YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Short

lines on the record: 40
first: 2022-09-02
most recent: 2022-09-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Control for the time when he would leave the presidency and move to another position and the political transition would get underway. It's not going to happen now, or at least not at this point. So I'd like to ask him that question. Is that what you were trying to do? But I wouldn't believe a word he said because one thing Putin is very good at is disguising what he really thinks. And you say he doesn't drink. He actually does quite like Georgian wine, but not sufficiently to make him tell the truth.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I think the most interesting things are, well, twofold. The relationship with the West. This is really gone beyond belief. I can't take it anymore. And so I'd love to know in his words what made him give up on the West. And the other thing is the way that you talked about Russia having, and I absolutely agree, being kind of 20% openness and dynamic debate, 40%, you say kleptocracy is a word I don't like, but yes, corruption and 40% authoritarianism until about 2018. So what has made it more and more dictatorial and less and less free? My explanation is partly to prepare for a political transition. I think Putin initially started cracking down because he wanted absolute”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's certainly what it looks like, isn't it? The brain drain, the number of people who've been going into Latvia, into Georgia, into the West has been very striking. Trouble, you know, it's far easily easier to write history than to speculate about what the future is going to bring. And you're asking about the future. Will there be another Navalny? Will there be will there be some other charismatic leader? I mean, you know, who knows the answer to that? I can't see it is all I can say. I can't see where it's going to, how it's going to happen. But one can always be surprised. I think much more likely we are looking at a period of descent which is... Crushed in Russia very effectively apart from few brave souls who lift their heads and an exodus towards the West.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would be a bit crude, wouldn't it, to bump him off in his prison cell? He's too high profile. I just don't think there is any need. It's all kind of cost-benefit for Putin, which is the greater cost and which is the greater benefit for the moment at least, and probably for the foreseeable future, better to leave Navalny alive infrastructure.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'd pick you up on the words like other opponents, which I'm sure came from the questioner. One tends to blame Putin for every murder that takes place in Russia. This is not entirely new. It happened in the time of troubles that Boris Godnov at the 16th century. So, you know, this is a long story. Why has he not had Navalny killed? He certainly tried. I have no doubt that the attempt at poisoning Navalny was on Putin's with Putin's approval and on his orders. I don't think it can have been any other way. Why now does he leave him in prison?”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“hegemon and these kinds of changes don't happen very often i guess it's probably 10 20 30 40 years before we'll see the end of it it's it's going to be decades but what is happening in ukraine and the end game in ukraine has to be seen against that background”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to find a modus vivendi. I have no idea how that's going to happen, but I do know that at some point it is going to happen. And I would just make one more observation, and that is the context in which this is happening. You have Russia challenging American domination in Europe. You have China challenging American dominance in Southeast Asia, in the China Sea. We are, I believe, living through an absolutely fundamental period of transition in which one hyperpower, America, which has been dominant since the end of the Cold War, is having to face the prospect of a multi more multipolar world emerging in which it will no longer be the absolutely unchallenged”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my view is that one should not speak in terms of a Cold War because the essence of the Cold War was that there were two ideological systems which were competing for dominance, domination in the world, communism on the one hand and capitalism on the other. And that is not the case. Neither Russia nor China are trying to export their system of values and their system of beliefs. So Cold War, no. But yes, conflict an adversarial relationship. Absolutely. And the question to me is, you know, how we're in, now we have a war in Ukraine. How are we eventually we are going to have to find a way once again to live together? Because Ukraine is geographically where it is. Russia is geographically where it is. They are going to continue to be neighbors and neighbors.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think that's wishful thinking. Putin has organized, and this is something, Mark, that you have looked at very carefully over the years. He has created a support base. He's created checks and balances in his system, which mean it's very difficult to see a threat to Putin's grip on power. I don't think that's...”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the things which I think we are doing wrong, and it's, I say we, Britain to some extent, but above all the United States, is to portray this as a struggle between democracy and autocracy. Because if you are a third world country, you probably don't have a terribly democratic government. And all the autocrats who are listening to Joe Biden say, oh, this is a kind of existential struggle between democracy and autocracy. Wait a minute, I'm on the autocrat side. So that is very foolish. It's a way of pushing away potential allies who had the Americans said this is all about territorial integrity. It's all about one country making a land grab for another. The territorial integrity is pretty much something everyone can agree on. they haven't so that's something that I would suggest could do differently”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think sanctions will work. And I think there are many examples if you look at Iran and sanctions against Iran, which is a much smaller country and was much more vulnerable than Russia was. Sanctions will hurt and they'll hurt more and more, but they're hurting both sides. They're hurting the West as well. But as long as the countries which are not part of the West, in other words, the global south, China, India, as long as all those countries sit on the fence and refuse to back sanctions, their effect is going to be limited. So even in terms of the economy, I think we need to be rather prudent about saying, oh, well, the Russian economy is going to collapse. It's showing no signs of doing so at the moment. Two or three years time, well,”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The United States recognize that it actually had to take into account Russian sensitivities and Russian concerns. And one has to be honest, I think. America has been very reluctant to communicate and to engage with Russia on these issues which the Russians felt were absolutely fundamental.