In the midst of one of the darkest acts of aggression in modern history - Russia's invasion of Ukraine - this book shines a light on Putin's rule and poses urgent questions about how the world must respond.
Chapter One
The Killing Machine
“Some idiot is moving heavy furniture around in the flat above and I wake up with a start. I’m about to give Lambeth Council a ring to get them to sort him out when I remember I am in Kyiv and it’s four o’clock in the morning, and it’s not tables and chairs that are going bang but Russian artillery.
The idiot is Vladimir Putin and his idiot war is two days old.
I grunt, fall asleep again, get up and go out, try to buy some loo roll, fail. In front of me in the shop are an old geezer and a housewife. The old guy buys ten packets of the same cigarettes and nothing else, his unique vice on vulgar display to the world. The housewife snaps up every saveloy in
the shop, anxiety buying on a comic scale. It is funny but it’s not amusing.
The walk from my Airbnb near the Olympic stadium to the centre of town takes half an hour. Khreshchatyk, the great street of the Ukrainian capital, has the flavour of a neo-Stalinist take on Bath’s great Georgian Crescent with extra vodka shots. It’s so wide you could drive three tanks abreast down it. This is Putin’s plan. Halfway along I start chuntering into my phone camera when a tough-looking dude with a very pukkah British accent points out that I am walking past the town hall and that is not a good place to be today. I explain to my fellow Brit that the Russians are not going to
hit the town hall today – that’s for later – and move on smartly. By the time I get to the Post Office building a great curl of sound walls up in front of me like a monster wave at sea. It’s the air-raid siren, going off big time, warning of incoming Russian artillery or missile fire. The noise is obscene.
They call it Putin’s lullaby.
I record a little piece to camera into my phone and tweet it as the sirens wail: ‘I’m worried about Roman Abramovich’s yacht. I do hope it’s ok.’
Someone on Twitter replies: ‘Sink the yacht.’
Up through Maidan Square to the rented flat of my pal, Oz Katerji, a British-Lebanese reporter who is half my age. Oz offers me a cuppa of Earl Grey. We sip our tea like the English milords we might be in some parallel universe and through the window we hear a big crump of artillery. It’s not close but this is never a good sound.
Crump. Vladimir Putin takes me back to revising for A-level English in 1976 and Wilfred Owen’s great poem, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’: ‘Only the monstrous anger of the guns . . .’
Both Oz and I are freelance, hoping to scratch a living by doing two-way interviews with radio stations BBC Northern Ireland, Scotland, LBC and RTE in Dublin. Each hit doesn’t earn much but after a run you can buy a kebab or two.
We faff about for a bit trying and failing to get a cab or someone to drive us towards the war. Nothing doing. Anyone with a vehicle is driving their loved ones to the train station, to get them out. We take the Metro. You see anxiety scribbled on people’s faces, a mum slapping her kid doing no wrong, an old lady mystified while her daughter barks into her phone, tough men in combat uniform surging in and out of the tube carriages as if there is a war on. Which, of course,
there is.
We get out at the Arsenal stop, the deepest underground station in the world. It is built into the side of the cliff that makes Kyiv a natural citadel, one where the Rus civilization was founded a thousand years ago. Moscow was, is and always will be the branch office. Out of the carriage, we are hit by a tide of human misery. It feels like walking along a tube platform during the London Blitz in 1940. Hiding from Russian bombs in February 2022 are an old couple, fast asleep; an old woman, surrounded by shopping bags full of stuff, the muscles on her face twitching uncontrollably; two sweet kids transfixed by a film on their phone, a silly dog at their feet.
Damn you, Vladimir Putin.
We ride the escalator out, walk to the west bank of the River Dnipro, edging north. The Russian Army is rumoured to be up ahead. I have to stop to talk to Jeremy Vine for his BBC Radio Two show
– he’s middle England but a vital conveyor to ordinary people – and Oz moves on. That’s the last I see of him, this day. As I walk along I film myself and in the distance capture a couple of Ukrainian soldiers hovering near the Triumphal Arch to the Friendship Between the Russian and Ukrainian Peoples – no irony here, folks. A soldier shouts at me to stop filming. I put my camera down, walk on another hundred yards and start filming some more.
Fool, Sweeney, fool.
A young Ukrainian with a rifle starts shouting at me in Russian. Kyiv is a majority Russian-speaking city. He is not dressed in full camo but sports plain green trousers. Other guys wave guns in my general direction.
Mr Green Trews wants my phone, to see the videos I have taken.
‘Do I look like a Russian spy?’ I’m wearing an orange beanie, a camel-coloured duffle coat as first worn by Trevor Howard playing Major Calloway in The Third Man, and a brown corduroy jacket with elbow patches. I look like an unemployed geography teacher from Dorking.
He demands my phone.
It’s bonkers. ‘Do I look like a Russian spy?’ I’m yelling at him, and I can holler. If you doubt that, ask a member of the Church of Scientology.
The guns are no longer waving in my general direction. They are pointing at me.
I hand over my phone, passport and NUJ press card and, with my hands in the air, they walk me to their base. A steel door closes behind me. No one has seen me enter it; no one has seen my arrest. I am in trouble.
We’re in a pumping station that keeps half of Kyiv supplied with fresh water. It smells of old ironmongery, properly oiled.
