Inside Vladimir Putin’s hall of mirrors

“For Putin, foreign policy is personal.”

That’s the biggest takeaway from Mikhail Zygar’s epic investigation into the man who has ruled Russia for seventeen years and the attendants who surround him in the heart of Moscow. All The Kremlin’s Men: Inside The Court Of Vladimir Putin was published last year and became a bestseller in Russia, and the English translation came out in September.

Mikhail Zygar has spent a decade at the epicentre of Russian politics. He founded Russia’s only independent TV channel, TV Rain, and he and his team were heralded as “the last journalists in Russia”. I meet him in Covent Garden to ask what he means when he describes Putin as a man who “accidentally became king”. The picture he paints is of a little-known and above all neutral secret service agent of no prominence, thrust onto centre stage at a time when the Kremlin was plagued by an intense and chaotic power struggle. Since then, Putin’s power and influence has grown so strong that Russia’s 21st-century trajectory both domestically and abroad has been moulded based on his whims and prejudices.

The book charts Putin’s disillusionment with the West, as his respect for leaders like George W. Bush and Tony Blair curdles with every perceived slight and betrayal. Russia, in Putin’s mind, has never been granted the recognition it deserves for opening up after the collapse of the Soviet Union. US intervention in Iraq without any consultation with Moscow, combined with repeated rebuffs on the question of Russia’s involvement with NATO, is proof to Putin that Western politicians are not to be trusted. “To Putin, all politicians are corrupt,” Zygar tells me. “Fair elections are not important anywhere, there’s no such thing as democracy, no such thing as free speech, police kill innocents everywhere.” Viewed through this lens, the ideological integrity of other world leaders, from Barack Obama to Angela Merkel, is a blatant double standard. Why lecture Russia on Chechnya when the US invaded Iraq? Why demonise the regime of Moscow’s friend Assad in Syria when Saudi Arabia is guilty of the same crimes? For Putin, there is only one answer: the Western world hates Russia, and will do anything to undermine it.

I ask Zygar about one American who seems inexplicably pro-Putin and who could soon be moving into the White House. “Putin understands Donald Trump,” Zygar answers, though he notes that he does not believe Trump has any actual ties to the Kremlin. “He understand the Berlusconi-style of politics. He thinks he could make a deal with him.” When I push him on Trump’s volatility and history of vitriolic personal vendettas, Zygar doesn’t think Putin would be fazed. No one in Russia believes there’s any chance of a military clash with the US, so there’s little fear that President Trump might decide it was time to teach Moscow a lesson. With her democratic values, Hillary Clinton is a far less appealing prospect.

Zygar never discusses his true opinions – he tells me his job is to describe and explain, not to comment, and it is clear he takes pride in his objectivity. But at times, his conviction that Russia’s recent military programme is a reaction to perceived aggression rather than an offensive mission is difficult to buy into completely. He believes there’s no dramatic difference between Russia’s behaviour for the last two years and now in Syria, but the drama has suddenly increased – an escalation he hints is really to do with the US election. As a former war correspondent, Zygar knows better than most that the distressing pictures of war zones printed in newspapers can be misleading, but when he dismisses reports that Putin is planning a new attack on Aleppo, saying they sound like “propaganda”, I am sceptical. What is certainly clear from the book is that Putin has come to see every foreign policy decision from the US as a personal affront – to him, the war in Syria is about targeting a Russian ally in the Middle East, not liberating civilians from an oppressive regime.

All The Kremlin’s Men goes some way to explaining how we got here, but at this stage, the point worth remembering is that every subsequent development just serves to confirm Putin’s worldview. “Putin is certain he is an expert on everything,” Zygar assures me. And what about when things do not go to plan – as, for example, after the invasion of Crimea, when Putin found himself ostracised and humiliated by world leaders at the G20? “He was not expecting such a unanimous response, or the sanctions that followed. He thought it was temporary, and it took a while to realise that it was irreversible. Now, if he has an opportunity to break Western unity, he will do it.” I’m reminded of the most bizarre and outlandish anecdote in Zygar’s book: the unquestioning belief in the “psychic spy” who convinced himself he had read the mind of former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and claimed that she believed that the natural resource wealth in Siberia should not belong to Moscow. The Kremlin has whole-heartedly bought into its own propaganda, just as Putin has total faith in his own genius.

And what happens after Putin? All The Kremlin’s Men is, after all, not about the king but the courtiers. Zygar begins each chapter with a study of one of the men in Putin’s inner circle: Igor Sechin, Putin’s closest ally, a ideological statist who basks in his reputation as the scariest man in Russia; Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s advisor and former deputy prime minister, who sees himself as a “samurai” who has given himself to the service of the emperor; Dmitry Medvedev, the gadget-loving sidekick who became president for an interim four years after Putin’s second term, then stepped aside to allow Putin to return to the throne. Each of them have wielded great influence over the Russian president at some time or other. Yet astoundingly, Putin’s dominance has grown so powerful that none of them stand posed to take over – when he was inexplicably absent for ten days in 2015, there was literally no one running the country. But he cannot live forever, and when I ask Zygar what will happen when he eventually dies, he does not predict collapse, a coup or a power vacuum, but that the Kremlin machine of bureaucrats that Putin has built – or, if you like, that built Putin – will continue as it is, but with another “operator” at its head. “That machine is much stronger than Vladimir Putin,” Zygar tells me.

I cannot tell if that is meant to be reassuring or terrifying.

All The Kremlin’s Men: Inside The Court Of Vladimir Putin. Mikhail Zygar, PublicAffairs, 2016.