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think something we don't recognize too much, but we probably should. Blinken's counselor, Derek Chollott, said shortly after the war had started, he acknowledged that NATO enlargement and the whole business of Ukraine and its relations to NATO was something that the Americans had not been prepared to discuss with Russia. And I think it was that lack of communication about all the grievances and the problems in the relationship between Russia and America, which fundamentally was what drove this war. It was Putin's attempt, and it has been marked by miscalculations and an awful lot that went wrong and that was screwed up. But it was Putin's attempt to make”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we had some pretty silly claims, didn't we? We had the small man syndrome. I think that was Boris Johnson. And Ben Wallace simply said he was a lunatic. I'm not sure that that helped anyone understand the problems that have occurred. I don't think that was the fundamental point. NATO enlargement, yes, I won't say it was a pretext. It's something the Russians have not just Putin, the whole of the Russian establishment has felt that any if Ukraine were to join NATO or were to become even an outpost of NATO, a kind of forward base, that that would be crossing a red line which for Russia was unacceptable. But it's not NATO enlargement alone. It's the whole bundle of things.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you compare Russia today even after what has happened to Ukraine, with Russia, the Soviet Union 50 years ago, it's a different world. I mean, it's really a different planet. People's mentalities, especially in the big cities and especially the younger people, are very, very different. Now, that's not all Putin's doing. It's Gorbachev, it's Yeltsin, and it's Putin. But he does have part of the credit for that. On the other hand, he has lamentably failed to make Russia a more democratic society. I think you said it sort of used to be partly a veneer of democracy over an authoritarian state, and the veneer is wearing very, very thin. He hasn't made the economic reforms. So it's a very mixed record. And I'm not sure it can be summed up in two words for an epitaph.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very mixed record I was in Russia with the BBC in the 1970s 50 years ago, which I probably shouldn't admit to, but it's a long time. And I was Bureau chief. I lived there for three years under Brezhnev.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“puppet government if you'd like then I think yes he would we would now be talking about Putin thinking of thinking of beginning a political transition either leaving power completely or more likely moving sideways into some other some other position but a new president taking part now I think that's that's gone that ship has sailed And we won't, I don't believe, will be able to have any idea really what's going to happen next until we know what happens on the battlefield, until we can see how the war in Ukraine is going to end. And I can't see that. I can make guesses, you know, frozen conflicts, stalemates, impasse, and all that kind of thing, but how long it'll take and how it'll work out, I don't think any of us. Can pretend to know”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not now. I think he wanted to. I think I really do think that he's dropped hints over the years. And of course, hints are very ambiguous and he's not someone who's going to give away what his intentions are very, very far from that. But I think his hope was that if he could, in his words, sort out the Ukraine, bring the Ukraine, bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold and show that the Americans weren't able to stop it. That was a subsidiary very, not even subsidiary, but a very important part of what he was trying to do. If that had all gone well, if Kiev had been taken in a matter of days, as people thought would happen, and he'd been able to put into power a”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not worth reading. That's not interesting. Whereas, honestly, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, people engaged in a different set. They were willing to engage in debate. They were willing to listen to opposing points of view, much more than I think we are today. But this is a social thing. And I don't think the pendulum is going to swing back very, very quickly. So yeah, it was very difficult. But I think it's absolutely vital to try and give people as mutually and objectively as possible the information from which they can make their own judgment without saying, oh, this guy is appalling. Look what he's done and advancing what is almost a kind of propaganda version of events. That's not me and I don't intend to start doing it.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, this was the most difficult biography I've ever done. And for the two reasons, because Putin is such a hot buckler issue, and particularly now, obviously, with Ukraine, he arouses such strong emotions. But also because you make an excellent point when you talk about you're expected to be engaged. The world has become much more opinionated. And if you don't today, if you don't, if you advance opinions which are not the same as your reviewer or your reader, they tend to say oof.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they're far too intelligent for me to do that. They can work it out themselves. But who was primarily responsible? What was the balance of responsibility? Was the West by ignoring Russian sensitivities, which was undoubtedly true, or was Putin going off at a tangent, going off into a kind of, in a way, a dark, a very dark alley whose outcome we still can't see because the war in Ukraine, but which doesn't look good for Russia's future or for Putin's legacy?”