinated by a unit of its armed forces called the Special Operations Forces (sso). The division was formed in 2015 after attempts at partisan activity failed disastrously in the early stages of the war in the Donbas. A former operative in the unit, who asked to remain anonymous, says the work is split into three parts: military action, support operations and psychological warfare. “Say the task is to stop the enemy from moving more reserves to Melitopol,” he explains. “The sso assigns special forces the task of blowing up a bridge, it asks partisans to damage the railway, and it gets psy-ops [psychological operations] to print leaflets to say we’re on the watch. So in the end, only half the troops dare to come.”

The source says his colleagues spent considerable time preparing potential partisans—“simple local people, but with a secret”—in the years leading up to the war. He refuses to go into detail about the training, but says the basics could be found in “Total Resistance”, a classic guerrilla instruction manual written in 1957 to prepare the Swiss for potential occupation by Warsaw Pact countries. A website published by the sso offers life hacks for Ukraine’s underground warriors. This includes advice about how to organise clandestine resistance (stick to a need-to-know basis), prepare an ambush (ensure clear escape routes), and cope with being arrested (keep calm and hope for the best).

Vladimir Zhemchugov ran dozens of partisan operations for Ukraine in his native Luhansk in 2014-15, before he was maimed by a mine and captured. He says the current resistance mixes professional soldiers and volunteers “60-40, in that order”. Mr Zhemchugov, who now helps train volunteers, says Ukrainian authorities had laid down the basic structure for an insurgency in a few rushed months before the war. A network of secret arms dumps, safe houses and potential sympathisers now exists across the country; in some cases, criminal networks were co-opted. But the preparation was less thorough than it could have been. It was apparently undermined by officials who later switched to support Russia. “The security services and police proved to be our weakest link.”

As in 2014, when war erupted in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s security services appear to have got their hands on secret military databases. In Kherson, Russian officers are visiting the homes of Ukrainians who served in the army. Those who haven’t managed to switch addresses are detained, beaten, tortured or worse. “This work isn’t always good for one’s health,” says the sso source. “The risks are real and it isn’t a walk in the park.” Russia also appears to be stepping up efforts to stamp out Ukrainian resistance, increasing arrests and demonstrative punishments. But intercepts released by Ukrainian security services suggest some Russian soldiers are fearful. “Every fucking night we’re fighting with diversionary groups who come into the village,” one soldier tells his friend in a call. “Some of us have had enough. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”

Mr Fedorov, Melitopol’s mayor, was abducted by occupying forces before being released on March 16th in a prisoner exchange. He said Ukraine’s resistance would continue to attract new recruits despite the risks. Only one in ten of Melitopol’s residents had switched to the other side, and that wasn’t a critical mass, he suggested. But the true strength of Ukraine’s resistance will be tested only in a new phase of the war: provided enough Western weapons arrive, Kyiv hopes to launch a counter-attack to retake the south. The tight-lipped intelligence officer predicts Ukraine’s underground army will prove to be a big asset. He suggests Vladimir Putin’s troops will be forced to beat an ugly retreat. “The Russians will be able to write another ‘War and Peace’. I’ve always been very fond of Tolstoy.” ■

Newsweek Slavik’s voice was laced with panic. “No one is coming for us. We are surrounded by the enemy,” he had told me over a crackling telephone line. There were, he said, many losses, many soldiers lying on the floor around him – “some dead, some injured. Commanders need to send in reinforcements, or start negotiating a way out.” I would get the message out, wouldn’t I?

Over the course of that Saturday 17 January, I spoke to him on two further occasions. It was clear the 22-year-old Slavik had grown more and more terrified as he became trapped in Donetsk airport. “We’ve been looking around for people’s arms so we might stitch them on again,” he had said. By our third call of the evening, Slavik reported that a comrade missing his arm had bled to death. “If they don’t come for us by day break, we are done for. Done for.” That was the last contact I had with him, the last contact anyone had with him.

Slavik was a gifted boy. Growing up in western Ukraine, he never studied properly, but always seemed to do well. He was “an intellectual”, according to his father, with interests from the saxophone to theatre. He studied at the Kharkiv arts academy, but within a year had abandoned college. “He said he didn’t like the way they taught, and it was typical of him – always seeking out injustice to the point of stubbornness”.

Given his circumstances, joining the elite 80th paratrooper brigade in Lviv wasn’t the worst of outcomes, and his father recalls his pride at seeing his son in uniform. But Slavik’s tongue soon got him into trouble. He fell out with superiors after an argument over an armoured personel carrier he claimed wasn’t fit for service. He ripped up his military contract and went home.

That was in November 2013. By summer 2014, Slavik was receiving terrifying updates from the frontline, where former colleagues were defending Lugansk airport, and had found themselves fenced in by Russian-backed forces. He lost four of his closest friends in the battle, and felt he had to do something. By September, against the advice of his father, he went back to the Lviv training range. “I didn’t want him there – I told him it was a politicians’ war,” his father recalls.

Just before Christmas, Slavik travelled east, eventually ending up in Donetsk airport. Built during the height of the Cold War, Donetsk airport was the epitome of modern design. It covered a huge territory, and provided any number of hiding places within its serpentine grid of tunnels, bunkers and underground communications systems. There were entries into nearby mines, and into Donetsk itself, though much of the network had not been accessed for decades. For the Russian-backed rebels, the airport was an Achilles heel that prevented them from taking full control of the city. “The defence of Donetsk is impossible without the airport,” says Shiba, a deputy rebel battalion commander, using an alias. For the Ukrainian side, meanwhile, the airport had turned into a symbolic Stalingrad, with much war propaganda invested into the image of the indestructible, Terminator-style “cyborgs” who defended it.

Birds fly near the traffic control tower of the Sergey Prokofiev International Airport damaged by shelling during fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces in Donetsk, October 9, 2014. SHAMIL ZHUMATOV/REUTERS

With the old terminal falling into rebel hands during the December “ceasefire”, the main focus of the January battle was the new terminal. During the week before it fell, the Ukrainians inside were steadily beaten down to the second and third floors of the building; and then, by Saturday, to just a part of the second floor. “They were crawling all over the place like rats – above, below, and on either side,” says Sasha [not his real name], an injured paratrooper, speaking from his hospital bed. “You could hear them baiting us from behind the walls. They were saying things like ‘time to surrender, Ukies, we’re coming to cut your throats’.”

Throughout that Saturday, there were several attempts to remove injured Ukrainian soldiers from the new terminal, but all were unsuccessful. At about 4am on Sunday morning, however, Ukrainian forces staged a major counter-offensive along the south side of the airport, which allowed a convoy of light army vehicles to retrieve the most seriously wounded. The operation was considered a success, though many Ukrainian soldiers remained trapped in the new terminal. Slavik was one of them. During the battles, military spokesmen claimed government forces were in full control of the airport. Then, some time around midday on Monday, the airport reverberated to the sound of an explosion. According to rebel commander Shiba, the blast was caused by the Ukrainian side “for reasons known only to themselves”.

Evgeny, a soldier serving in the 93rd brigade, sees things differently. “The explosion came from the centre of the hall, perhaps 40m from where we were, and was caused by explosives thrown in through a hole from the third floor, which we simply didn’t control.” All the internal walls were blown away by the blast, he says. Although few died, most soldiers received concussion injuries. An even bigger explosion followed at 3.30pm the following day. All of the supporting walls in the floors above gave way, crushing soldiers among the falling concrete. “We were running out of munitions,” says Evgeny, “but the worst thing was this sense of phantoms flying around you. You had so many people writhing in agony, moaning, crying for help.” Some of the injured were still shooting from horizontal positions, according to Evgeny: “They realised it was a fight to the end.”

Evgeny himself escaped on foot on Tuesday evening, scampering to safer positions the other side of the landing strip. He was the only one of his original group to make it home. He estimates that of soldiers in the new terminal, at least one third died, and a further third were seriously injured. As of 7.30am on Wednesday, Slavik was still in the new terminal, trapped under the rubble. His father battled his own fears in order to keep his son’s spirits up during a series of short telephone calls. “At the start we had hope. Slavik told me how he’d spoken to a British journalist, and how some deputy defence minister had followed up and assured him that help was on his its way.”