“I am locked inside military bureaucracy, trying to prove my innocence of the worst charge possible. It’s like fighting a charge of treason in a foreign language with people armed with guns.”
Someone makes a phone call to Ukrainian intelligence, the SBU, the Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny. I keep on saying, look at my Twitter banner.
Green Trews whistles up his commander and his second-in-command, who are the real thing, fully attired in Ukrainian Army uniform. The boss is a big man, bigger than me and I’m no petit four. The deputy is smaller but sharp. He eyes me up with amused irony. I suspect that he knows I’m no threat. The two men remind me of Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson from Dad’s Army. But the boss scowls at me and says ‘Russkiy shpion’. I did Russian at school and have forgotten nigh on all of it but I can work out ‘Russian spy’. At this, I sit down and start laughing uncontrollably.
The Russian spy does not seem suitably afraid. The mood changes. Green Trews googles me and, about bloody time, sees the photo on my Twitter banner, of me challenging Putin to his face. In July 2014 a Russian BUK missile fired from pro-Kremlin eastern Ukraine killed everyone on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. I got to doorstep the President of Russia in Siberia and ask him about the killings in Ukraine.
Green Trews finds the photo in which Donald Trump is standing over me, seeking to shake my hand to signal the end of our 2013 interview, but I remain seated, with palm upheld. My question was: ‘Mr Trump, why did you buy your concrete from Fat Tony Salerno?’
Of the two of us in the photo, one may be a Russian spy but it’s not me.
An old grannie appears with a cup of tea for the prisoner. Green Trews then becomes my champion. He introduces himself as Vlad Demchenko, a sweet and bright film-maker who tells me he made a documentary about the Battle for Donetsk airport in 2014. In a previous existence, before the war, he went travelling. Like you do. His English is pretty good and we are getting on well, but the call has been made to the SBU so I am locked inside military bureaucracy, trying to prove my innocence of the worst charge possible. It’s like fighting a charge of treason in a foreign language with people armed with guns. We get into a big brown pick-up truck, the commander at the wheel, his 2IC riding shotgun and Vlad and I in the back. Checkpoints are going up across town, soldiers with guns running to and fro, the sirens wailing continuously. The crumps are getting closer. We park on a side road next to the SBU HQ and sit there. And sit. And sit.
Vlad whispers to me: ‘I think they’re getting a bit paranoid.’
Welcome to my world, I say to myself, but not out loud. It strikes me that the headquarters of Ukrainian intelligence is the second-best Russian cruise missile target in town, after the Presidency.
Eventually, a window blind shuffles open and something is said.
Three Ukrainian soldiers appear and take custody of me. I say my goodbyes to the commander, the deputy and Vlad, and we march up the street, around the top of the SBU HQ and down a bigger street up to the main entrance.
And then we wait. There is a heavy turnstile with an electronic control. But no one can move until the lead soldier makes a phone call. And he can’t get through. I become aware that there are a number of machine guns pointed in our specific direction.
Finally, the other party picks up and I am shuffled through the turnstile into the lobby. There are sandbags everywhere; soldiers with automatic rifles, red-eyed, as if they haven’t had a good night’s sleep for a week – which would go for most people in Ukraine. A tall, stern man takes my passport and press card off a soldier and leads me up a staircase, past soldiers half-dead with sleep sitting on the steps like some Pre-Raphaelite painting of a scene from Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’.
The stern guy takes me to his office, the windows criss-crossed with thick yellow tape to reduce glass splintering should the SBU get shelled. If it gets hit by a cruise missile, we’re all fried. There are three or four more soldiers, sitting in the office chairs, exhausted. He studies my passport and press card; then looks through the images on my phone. I’ve been in Kyiv since 14 February. Some Valentine’s Day.
‘These videos of Ukrainian soldiers. They must be deleted.’
I do so and apologize for wasting his time. Then I add: ‘But I am not a Russian spy.’
‘You are free to go. Don’t film the Ukrainian Army again.’
Roger that.
Outside the SBU, dusk is gathering. I march swiftly along and there’s the pick-up that brought me here, parked by the side of the road, the only person inside the commander at the wheel, on the phone. I tap on the window and give him the thumbs-up, to show that I had been freed. He looks up,
scowls at me, and I hurry on.
More than a month later Vlad texts me: ‘I didn’t tell you before but of the people who were in the car that took you to SBU the day when I arrested you, only me and you are still alive, John. The other two disappeared after an operation here on a front line.’
Vlad goes out looking for the commander and the deputy, so that they can be properly buried. He texts me with an update: ‘We didn’t find their bodies. So they are captured alive or they are buried at unknown place. I don’t know which option is better.’
And he sends me a photo of the burnt-out pick-up, a charred metal skeleton sitting in a wood somewhere in the Badlands, north of Kyiv.
Back in my flat, I record a film on Twitter from my Airbnb, telling people about my rough old day, taking a stiff slug of gin with borderline tonic as I talk about being arrested, then freed. I end by pointing out the electricity and the internet are still on, and that makes me think that the man in serious trouble is not President Zelenskiy or even me but Vladimir Putin.
That Twitter film gets one million views.”
Extracted from Killer in the Kremlin by John Sweeney, out now.
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