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that. The Russians had a lot of, they gave quite a lot, but they had a lot of things which they really hated, NATO enlargement, obviously, but worse than that. The United States leaving the anti-ballistic missile treaty, setting up a nuclear missile defense shield in Europe, and so on and so on, and so on. So by 2007, the mood had completely changed and Putin was kind of giving up on the West. And then from then on, things went from bad to worse. You had the war in Georgia, Crimea in 2014, then obviously the war in Ukraine today. And the question is, and it's something which people who must make up their own minds. I'm not in the business of telling people what to think.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He came out of a Soviet Union which had always regarded the West as an adversary, as an opponent. And from a longer tradition where the Slavophile tradition, where people believed that Russia had its own course, its own independent course to follow, and that the West was already in the 18th and 19th century, rather decadent, individualistic, superficial. So there were always these two things pulling. And over the first seven years, he got more and more dispirited, more and more frustrated with the West, not without reason. Because Francis Richards, who was head of GCHQ, said, we got a lot from them, but we didn't give very much back. And there was much truth.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very difficult question to answer. I mean, obviously, he's the same man, but how much he's really changed? He's changed in an important respect in the sense that he believed when he came to power in 2000 that Russia's place was with Europe. He talked a lot about Russia becoming part of the civilized world by which he met the Western-led world. He talked a lot about Russian culture being European culture and so on. And we tend to forget that 2001, 9-11, the Twin Towers in America, Future was the first guy to call George W. Bush and not only pledge Russia's support, but actually give a lot of support to the United States when the invasion of Afghanistan took place. So he was genuinely, initially, I won't say pro-Western, but he believed that Russia, Russia's future lay with the West. At the same time,”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hate to say, he was successful, but he was brutal, he was bloody, he was cruel, and eventually crushed the Chechet resistance three or four years later”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In several ways. First of all, he'd shown that he was loyal by, as you mentioned, helping Subjack to get to Paris and avoid an arrest warrant. And he took a risk in that. You know, if it had gone wrong, he would have been fired. And that would have been the end of his career at the presidential administration. And the other thing, by the late 90s, Yeltsin realized or started to believe that you needed more spine, more steel in the administration. And steel meant people in the security forces who would be able to control the business magnates, the so-called oligarchs, who were really having a pretty wild time of it. So on both counts, loyalty, demonstrated loyalty, and steal, a strong man, Putin answered the description. And the proof came very soon afterwards with the renewed war in Chechnya, where Putin.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't think there's any doubt that it was Yeltsin's choice. And Yeltsin really from 1996 with considerable difficulty he managed to get into a second term had been concerned about the succession, you know, who was going to succeed him. And you know better than I do that the whole list of people he tried, it seemed to go on forever. Boris Nemtsov to start with, then primaf was a kind of stopover, but Kiri Yenko's depashion and so on and so forth. We won't bore people with all the names. And then Putin, and quite honestly, most people in the West, I don't know, you were following at this time, felt that, oh, this is yet another who's going to be there just for three months as prime minister. And then Yodse will change his mind again. But Putin answered Yeltsin's requirement.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't so much naked ambition, though he was ambitious. He hid it very well, but he had ambition. But it was the ability to be in the right place at the right time when no one else was there who was an obvious choice. And if you look at his time as president, he's been very opportunistic as well. He's played a weak hand as president. And when an opportunity has presented itself, he's taken it. He's used it. So that, I think, is a very consistent trade throughout his career.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cease to be what it had been before. And any suggestion that he went up through the hierarchy, through St. Petersburg and then on to Moscow as some kind of KGB plot, you know, I don't buy at all. I see absolutely no evidence for that. After he had been attached to Subjack and he started rising through the political ranks in St. Petersburg, then, yes, opportunity did knock and he was an opportunist, but he had this extraordinary knack of making himself indispensable. And he made himself indispensable to subject so that, you know, literally after a couple of years of working in St. Petersburg, he was acting mayor of a city of five million people. And then when he went to Moscow, he made himself indispensable again. And it wasn't just Chance.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have to say, I don't believe, I mean, the taxi driving unemployed XKGB guy was, for me, one of the legends, one of the lies that Putin told to quite deliberately to put people off the track because he had been attached to a then up-and-coming, very much up-and-coming liberal politician, Anatoly Sobchak, who later became mayor of St. Petersburg. And he'd been attached by the KGB, which had realized that their big problem was not the dissidents. Their big problem was these pesky Democrats who were coming up under Gorbachev and who wanted to change the way the Soviet Union was run. So, yeah, to that extent, at the very early stages, I would agree, he was put where he was by the KGB. But very soon afterwards, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB...”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you found people going to university and registering to learn Serbo-Croat. There was one dissident who told the story that that's what he'd done because he thought an obscure language like Serbo Croat or Albanian, that would give you a better chance of joining the KTB. So yeah, you can say, I'm not sure we may disagree on this point. I'm not sure Putin was insecure. That's a psychological level I'm reluctant to plumb. Certainly the privilege, the idea of forbidden knowledge that you would have access to. I think these were very important.