By Wednesday, however, it was clear that Slavik was on his own. “I said to my wife I was going to get the little one,” Slavik’s father says. “I got everything together in quick time – passport, money, papers – and I set off in the car. But I was an absolute wreck and I lost my way four times in the first hour.” He abandoned plans to drive there, and boarded the next train going east.

Some time after 7.30am on Wednesday 21 January, Slavik was captured by rebel forces. The following day he was paraded as part of a column of Ukrainian POWs in front of angry locals in Donetsk. Slavik’s father has been working ever since to secure the release of his son, and has even made an personal appeal to rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko for mercy. These efforts have been independent and largely obstructed by Ukraine’s security services. “They tell me I’m doing my country no favours, but I’m only doing what a father needs to do,” he says.

Sasha, the paratrooper in hospital, recognises Slavik from the tale, and agrees with the father’s position. “Every one of those soldiers who fought in the airport is a hero. Sure, Slavik might have been scared, but we were all scared. There was not one second when you weren’t completely petrified. What’s important is that Slavik didn’t leave his comrades behind.” Sasha shakes his head and pauses for a while. When he continues, he tells me the airport is an experience he’d wish on no one, but that it wouldn’t stop him going back: “Too much blood has been lost. Even now, I see the faces. Those faces . . .”

A young woman, a nurse, appears from behind the soldier’s hospital bed. “Your temperature is above 38C. The interview stops now,” she says.

Published 3 February 2015.

The Independent A little over two centuries ago, the publication of an anonymous and largely fictitious travelogue sent shockwaves through the Russian empire. “A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow” detailed a stream of social injustices – from harsh laws to venereal disease and the poverty of serfdom.

Catherine the Great, who had just returned from inspecting her newly annexed Crimea, was not impressed. The author was identified as an aristocratic tax inspector called Alexander Radishchev, and he was exiled to Siberia in no time.

It was the first sanction of its kind taken against a writer, and it ended Catherine’s brief infatuation with the literary world.

Radishchev’s polemic would be banned for 115 years. High literature it certainly is not, but the explosive nature of its criticism has fixed it in Russian history and school syllabuses.

On the eve of Sunday’s presidential election, and as the fallout from the Salisbury poisoning threatened to push contemporary Russia into complete international isolation, The Independent retraced the famous route. Over two days, we travelled by car between Russia’s two capitals, which are now connected by a federal highway: the M-10.

Along the way, we discovered that not everything has moved on.

'People are fussy these days and want clear drinking water'

Within half an hour of setting off from St Petersburg’s central Radishchev Street, the grandness of the imperial capital gives way to more monotonous landscapes. We pass grey, Soviet apartment blocks, petrol stations, shopping centres, the power lines and rusting factories of Russian suburbia. For a while, the road follows the tracks of the Great October railway and its slow-moving cargos, which are every once in a while overtaken by glitzy new high-speed trains on their way to Moscow.

A few miles on from the city’s boundaries, the birch forests, wooden homes and aching loneliness of Russia’s heartlands begin.

In Chudovo, a small market town and one of the first “stops” in Radishchev’s journey, we pause to offer a lift to Sergei Mikhailov, 60. The weathered man of few words tells his life story. He used to work as a driver at the local collective farm, he says.

The farm is no more, but he’s since moved into the filtered water business. It’s one of the few growth industries in the region, boosted by the the local timber factory – the source of the foul, metallic smells that follow the river downstream.

Sergei Mikhailov is by no means at the bottom of the pile. His wage and pension bring him over 20,000 roubles a month – that’s enough to cover food and medicines. His daughter doesn’t earn much more working in a chicken factory in St Petersburg, and she has to commute 90 miles every three days. She’s lucky, says Sergei; there aren’t any jobs left locally.

He’ll be voting in the village on Sunday, he says. Who for? “Well, there has only ever been one man on the ballot paper. ” Besides, the television has been warning about another war in Ukraine a month after the elections.

“I’ve got no problem with the Ukrainians personally, but the Americans have 60,000 troops ready to attack,” he says.

'You ask if I’ve read the book? Between milking the cows and bringing up five kids?!'

Once upon a time, there were many bustling settlements all alongside the highway. Today, the villages are disappearing. The decline has been decades in the making, and first began during a Soviet “efficiency” drive.

Kids leave to the local towns as soon as they can – generally to neighbouring Novgorod or St Petersburg. Those who don’t tend to fall into alcoholism and decay. The especially bored ones turn to arson. At least two dozen of the wooden homes on a five mile stretch out of Chudinovo have been reduced to cinders.

The village of Radishchevo in Leningrad Oblast, named after the exiled writer, is a case in point. Sergei says there used to be a dozen families living either side of the road – “Now all that’s left is a couple of old widows.” We drive up to one of the homes, and Sergei leads the introductions.

“Lyubov Pavlovna, it’s Sergei Mikhailovich, from the farm, you remember me?”

“Sergei Mikhailovich? My, you’ve changed! I didn’t recognise you!”

Lyubov Pavlovna, 80, toiled all of her working life as a milkmaid. The farm has gone, as have most of her neighbours. But she lives on with her three dogs, two goats and a paltry pension for company.

Her conditions are basic. Parts of her house are falling down. Going to the toilet requires a walk across the exposed, icy yard – no easy task for a woman of her age. The nearest shop is several miles away.

But life is “just great!” she says. “No shops? Well, what of it, we’re not doing badly here. It’s what you’re used to, isn’t it? You come out of the house, you have your little rest, you glance at the TV, you chop some wood, and you go back to wash the goats.”

Lyubov Pavlovna says she’s never had time to read Radishchev’s journey. She has no time for politics, she says – between bringing up her five children and milking the cows.

But this year, she has caught a glimpse of the “presidential” debates on television. She hasn’t been at all enthused by any of the candidates, least of all the liberal opposition candidate Kseniya Sobchak, who has been “slinging mud over Russia”.

Instead, she’ll be voting for the man who has fastidiously kept his distance from live TV. “Vladimir Putin. Who else?” she says. “Maybe some people are having it tough, but I’m doing OK!”

'We’ve had some success with our stickers'

The ancient city of Veliky Novgorod plays a central role in Radishchev’s journey, held up as an example of the country that might have been. Over the 12th to the 15th centuries, Novgorod was famously governed by a representative oligarchy, with public meetings, elections, political parties and all kinds of checks and balances. The republic’s existence ended abruptly in 1478, when the city was overrun by the tough men from Muscovy.

Contemporary Novgorod is some way from those hailed democratic roots. When we arrive, there is no sign of political campaigning at all, despite presidential elections being a few days away. The only visible message is the handful of posters that line the road into the city’s historic Kremlin citadel. All advertise a new “future” under Vladimir Putin, the fourth-term president.

Tucked away from the other side of the Kremlin, however, is the alien spaceship of Alexei Navalny’s local headquarters. The Putin critic might have been controversially barred from these elections, but his band of merry men – kids, to be more exact – continue to campaign on his behalf. The activists have redecorated the small hut in cool turquoise and Ikea white, with posters of their hero dotted around.

The local campaign team is actually from St Petersburg. Konstantin Pokhilchuk, 21, and Yarovslav Putrov, 19, were parachuted in to the sleepy provincial town when it became clear there just weren’t the local cadres. Since then, their lives have been subject to the best of Novgorod hospitality: constant surveillance, intimidation and the occasional arrest. But their enthusiasm hasn’t waned, they insist.

As we talk, the pair conduct interviews with two would-be election observers – a 15-year-old and 16-year-old. Shy and nervous, they say they were radicalised by Navalny’s videos showing the alleged corruption of the country’s leaders. All of their friends had seen the videos too. Not all of them are on his side, one admits. Some still prefer Pavel Grudinin, the moustachioed Communist Party candidate.

“It’s pretty dead,” says Mr Pokhilchuk. “Nobody understands just how important Novgorod was for the cause of Russian democracy. But we’ve had some success with our stickers.”

'Thatcher was a bitch, but I respected her. This one [Theresa May] is just a bitch'

By now, night is drawing in, and the weather is now among Russia’s most unpleasant: freezing rain accompanied by a bone-chilling wind. As news of the British ultimatum to Russia over the Salisbury poisoning breaks, we draw into a roadside cafe, in the hope of finding a drop of something to warm the soul.

“We’ve got enough problems here without selling vodka,” says the woman behind the counter.

“Problems?” I ask.

“From the authorities. Who else is going to fine me? Turnover is bad as it is. No one has counted their pennies as much as my customers are doing now. The cafe is for sale, if you’re interested.”

Liudmila Alekseeva has run her roadside cafe for 25 years. It’s nothing fancy – tea, coffee, chocolate, crisps and a basic menu for the truck drivers. But the egg mayonnaise and over-sugared tea are comforting enough.

For 30 years before she turned to trade, Alekseeva was an educator. She taught physics first in the city of Pskov, on the border with Europe, before being redeployed to teach in the village school. Alekseeva was always a disciplinarian, she says. And in the President she sees a kindred spirit.

“Only Putin, I don’t see another way” she says. “If it was up to me, he’d be my President for life. He’s pulled us up, pulled us out of the 1990s. Our tummies are full now, and we have clothes on our backs.”

She has problems – yes, many problems – but they were nothing to do with the President or his eighteen years of power. The cause of all her headaches were the bureaucrats – “those who see deception, treachery, robbery and … murder as nothing more than drinking a glass of water,” as Radishchev wrote two centuries ago.

Alekseeva says the council is trying to push her out of business to take control of the land. She tells dark tales of the suspicious arson attacks in which she was nearly burned alive. Now, she says, the council is threatening to take away her rental rights, and she is battling them in court.

Perhaps when people read her story in the British press, I suggest, things might improve?

She pauses. “So you’re an English correspondent? I’ve been gobbing away like this to a foreigner?! No, no, no! I don’t sell my country down river! Let alone to the English! The bastards!”

A television flickers in the background. One of the leading stars of Russian propaganda, Vladimir Soloviev, is angrily dissecting the consequences of the British ultimatum.

“I watch the television all the time, so I know what I’m talking about,” says Alekseeva. “Your Theresa May is just a swine. Now Thatcher, yes, I could respect her. She was a bitch, but she was fair. This one is just a bitch.”

‘Better Putin than Zhirinovsky – he’d start a war in a flash’

Half way on our journey, we reach Valdai, the administrative centre and commuter point for a huge national park by the same name.

Stalin kept a country home here, and the current President, it seems, is no less fond of the area. In 2004, he picked it as the location of an elite discussion club with handpicked foreign experts, designed to boost Russia’s image abroad. The Valdai Forum has since become an annual event, and, consistent with general information policy, more controlled and hand-picked with each passing year.

Putin has also built a luxurious residence here, on the edge of the park’s pristine lake, and locals say they see his helicopter flying in from time to time.

A whole infrastructure has been built around the President’s needs, says Nikolai Ivanov, 33, an attendant at the Gazprom service station on the way out of the town.

Those who manage to fall into the inner circle can expect excellent salaries: “Putin has security guards there on 80,000 roubles, and all for doing nothing. You live a plush life with that kind of cash.”

Ivanov earns less than half that, while working punishing 12-hour shifts. But, for a while, he too was part of the privileged presidential set-up, labouring as a builder on Putin’s estate.

He recalls the countless security checks both before and during the works, and the lavishness of the world inside: “There’s an entire universe behind the fences: a tennis club, helipads, chapels, you name it. The facade of the residence is decked out in marble, and the castle, my, words escape me. It’s being added to all the time.”

The awe-inspiring riches will not stop him voting for Putin, he says. His heart says he should be voting for the nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. There are too many foreigners in the country, and “Zhirik” would put a stop to that immediately. But his head says Putin.

“I don’t think Putin will start wars that no one needs. And Zhirik, well, it’s 50/50,” he says.

‘It's an extreme feeling when you have only 100 rubles left in your pocket’

Putin’s definitive election victory in 2012, and the merciless crackdown that followed, put paid to Russia’s nascent protest movement. With increased stakes on dissent, there were few serious challenges to the President’s rule during his third term. One of them, undoubtedly, came at the hands of the country’s trucker community two years ago.

Protesting against the imposition of a new road tax called Platon, hundreds of drivers began a slow march on Moscow. Authorities were so alarmed at the prospect of the protest reaching the capital, they launched a heavy-handed security operation to stop the truckers. It worked. Since the high point of 2016, the protest died down. But judging by the mood of drivers in this lay-by cafe, much of the anger remains.

“There are no laws that say we had to pay that tax, and truckers already pay enough on petrol tax,” says Vladimir Kuznetsov, as he tucks into a plate of eggs and sausages. “People are coming round to it because they are afraid of fines and there is no one to complain to.”

“Roads and fools, that’s always been Russia’s problem,” says his breakfast companion, Sergei. “The bureaucrats are keeping the money for themselves, which is why you see roads being built on marshland without the proper foundations. There are pits all along this highway – it’s like driving on a trampoline sometimes. Crashes almost every day.”

None of the drivers say they have any inclination or intention to vote.

“Elections? Give me a break!” says Sergei. “The pensioners will go to vote because they have nothing else to do. But the ordinary people are pissed off. They won’t take it much longer.”

By Russian standards, the drivers aren’t doing badly, earning an above-average 50,000 roubles (£620) a month. But they are angry at the government, which, they say is making them poorer. Months spent on the road – from Murmansk to Siberia – have removed any hope that change is around the corner.

“There’s no money left in the country, and it isn’t funny,” says Vladimir. “It’s an extreme feeling when you only have 100 roubles in your pocket.”

‘The asphalt may be new, but nothing here has changed for 200 years

“The Russian being is very patient and will tolerate things to the extreme,” wrote Radishchev. “But when he reaches the end of his tether, there is nothing that will stop him committing acts of extreme cruelty.”

Every day, along the sides of the M-10 highway, ordinary Russians perform tasks that would push Western tolerance to breaking point. Small-scale traders work on through freezing conditions, inches from danger, on pitiful and decreasing wages, but only because they have no choice. A reliable axiom seems to be at work here: the worse their condition, the less people complained, and the less they viewed politics as an answer.

In a day’s work of selling coffee and potato pies, Sveta Pavlovna earns 400 rubles (£5). She’s been standing alongside her small table and samovar nearly every day for the best part of eight years now. The business is hard, and was more profitable a few years ago, but she’s got used to it, and she’ll cope even if it gets worse. The one thing she won’t be doing is voting.

“Nothing will change come Sunday,” she says. “Putin’s already stolen all that he can, and maybe he’ll stop now. But even if he goes, things will just get worse.”

A few miles down the road, Marina is selling anti-freeze at 100 roubles a bottle. Her wage is generous in comparison – 800 roubles a day.

“It’s about surviving in these parts,” she says. “People do what they have always done – get by. Nothing has changed in centuries, only the asphalt. The trees are where they have always been, and the marshes, villages, too. Everything is in ruins.”

And another few miles on is Mikhail, a medalled Afghan veteran now in the business of selling wild mushrooms. Mushrooms are his life passion – “there aren’t any hallucinogenic ones for you lad, sorry” – and his eyes sparkle while talking about the preparation process. “You need to see how they are cooked. First you soak them, then, like smoked meat, you salt them in layers, adding seasonings, spices.”

Mikhail’s home is a village 50 miles into the forest, but he has been forced to commute to this spot for ten years. He’s here for days at a time, come rain, hail or snow.

“I’m not here out of a good life. There’s no work in the village. Nothing. So we club together and do what we can,” he says. “They say everything’s A-OK on the telly, but we know things aren’t like that.”

“You’ll take the white mushrooms?” We do, and they are quite delicious.

‘Politics? I’m more interested in boys’

The faded trader town of Vyshny Volochyok is the next stop. In centuries gone by, the town was connected to St Petersburg via a waterway that transported cargo destined for Moscow. The influence of both capitals remains strong here, with a lavish architecture unusual for a town of its size.

We speak to two students of the local nursing institute, Olga and Snezhana, 19. Both have come to the town from a village in Tver region. They aren’t keen to tell us their surnames, they say, for fear of reprisals after speaking to a foreign journalist: “We’re not enemies of the nation, you understand, we don’t want people to be searching for us.”

They had little to complain about, they said, repeating a phrase we had heard dozens of times on the road already. Yes, the student stipend of 452 roubles wasn’t fun to live on – but you can have a glass of wine every couple of weeks. Yes, the pull of nurses’ wages of 12,000 roubles (£150) a month was nothing to get excited about – but this was just a stepping stone to another career. Yes, it gets cold in the halls of residence – but you can always find a carpet to hang over the leaky windows, as pretty much all the students have done.

On Sunday, the girls will be voting in a presidential election for the first time. At 19 years of age, they have only known one leader: Vladimir Vladimirovich. By and large, they are happy for it to stay that way. They have little faith in the power of politics to change their lives. Neither Navalny nor Sobchak were interesting, said Olga – “though a lot of the other students seemed to like Navalny”.

“You’re asking what I think?” says Snezhana. “Well, I personally don’t think anything, I’m happy to remove myself from the process. I’m much more interested in boys.”

‘Help me! I’ll get on my knees to beg you’

“They call me Moses,” says Vladimir Mogilnikov. “For 40 years I’ve been shouting in the desert, and nobody has heard me.”

The locals in Tver have directed us here, to Morozov’s Proletarian Courtyard, a group of red-bricked buildings on the outskirts of the city “to get a taste of local life”. Built in 1885 for the workers of the Morozov textile works, which once employed thousands, the buildings have long fallen into disarray.

The third floor has already been declared unfit for living, but if truth be told, such a description could be extended to the entire building. A chemical stench radiates from the entryway – the result of the sewage system falling into the basement in the early 1990s. Nothing can get rid of the smell. Black mould covers the walls of every floor. Occasionally a rat scuttles by.

The building has become a cause celebre among opposition groups, and has even featured in Russia’s limp election campaign. Presidential candidates Grudinin and Sobchak dropped by for photo-ops. But still there is no sign of action from the local authorities. The residents remain, some with scarves held over their noses, waiting to be rehoused as promised.

“We’ve done everything we can, written to every higher instance, but no one is interested,” says Mogilnikov, who is the leader of the residents’ informal association. “Our ultimatums have gone the same way as the British one will do: nowhere.”

Moscow is now just 100 miles away, but it might as well be another continent. There, hundreds of structurally-sound Soviet-era buildings are set to be demolished in a multibillion pound redevelopment of the city. Here, in a microcosm of life for the Russian dispossessed, multiple generations of residents wash in communal bathrooms, shower in communal showers, and try to avoid the communal waste while crouching on the communal toilets.

“I know its the capital, but we are people too,” says Mognilnikov.

The eldest resident, Maria Panasova, 82, is one of two left on the condemned third floor. An order to rehouse Grandma Masha came nearly five years ago, but hasn’t yet been acted upon. She limps with her walking stick to greet us.

“I’m exhausted,” she says, sobbing. “I’ve worked all my life, two heart attacks, buried two sons. And I live in a swamp. Please help me! I get on my knees and implore you!”

And she attempts to do just this, only to be restrained.

Grandma Masha is certainly not what you would describe as a typical opposition voter, and has voted for Putin consistently since 2000. But not, apparently, this time.

“What kind of a government is this?” she asks. “Putin would do well to come here and see how the ordinary people live.”

Just 100 miles from Moscow is the last stop in Tver –but capital might as well be another continent

On the way back to Moscow on a modern suburban train, as I watch the stony faces of commuters, I try to take stock of the two days that have just passed. How to reconcile the side of Russia we have seen – and that Radishchev saw before us – with what the rest of the world is seeing right now: the resurgent Russian bear, flexing its muscles on the international stage.

It almost didn’t seem relevant to the journey I had undertaken. Few of the people I spoke to were ready to think beyond the anarchy of their domestic lives. Fewer still had travelled abroad or were prepared to think about Russia’s role in it. Those that did were unanimous in praising Putin’s new assertiveness abroad.

But the language they used was strikingly similar: we’re living shitty lives, yes, but the President is standing up for our country.

When you dug down, it seemed to be only the most superficial layer of their psychology. Almost immediately, people would add that they wanted to get on with other nations – to get on with Ukrainians, or the British for that matter. It was only the Americans, or something else, that was standing in their way.

At times, it was difficult not to conclude that Russia’s precisely engineered propaganda had left its calling card.

Weakness and strength aren’t incompatible. In Russia, the two are feeding off each other. While its citizens continue to teeter on the edge of survival – and while its leaders continue to exercise the greatest of control over them – the prospects for the world coming together are not promising.

Photo: Dmitry Markov

Politico GENEVA, Switzerland — One evening in late October, the skies above Dnipropetrovsk whirled with the sound of helicopters. Below, armored vehicles and a 500-strong SWAT team moved in assault formation. Even by Ukrainian standards, it was a dramatic scene. As he was dragged from his doorstep, the target of the exaggerated raid — the businessman-turned-politician Hennadiy Korban — seemed as shocked as anyone. Regardless of what he might have done, it just wasn’t how things were done in Ukraine.

Korban was airlifted away, first to Chernihiv, a provincial town north of Kiev, and then to the capital itself. His allies immediately cried foul, claiming political persecution. Prosecutors responded, after some delay, with an official explanation. The operation was “part of an ongoing battle with organized criminal groups,” they said. Korban was responsible for “kidnappings” and the “misappropriation of donations given for the frontline.”

A self-styled “conflict manager” who made his name in Ukraine’s ultraviolent 1990s, Korban could hardly profess moral purity. But claims of selective justice from a politically motivated prosecutor’s office rang too true, and Korban’s plight attracted support from quarters not ordinarily sympathetic to him.

It was, after all, no secret that Korban’s boss — the spiky, potent billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky — was in serious conflict with the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko.

* * *

On the day of Korban’s arrest, Kolomoisky was 2,000 kilometers away at his lakeside apartment in Geneva. The billionaire slept, as he says he always sleeps, a full night, waking untroubled at 10 a.m. He learned of Korban’s arrest four hours after the event.

“I live my life to my own rhythm and take a fatalistic view of everything,” he says. “If things happen, they happen.” Kolomoisky was not the only person unaware of the operation. Several members of the government, including the prime minister, were deliberately kept in the dark.

Kolomoisky is a complicated and provocative character; a complete contrast to the anodyne bling of the lobby bar at Geneva’s President Wilson hotel, where this interview takes place. Almost without noticing, Kolomoisky switches between a sharp business brain and hotheadedness, between the most courteous European manners and expletive-laden tirades.

Behind one shoulder are the paradisiac vistas of the Wilson Quay and Lake Geneva, a suitable backdrop for a Bond movie. Behind the other is a Christmas tree constructed entirely from fluffy, white teddy bears. Kolomoisky’s rounded build and white beard, since shaved, complete the seasonal look.

The oligarch begins in conciliatory mode. His associate’s arrest was “the predictable result of the country’s war effort,” he says. Everyone was a patriot: Korban was a patriot, Poroshenko was a patriot, and Kolomoisky was a patriot.

Korban had broken some rules. He said things he shouldn’t have said — probably. He didn’t know his place in “the hierarchy of power” at a time of war — sure. He was insubordinate — of course. Then again, some wounds ran deep. Korban had spent most of last year fighting separatism on the frontline, and there were serious differences of opinion about military tactics. He had strong feelings about the crushing reverse inflicted at Ilovaisk last summer, where several hundred Ukrainian soldiers were wiped out in a Russian-led ambush.

In the days following Korban’s arrest, Ukrainian media looked for signals from Kolomoisky about how he was intending to play out the crisis. Several commentators sensed the oligarch was somehow attempting to distance himself from his junior partner. This is his position today — or initially at least. Korban was “independent,” Kolomoisky says, and any idea of him being “my man” was “journalistic parrot talk.”

Kolomoisky’s assertion of being an entirely neutral bystander does not hold for too long, however. Eventually, he accepts the obvious: The arrest was about more than just Korban.

Poroshenko had taken a strike at him — Kolomoisky — he says; and he had done so because he was the only oligarch unwilling to cut a deal. Rinat Akhmetov, Viktor Pinchuk, Sergei Lyovochkin, Dmytro Firtash — these other oligarchs were exactly where the president wanted them, dependent.

“Take Firtash in Vienna,” he says. “I’ve seen him a couple of times in the last months, and the guy is in a terrible state, morally defeated, no fight in him. The only thing he is thinking about is how to avoid extradition to the U.S.”

Other oligarchs had chosen a path of cooperation. The Yanukovych-associate Sergei Lyovochkin, for example, was now “openly collaborating” with the president. He was hoping to become prime minister — an unlikely proposition, “but, then again, no one expected the criminal Yanukovych to become president either.”

“Tell me,” he continues. “Could a political figure in the U.K. be arrested if the head of state has a conflict with a leading businessman? Could Milibad [sic] be imprisoned over a battle with Lakshmi Mittal? Could he?”

Kolomoisky begins to free himself from any visage of political correctness. The only difference between Poroshenko and Yanukovych, he says, is “a good education, good English and lack of a criminal record.” Everything else is the same: “It’s the same blood, the same flesh reincarnated. If Yanukovych was a lumpen dictator, Poroshenko is the educated usurper, slave to his absolute power, craven to absolute power.”

The last time Kolomoisky and Poroshenko spoke was August 21.

* * *

In early spring 2014, the very future of Ukraine was in doubt. A popular revolution had paralyzed much of the nation, and had set in motion an altogether different wave of terrifying counterreactions across the east. Russia’s “little green men” began appearing on the shores of Crimea, separatist flames broke out across many eastern cities, and a screwy Russian military fantasist named Igor Girkin, aka “Strelkov,” barricaded himself in a sleepy town called Slavyansk. It was an explosive mix that even the most skilled or resourced authority in the world would have had trouble containing.

The new government of Ukraine was neither.

In the chaos, Kolomoisky seized the moment. First, he intervened to disrupt a plan that would have seen an alternative eastern republic established in Ukraine’s second city and former capital, Kharkiv.

Kolomoisky was good friends with city’s main power player, the crafty mayor Hennadiy Kernes, and he pushed him not to make a deal with the retreating Yanukovych. At this point Kernes was unsure of his allegiances; indeed, he seemed to be supporting the other side. “I told him he was risking everything by betting on the wrong horse,” Kolomoisky recalls. “He didn’t understand the regime was over.”

Kolomoisky persuaded Kernes to visit him in Geneva, which he did in late February, after Yanukovych had fled for Russia. Unusually, Kernes was in full listening mode, and agreed with Kolomoisky that he would return to Kharkiv and declare himself a Ukrainian patriot. Slowly, the separatist storm in Kharkiv — at one point the most violent in the land — began to dampen down.

A few days later, Kolomoisky suggested to then acting president Oleksandr Turchynov that he be made governor of his native Dnipropetrovsk region, which had shown real signs of going the anarchic ways of neighboring Donetsk. The appointment of Ukraine’s second richest man to high government position was not the most logical consequence of the Euromaidan revolution. But there was such disarray in Kiev, Turchynov readily agreed to the proposal.

In quick time, Kolomoisky delivered on security in Dnipropetrovsk. There were all kinds of rumors about how he did this: marches to the woods, summary shootings, gang warfare. Kolomoisky refuses to discuss the methods used, save for saying that they were necessary at a time of undeclared war. Were I to disclose what we did”, he says, “Poroshenko would declare that I was part of an organized crime group and file criminal charges tomorrow.”

What was important was the result: “We had a problem, we dealt with it, and thank God we did.”

Dnipropetrovsk remained in a febrile situation for many months, and the job of defending it was not one for the faint-hearted. Local security officials repeatedly raised the threat of a Russian invasion to the highest level possible. Full mobilization plans were enacted — tanks, planes, special forces, artillery. And Kolomoisky took a leading role in creating new and well-equipped territorial “volunteer” battalions.

The most important thing, says the oligarch, was the process of securing the street. “If robbery, rape, murder and pillage had become the norm in Dnipropetrovsk, the people would have welcomed any strong hand, Ukrainian or not.”

* * *

Kolomoisky earned plaudits from friends and enemies for his decisive action in those months. Not everyone was convinced that his investment in military means was a completely selfless endeavor, however. Many began to express concern that the oligarch had used the war to build up private armies that he was now using to settle business and political scores.

A well-placed governmental source says that the president became concerned by what he saw in the early months of 2015. “We understood we had to act to disarm his irregular forces or to bring them under the direct control of the army command,” the source said.

The standoff between Poroshenko and Kolomoisky peaked in March this year, coinciding exactly with government attempts to curb the economic influence of the oligarchs.

The change that affected Kolomoisky most directly was a new law, passed on March 19, that returned control of notionally state-controled businesses to the state. There were several examples of minority-shareholding oligarchs exercising full de facto control via loyal managers installed under the previous regime.

Kolomoisky’s people were particularly fond of blocking undesirable management changes by not turning up at board meetings and ruling the meetings inquorate. The new law made the tactic impossible by reducing quorum to 50 percent.

That very evening, Kolomoisky received news that an ally had been removed as chief executive of the oil pipeline operator UkrTransNafta, a company where he was a minority shareholder. Within a matter of hours, Kolomoisky presented himself at the company’s Kiev headquarters with a group of armed men.

When asked by journalists what he was doing there, he subjected them to a torrent of profanity, before claiming he had come to protect the company from a “raider attack” and “Russian saboteurs.

Kolomoisky made another controversial appearance March 22, this time at the headquarters of the oil and gas behemoth Ukrnafta, where he held a now-insufficient 43 percent stake. Kolomoisky claimed, once again, that he had traveled there to protect his business interests from a raider attack. He said that the 40 or 50 men who accompanied him were, in fact, the company’s own private security forces.

“Poroshenko and his scribblers peddle this myth about Kolomoisky working with his private armies, yet they don’t understand the difference between an army and a private corporate security firm,” he said.

But the president had seen enough and, encouraged by American and European partners, in late March he asked Kolomoisky to leave his post as governor of Dnipropetrovsk. The deal was simple: Kolomoisky’s business would be left alone if he stopped attacking the government; and Poroshenko promised Kolomoisky that his team would be not be touched by law enforcement in connection with anything they may or may not have done while defending Dnipropetrovsk.

The agreement did not, however, resolve the fate of Ihor Palytsa, Kolomoisky’s long-time business partner, who he had helped install as governor of neighboring Odessa region. Palytsa was to remain in position for just two more months, before he was sensationally replaced by the former Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

That appointment triggered a dramatic and public war of words between Kolomoisky and Saakashvili. Saakashvili told journalists Kolomoisky was a “gangster” and “smuggler.” Kolomoisky told them Saakashvili was “a dog without a muzzle” and “a snotty-nosed addict.” If nothing else, Kolomoisky won on linguistic style.

Kolomoisky says things had not always been so unfriendly between the two men. In 2011, they went yachting together in Croatia: “He was there with his favorite, this big-titted economics minister of his — his lover,” says Kolomoisky. “I even gave him money for his election campaign in Georgia.”

Just before Saakashvili was installed in Odessa, the Georgian traveled to Dnipropetrovsk to visit him, Kolomoisky says. “He showered us with praise and his Georgian toasts, told us how wonderful we were, how I had replaced him as Putin’s enemy number one,” recalls Kolomoisky. “Then he went directly to Poroshenko to ask for Palytsa’s job.”

Kolomoisky shows no sign of forgiving the betrayal. “If I ever catch sight of him, I tell you, I will smash his face in. As soon as he leaves his post, I’ll beat him up and down like a dog,” he says.

He looks me in the eye: “Well, you’re from Liverpool. You grew up on the streets, didn’t you?”

* * *

Poroshenko and Kolomoisky may have had a deal to stay out of each other’s business, but politics soon got in the way. Ahead of October’s local elections, the presidential administration became increasingly concerned that Kolomoisky was working to bring down Poroshenko’s governing coalition and to force snap parliamentary elections. With some justification, they feared that such elections would lead to a “Balkanization” of the national Parliament and destroy Poroshenko’s already fading grip on power.

Kolomoisky says he sees no future in the current coalition. “And I don’t see any prospects for Ukraine until it returns to its proper constitutional set-up either,” he says. “We are supposed to be a parliamentary-presidential republic, but Poroshenko has managed to switch that around.”

In the build-up to the election, Kolomoisky supported an incongruously broad palette of political movements — from the populist, anti-Russian Dill party to a new, eastern-leaning party called Renaissance, made up of the more pragmatic wing of Yanukovych’s old Party of Regions.

“Rather than tell you who I support, let me tell you who I don’t support,” he says. “I don’t support Poroshenko’s bloc, I don’t support the Opposition Bloc, and I don’t support Yulia Tymoshenko” — the former prime minister.

The presidential administration was, in fact, working on the assumption Kolomoisky was collaborating with the newly resurgent Tymoshenko. Both hailing from Dnipropetrovsk, the two shared a long — if complicated — history.

Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine. Photo by Aleksander Prokopenko/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine. Photo by Aleksander Prokopenko/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images

“She has every chance to become prime minister or president still, though it’s true that she isn’t getting any younger.”

The prospect of a grand anti-Poroshenko coalition could easily have been a strong enough bond to unite them. Tymoshenko was still the most assured politician in the land: No one matches her populist touch or hunger for power. And Poroshenko had reason enough to fear her. When, as prime minister, Tymoshenko plotted to overthrow President Yushchenko in 2006, Poroshenko was the man chairing the country’s National Security and Defense Council.

Tymoshenko has denied ever making contact with Kolomoisky in the run up to the elections, but Kolomoisky insists the two did, in fact, meet in Europe in August.

“We talked about Ukraine, about her ambitions,” he says. A conversation about assisting her did not progress far because Tymoshenko would not leave the coalition: “I couldn’t support her because she is a prostitute. You can’t just be a little bit pregnant. You can’t pretend you are in opposition and be in government at the same time.” He pauses, smiles. “It’s immoral.”

In the end, Tymoshenko polled 13 percent — not as much as anticipated, but a solid enough launchpad for another stab at the presidency down the line. “It was a warm-up,” says Kolomoisky. “She has every chance to become prime minister or president still, though it’s true that she isn’t getting any younger.”

Kolomoisky’s own parties polled solidly right across the country. And in a fiercely contested second round run-off, his close associate Borys Filatov was elected mayor of Dnipropetrovsk.

* * *

The success of Kolomoisky’s allies in the elections was certainly a headache for the president. Overall, however, the October election results fell short of being a complete disaster.

Poroshenko avoided the Armageddon scenarios — a coup, enforced early parliamentary elections or Tymoshenko as prime minister. All scenarios were possible had his coalition partners polled as predicted.

Instead, the president now has at least the prospect of muddling through — for as long as the he can control Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s 82 MPs, and manage the now public dispute between Saakashvili and Yatsenyuk.

Meanwhile, it is hard to predict how the president’s relations with the ever-recalcitrant Kolomoisky will play out. On the one hand, there is no obvious knockout punch for either man. A serious escalation likely means mutually assured destruction. And both men face serious challenges in the months ahead.

The situation on the eastern front lines might be calmer than a year ago, but the winter will still be tough for the president, with diversifying security risks, an increasingly disloyal Parliament and the potential for social unrest.

A deadline looms for the controversial parliamentary votes on decentralization and amnesty for the east, both of which were pledged by the president to Western partners during the Minsk peace negotiations. The last time decentralization was discussed in Parliament August 31, live grenades were thrown and four national guardsmen lost their lives. Poroshenko does not yet have the 300 votes needed to carry it through.

Equally unhelpful is the fact that the IMF has delayed approving a final tranche of its agreed 2015 loan over concerns that Ukraine will have problems balancing its budget.

Kolomoisky’s businesses, on the other hand, are not looking quite as formidable as they once were. Minority-owned Ukrnafta still owes €320 million to the taxman (Kolomoisky says the company is owed at least as much by others). His market-leading PrivatBank bank has also attracted the attention of the head of Ukrainian Central Bank, Valeria Gontareva, who has asserted the bank might need significant recapitalization.

The oligarch disputes her figures. “This clever f—ing Gontareva comes along to a hugely successful bank — one that’s nearly 25 years old — and says just everything that has happened over the past 20 years was terrible,” he says. “The problem is that one day she talks about 128 billion hryrvina [€5.1 billion] and then the next she says, no, it’s 15 billion [€602 million]. And today she has her tongue stuck up her arse because she doesn’t know what to say next.”

Such fighting talk aside, it does, however, seem as though both sides have pulled back from all-out war. An emergency peace process has begun, with the head of Poroshenko’s administration, Borys Lozhkin, placed in charge of direct communication with Kolomoisky and his associates.

With a long history of doing business with all of the main players in Ukraine, Lozhkin is considered someone naturally suited to compromise. Kolomoisky confirms he talked to him on a daily basis. “I’m not fighting with anyone there, I’ve done no harm to anyone and I try to find dialogue with everyone,” he says.

Kolomoisky, meanwhile, is recruiting as many friends as he can. He says he enjoys good relations with the prime minister, who, he says, is “the best of all of the viper’s nest.” He also revealed he was coordinating moves with his one-time competitor, the country’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov.

“You know the joke about the dying Armenian?” he asks. “He surrounds himself with all his children and relatives, and he tells them to take care of the Jews. They ask him why. ‘Because if they aren’t there,’ he says, ‘they will come after us next.’ Akhmetov and I need to take care of each other, because if he goes, they’ll come after me. And if I go, they will come after him.”

Double or bust, the oligarch thus presents the president with a real dilemma: Continue to target Kolomoisky, and you face a broader fight you just might not win.

The sensible money would be on the Ukrainian oligarchs — and Kolomoisky — thriving for some time to come.

The Independent Vladimir Putin is arguably the most consequential world leader since Winston Churchill. That, if one thinks about it, is quite a statement for a man who initially harboured zero political ambitions. Had an ailing and desperate Boris Yeltsin not reached out to guarantee his power and his family’s immunity – or simply looked elsewhere – Russia’s history would likely have looked very different.

When Putin became prime minister on 19 August 1999, he was a political nobody with a one per cent electoral rating. Most assumed he would quickly go the way that previous Yeltsin hopes had gone – replaced in the midst of crisis. The opportunities for crisis were very real with the northern Caucasus embroiled in civil war and other regions threatening to break away.

But instead, 20 years later, Putin is still here.

Over those two decades, the young, grey KGB bureaucrat from St Petersburg left his mark on nearly every area of Russian life.

I am the Lord thy God

A lot more than just fashion separates today from the grainy footage of Yeltsin first inviting the 46-year-old Putin into his office. With Putin at the helm, Russia’s political system has been completely overhauled.

The undeniable trend has been of growing authoritarianism.

Putin spent much of his early years rebuilding a “power vertical”, subordinating executive powers and the regions to one system of command and control. This happened concurrently with a Soviet institutional revanche, doubling state control over the economy, and returning secret services to the centre stage of Russian life.

There have been at least two discernible ideological phases along the way.

The first phase was a pro-western populism: agnostic to Nato, favourable to the United States, and free-market reformist at home. This “diet Putinism” lasted until around 2006-07.

Later, ideas of “sovereignty” took over. First came the concept of “sovereign democracy”, introduced by the influential aide Vladislav Surkov, the signal that Russia was beginning to pivot away from the west. There was the 2007 hawkish speech at Munich that took on the world’s security establishment. Then, in 2014, came the controversial annexation of Crimea, and war in Ukraine, which brought other notions: isolationism and a sovereign economy.

“In 20 years, America saw Clinton, Bush Jnr, Obama and Trump, each time with a different policy outlook,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who worked in the Kremlin for the first 12 years of Putin’s rule.

“People think if you have one president, you have just one policy. It’s not like that at all. The first Putin term has nothing in common with the current one.”

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image

If Putin transformed Russia, Russia transformed Putin too.

Early Putin was unready for the big screen, and his team worried about his image. Putin had never played frontline politics before, and was not used to being the centre of attention. For a while, he even had problems finding a suit that fitted.

“Whenever he sat down, the back of his jacket would stand up,” Pavlovsky recalls. It would take years before the spy was able to break out from the background.

Today’s Putin is the subject of a cult. There are T-shirts, mugs, knives, clocks, calendars and knickers all engraved with the bombastic leader’s image. They show the fix-it-all crisis manager. The all-action hero. The defender of the nation – shirt optional.

Putin’s strongman image has stayed robust even as the popularity of almost everyone under his command has collapsed.

There have been only three serious dents in his ratings: in 2005, following a poorly received reform of social benefits; in 2011, after rigged parliamentary elections; and since last year, the result of a pension reform opposed by 9 out of 10.

Despite the latest dip, Putin remains – overwhelmingly – the most popular politician in Russia. Only 20 per cent of the country has a highly negative opinion of his regime.

But there is no love or euphoria contained in such figures, cautions the veteran pollster Lev Gudkov. Russians are sober in their assessment of Putin, he says. They understand Putin represents the interests of oligarchs, the army and security bloc. They understand he is willing to clobber any opposition.

“That engenders neither love nor particular sympathy,” Gudkov says.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain

By the time Vladimir Putin came to power, there was already limited potential for liberal democracy. The first decade of post-Soviet life had been one of dizzying opportunities for some Russians. But for the vast majority, it was a nasty fight for survival.

Boris Yeltsin first laid the foundations for a move away from freedoms – handing executive power back to the security services, and the premiership, to the security agency’s boss, Vladimir Putin.

The former spook took that start and ran, accomplishing a targeted, complete and ruthless takeover of rights and civil society. In the mid-2000s, he amended automatic rights of public assembly, with rallies now requiring prior permission from authorities.

Restrictions followed almost to the point of absurdity. Russians were jailed for sharing stories on Facebook. In 2018, officials fined an unemployed carpenter for calling Putin a “fantastical f**khead,” the first use of a new law banning abuse of officials online.

But Putin’s crackdown on dissent was pushing at an open door, and it came with minimal resistance. After the turbulence of the 1990s, the Russian nation was urging for order, a strong hand and stability. The majority was ready to hold its nose in exchange for fuller fridges.

Buoyed by rising oil prices, Putin was able to keep his side of the bargain. He ended his second term with reasonable claims to enter the pantheon of Russia’s most successful leaders.

Recent protests against the government have often been met with a harsh response from the authorities

With the majority of the country behind him, had Russia’s president wanted to change the constitution and stay on as president, he would have met little opposition. But Putin decided on an experiment and a successor. From 2008 he became prime minister, and Dmitry Medvedev president.

Konstantin Gaaze was an advisor in the Ministry of Agriculture at the time of the transition. He recalls how the entire government felt a sense of euphoria at pulling off a “massive project” – the first time that presidential power had been handed over without death or emergency.

“When it happened, it felt like a beautiful, strong, democratic victory,” he says. “We all thought we were just brilliant. We thought we had entered a different era, that everything from now on would be routine.”

In the eventuality, the Medvedev era turned out to be a dead democratic bounce. Almost as soon as he was elected as president, crisis hit. Economic instability quickly led to political instability and mass protests. Putin, spooked by seeing at least part of the elite switch to Medvedev’s camp, began to regret his decision to hand over the reins.

“For about a year and a half, Putin was a team player,” says Gaaze. “But by 2010 it was clear that he had begun fighting for power again.”

Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 became a very personal victory; and his time out of the saddle a lesson about the dangers of handing over levers of power.

He spent the following years reversing almost everything that Medvedev had implemented.

President Medvedev had sought to engage with Russia’s liberal elite and creative classes. He dabbled with Twitter and even dropped into Dozhd TV, Russia’s trendy opposition television station. When Putin returned, domestic policy swung completely the other direction.

“Putin saw a need to consolidate the masses around him,” says Tatyana Stanovaya, a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre.

“So he sought a new engagement with what he saw as the democratic majority. This was the first time we began to hear discussions about the spiritual underpinnings of the nation, family values, and a patriotic wave that led to Crimea.”

From late 2011 on, Putin co-opted Russia’s moralist wing. There was a new cult of healthy living, and a clampdown on online porn. In 2013, the regime introduced Russia’s “Section 28”, controversial new legislation against the so-called “propaganda of non-traditional relationships” among minors. The results were unsurprising: hate crimes increased and were rarely investigated. In Chechnya, hundreds of gay men were tortured, and at least three killed, in two waves of targeted pogroms.

The Orthodox Church stood at the centre of this new conservative pact, with Patriarch Kirill rejoicing Putin as a “miracle of God”.

Not everyone was convinced. In March 2012, a group of four feminists took to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow to perform a “punk prayer” in protest. The Kremlin responded by sending them to a penal colony.

“Putin was an agent of the KGB, which destroyed the church, killed priests and sent believers to their deaths in camps,” says Maria Alyokhina, one of the Pussy Riot members to be imprisoned. “Now the Church is telling us that the KGB takeover of Russia is great. It’s like the Chief Rabbi praising Hitler.”

Thou shalt not kill

Ivan the Great famously used severed dogs’ heads to sniff out treachery. Putin’s Russia has a more sophisticated means to track its enemies. But in its approach to the tools of death, not everything, it seems, has moved on.

The gruesome murder of Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006 was a major inflexion point in Putin’s presidency. The former Russian spy’s agonising death at the hands of Polonium-210, one of the most radioactive isotopes known to man, was broadcast across the world from a hospital bed in London.

Ten years later, a British public inquiry agreed with the dying Litvinenko that it was “probable” the two Russian agents who killed him were acting in the knowledge of Putin himself.

Targeted killing on foreign soil was not new; the rebel Chechen leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was assassinated in Qatar just two years earlier. What was different with the Litvinenko operation was how and where it was done, on the streets of the British capital. It marked the dawn of a new activism by Russia’s clandestine forces.

The appetite for risk reached new levels again in 2018 with the bungled nerve agent attack on double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. Again, a convincing trail of evidence led back to Moscow – incriminating two Russian military intelligence officers, and exposing hundreds of other suspected Russian agents in the process.

“Over his leadership, Putin became much more relaxed in the way he treated killing operations,” says Carnegie’s Tatyana Stanovaya. “Before it was always the dark side of power, a matter left unspoken. Now the Kremlin is less reserved about it. Death has become a much more overt instrument.”

Thou shalt not commit adultery

As the botched operation in Salisbury showed, competence is not always an essential quality in Putin’s system; loyalty is often valued more.

Those who enjoy Putin’s trust have tended to rise highest. In 20 years, he appointed four of his former bodyguards as regional governors. He gave the security bloc a privileged role over domestic politics.

Putin’s former colleagues in the security services soon became the “new nobility”, says the author and security expert Andrei Soldatov. But later in his leadership, it was the army and its GRU military intelligence wing that rose in stature.

“Russia’s main security agency is now fulfilling the role of the Soviet KGB, controlling society with spy mania and the elite by addressed repressions,” Soldatov says. “But it’s the army that is beginning to play a more independent – and I would say ominous – role.”

Those who broke the unwritten loyalty codes found out fast.

In February 2003, tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the richest man in Russia, dared to criticise the Kremlin’s policy on corruption – and during a televised meeting with the president. By the end of the year, Khodorkovsky was arrested. A year later, he was stripped of his main oil-producing assets.

The operation was part of war against the oligarchs, the group of men who had wielded unprecedented political power in Yeltsin’s court. One way or another, those who did not agree to voluntarily stay out of politics were forced out. The most excitable of them, Boris Berezovsky, was found dead at his British home in 2013.

But just as fast as old oligarchs fell, a new court rose. And most of them just happened to be on close terms with the main man.

One of the undeniable achievements of Putin’s rule was a massive reduction in absolute poverty. That was achieved on the back of historically high oil prices, an early reformist agenda and several years of high growth. Over the 10 years from 1999 to 2008, Russian GDP increased by 94 per cent. Ten-dollar cappuccinos were not out of place.

Since then, economic performance has been more of a mixed bag, with an average of 1 per cent growth and a much more modest outlook. Last year, the level of poverty grew from 13.9 per cent to 14.3 per cent.

For all the words about battling corruption, it remains the regime’s Achilles’ heel. Paradoxically, transparency reforms carried out under Medvedev’s rule have given journalists and investigators the tools to expose the full extent of that corruption.

Opposition politician Alexei Navalny made waves with his investigations into the shady dealings of Putin’s closest lieutenants – from Medvedev himself to long-time associate Igor Sechin. But his reports had zero consequences for the personalities involved. Instead, Navalny found himself the subject of criminal investigations and regular jail terms.

“As soon as people realised that they were in Putin’s circle, they became corrupted,” says political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky. “Whether Putin himself is corrupt is not important. The majority of decisions are taken by his court – and his court is corrupt from head to toe.”

Thou shalt not bear false witness

The course of the Russian media over 1999-2019 has been one of tragedy and intermittent triumph.

In Putin, media outlets faced a relentless foe.

First, the regime came after mass television media, taking over ORT and NTV, two influential channels that had to varying degrees offered critical journalism. Then the regime came for print: first mass-market tabloids, later the elite broadsheets. There, the scheme was usually the same: forcing oligarchs to buy the titles, then using their other assets as leverage against the media business.

Beginning in 2011-12, Russian audiences came up against a new level of falsity and disinformation. The investigative journalist Aleksey Kovalev calls that moment a point of “no return”, and one that made him so concerned he decided to found his own fact-checking site, The Noodle Remover. The faked stories were often irrational, but camouflaged alongside authentic news. Many warped existing alt-right narratives, for example by claiming Sharia patrols were active on the streets in London.

By Ukrainian operations in 2014-15, the Kremlin operation had gone into overdrive, he says. “State media began framing all opposition to Putin as the work of spies. It provided conspiracy theory and falsehood non-stop – and in almost any language of the world.”

Even against this backdrop, islands of independent journalism managed to survive – most especially online. When Putin arrived, only 2 per cent of the population were internet active users. That figure is now over 80 per cent. Encouragingly, the Kremlin does not yet seem to have a coherent strategy about how to deal with the digital challenge.

Leonid Parfyonov, a star of Russian journalism, was one of the earlier victims of the media crackdown. His 2004 interview with the widow of an assassinated Chechen leader saw him pushed from his role as a news anchor. But today Parfyonov is back in business, his programme resurrected on YouTube.

“I haven’t worked on state TV for 15 years, but for me things are better than they have ever been,” he says. “For the first time, I’m producer and broadcaster. I’m my own TV channel. It’s quite something.”

Thou shalt not covet

While propaganda about Putin’s domestic success seems to be reaping fewer dividends than ever, Russians remain broadly receptive to narratives about re-establishing the nation as a great power.

Even parts of the Russian opposition are signed up Putin’s expansionism, says Andrei Soldatov. That paradox is not entirely new, he says, with imperialism ingrained in the Russian psyche: “In the 1970s and 1980s, many dissidents supported Kremlin policy in eastern Europe, even while positioning themselves as opponents of Stalinism in almost all regards.”

But patriotic education means that trend is set for the long term. “People are tired of Ukraine, and of Syria, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental things. We are still living with 19th century mentalities.”

Putin’s Russia will be remembered for its bloody wars – Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria – and a reckless approach to the lives of civilians living there and, occasionally, flying in the skies above. It will be remembered for massive increases in military expenditure, which rose between 4.9 per cent and 16 per cent each year between 2010 and 2016, before tailing off somewhat.

But foreign policy was not always bad news. In 2004, Russian diplomats actually put one centuries-old conflict to bed, signing a long-awaited peace treaty.

The co-signataries? Native Indian tribes in Alaska.

Russia without Putin

This summer’s protests for free elections – and the blunt politics that provoked them – suggest a certain level of crisis for the ruling system.

It remains to be seen how serious the situation is for Putin. Only part of the Kremlin’s repressive apparatus has been switched on, and few doubt his regime’s willingness to turn the dial up to 11. The protest movement is also largely limited to the capital, with disquiet in the regions easily localised.

But a conflict of some kind is clearly brewing.

Putin’s second successive term is up in 2024, and unless he changes the constitution he will not be able to stay on as president.

Already in power longer than Brezhev, the Russian president has denied himself an easy exit. His experiences in the sidelines over 2008-11 were not successful. And even if he were to want to leave, he would likely face opposition from his inner circle, who need him much more than he needs them.

Various possibilities have already been discussed: a constitutional change that would see real power transferred to parliament and Putin installed as an emboldened prime minister; a model chosen by Kazakh “father of the nation” Nursultan Nazarbayev, with Putin as head of the country’s security council; or, most riskily of all, Putin installed as head of a new unified super-state with Belarus – this is a challenge unlikely to be welcomed in Minsk.

“We are used to believing that regimes change most fundamentally at the start,” says Konstantin Gaaze. “But with Putin’s Russia, things are happening the other way around. The last five years have seen the most fundamental changes the system has seen.”

“The biggest shift is about to play out right in front of our very eyes,” he says.

The Times. The bunker is dark, damp and cramped. At its entrance stands a bespectacled former football player from Donetsk who goes by the name of Ostrich. He is shouting frenzied instructions into a radio as mortar rounds from the Ukrainian side pound the rebel positions around us. One lands very close. 

“Casualty, we have a casualty,” cries a voice over the airwaves. “Fast One is dead. Dead.”

The former seaside resort of Shirokine, eleven miles east of the Ukrainian-controlled industrial city of Mariupol, offers perhaps the most obvious evidence that the conflict is once again spiralling out of control.

Positions may not have shifted here for many months: the Ukrainians still control the western heights above the village, the Russian-backed rebels controls the streets and the 700 yards in between is a no-mans land. But shelling has intensified significantly and international monitors have not been inside the village for nearly two weeks.

Contrary to Ukrainian government warnings of an rebel offensive on Mariupol through Shirokine, there’s is little evidence of an imminent Russian-backed push. In fact, the rebels seem poorly equipped and demoralised. 

There is very little of the control, coordination and supply of men and equipment that typified the Russian-backed assault and capture of the strategic town of Debaltseve in February.

You can stumble into the rebel positions in the centre of Shirokine almost by accident and our presence genuinely surprised the soldiers on duty

The soldiers themselves are a motley mix of locals, mercenaries and Russians. Few of the privates seemed to be regular army soldiers. For many of them, there is nothing left at home, or no home to go back to.

There was “Shadow”, the commanding officer. He came from Zaporozhye, in territory held by the Ukrainian government. Returning there now would be “suicidal”, he said.

Then there was “The Fisherman”, an affable bearded officer from St Petersburg, and the “Little One”, a 21-year old officer from the Russian Caucasus, and “The Fast One”, real name Artyom, a charismatic 28-year old from across the Russian border in Rostov.

He had spoken to us little more than 40 minutes before the fatal mortar fell into his trench position. He was from a troubled family, he had said: his mother was serving time in prison and father had disowned him.

Nonetheless, he was proud to have become a tattoo artist and had promised a free trial of his skills as soon as the war was over. Artyom had been drawn to Ukraine by a desire to “save Russians from fascism”, he said, and he seemed to believe it.

The soldiers told us of their disillusionment with senior commanders, who they said had not been seen “for a long time”

“They are sending people who don’t even know how to use a rifle,” said Ostrich. 

His colleague the Fisherman added: “It’s good you’re here, because you’d have got a very different story in HQ.”

“As day turns to night, you’re happy you’re alive. If you wake up in the morning it’s a miracle”

The soldiers said that one or two losses per day had become normal, and as there didn’t appear to be more than 50 troops on the front line, that is an alarming rate of attrition.

And then there are the civilians. Names of those who have stayed are scribbled on the front gates but the soldiers suggest that no more than two dozen people are still living in the village, and these are undoubtedly the poorest and most infirm.

Yuri Gudilov, 66, said he had stayed despite the danger because he could not afford to rent an apartment in nearby Mariupol.

“My pension is 1500 hyrvina (£50)” and a rental costs 2000 hyrivna alone”, he explained but conceded that “only a fool” would not be frightened by what was happening in the village. 

“I’m holding out, but it’s unlikely I’ll make it through the winter if this continues”, he said.

“You’re both shooting, and all we want is peace,” he told a rebel soldier. “I just don’t understand what you’re fighting for.”

“For Novorossiya,” says the soldier.

“Yeah, right,” says Mr Gudilov.

The officer known as the Little One whispers not to pay him any attention. “We’re aware he’s a Ukrie”, he reasoned.

The next time we see the Little One is at an evacuation point in the east side of the village. We meet under the cover of darkness — because leaving during daylight hours is considered too risky. 

The agreed plan is that we travel together with Artyom’s corpse. The Little One, as Artyom’s commander, is emotional. 

“I’ll be honest with you, I’ve wet myself from grief. He was my best friend”, he says. “They are sending us here, sending us all to his deaths”.

As soon as he had delivered the body to the morgue in Novoazovsk, 15 miles behind the ceasefire line, the Little One says is going directly to see his commanding officer to demand his company receive proper reinforcements.

“Otherwise we’ll all just dismiss ourselves from duty”, he said.

A day later he is back on the front in Shirokine, having been promised reinforcements and a new offensive on Ukrainian positions. He’s not convinced it’s going to happen.