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And it wasn't only Putin who felt that way. I mean, there were loads of bright young men in the 1980s, the early 70s, particularly the early 70s, who looked to the KGB as the best career they could possibly have. And why did they do that? Well, first of all, it was very privileged. They had knowledge which was denied to the rest of Russian Soviet society. They had the possibility of going abroad, which again, not all of them had that possibility, but there was a route which they could take which might eventually lead them to go abroad. And that was something that was permitted to very few Russians. And they carried a KGB card, a little Uzdostavarenia with the KGB stamped on it, which will put the fear of God into anyone they showed it to because the KGB was what it was. So all these reasons.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you look right back to his childhood, it's this secretiveness, the way in which one of his school friends said, you know, there was always an area I knew that I couldn't touch. We were his closest friend, the guy who shared a desk within when he was at primary school. But there were parts of Putin's career, but his personality, which no one could go near. And I think that has continued. The secretiveness, the way that there is part of him that is really hidden from everyone. And to go back to where we started, of course, that's what makes him interesting because if you have someone who is opaque and impenetrable, then it's a tremendous challenge to try and figure out where he's coming from and what actually makes him tick.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree with you completely. He was Putin before he joined the KGB. The KGB gave him tools, ways of dealing with people. It taught him, I think, one of the things it taught him was how to create legends. And that's something that he has done all the way through his career. A legend is a, I guess, a polite expression for how to lie, how to create a false story about yourself, which you can then abandon when it's no longer useful. That was KGB training. Would he have been able to do that? Would he have done that in the same way if he hadn't been in the KGB? Probably not. It certainly influenced to some extent his worldview, but not uncritically. There were things that he learnt in the KGB that he accepted about the outside world, and there were things that he didn't accept. So the KGB was not formative.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Either. And I think that is a very good insight into the way Putin operated. He kept his cards so well hidden that nobody really knew exactly where he was going.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite a strong relationship with Putin until they fell out. And Sedlemayer has spent the rest of his life suing the Russian government because Yeltsin's time, the government confiscated his property. And he's actually had quite a lot of success in getting money back out of the Russians. So he's not in any sense somebody who is pro-Putin. He's very anti-Putin these days. But there was a period when he had a sense of where Putin was. And one of the interesting things he talks about is when Putin was leaving the KGB or was pretending to leave the KGB, because as far as I can make out, he never actually did so. And he said, Putin's intentions work perfectly gray. No one in the KGB knew really what Saidi was on. People in the mayor's office didn't know what Saidi was on.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of them, surprisingly, was a German, Franz Sedelmeier. I don't know if you come across him, but he was a very young, I called him an arms dealer, and he objected and said, I was a security consultant, but he sold defensive weaponry in St. Petersburg to the police and the security forces in the early 1990s. And he was German. He was younger than Putin. His first impression of Putin was extremely disappointing. He said, you know, this guy, he's another German bureaucrat. He's German through and through. But eventually they became quite close. And I think Sedelmeier at that time was closer than any other foreigner to him. And he was the person who described to me first Putin as a comedian. They got on very well and Putin and Sedelmeier had a really quite...”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Swedish Prime Minister was amazed by the extent to which he could master a brief. And that came out also from Germans who dealt with him, from British who dealt with him, people like Jonathan Powell, who went with Tony Blair. The more people you talked to, you found that it wasn't a law of diminishing returns exactly, but many of them would have fairly similar impressions of a particular aspect of Putin. And that was true of the Russians, and it was true of the foreigners as well.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it depends which foreigners you're talking about. And in a way, that's what you'd expect. The Finns, for example, people like Yako Kale, who was the National Security Advisor, had successive Finnish presidents and who dealt with Putin in the 1990s. You know, he gave one view of Putin at one particular time. American ambassadors who dealt with him, German ambassadors, they gave a different view. I found the most interesting for not very surprising reasons were the people who had known him, the Russians who had dealt with him in St. Petersburg, who had really pretty lucid views of how he was and what sort of person he was. The foreigners were interesting because they usually got one aspect of Putin's personality. You know, someone like Joran Perschen, who was”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the trust level, have Russians ever trusted their governments? I don't think so. They've been badly treated by governments for hundreds of years, Russian Empire, the Soviet government. You remember the old saying they pretend that the workers would say, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. There's always been that regarding authority, very deep mistrust. So I'm not surprised that Putin is mistrusted. And of course, he himself trusts no one. When you talk about his entourage and the old friends, you wonder, well, how much does he really trust them? And he himself says, you know, in my position, I can't trust anybody. And I think that's true. Some of those who knew him early on say he doesn't trust anybody. Totally suspicious of absolutely everything that goes on around him. So he's like Russians in that respect.”
2022-09-02 · Intelligence Squared · Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, with Philip Short · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT