Every gambler has a tell. That little indicator that shows they’re bluffing. A warning light — whether a twitch or a scratch — that their actions are not what they seem. For Vladimir Putin that tell is simpler than most. His give away, that moment you know he’s lying, is when his lips move.
He wouldn’t take that as an insult. From his earliest days in the KGB, Putin has absorbed the maxim that the truth is so precious it can only go out guarded by a phalanx of lies. Every word, every action, is considered and measured. Not designed to reveal but conceal. His whole existence is lived in the shadows.
He comes straight out of the long tradition of Soviet government where even who is running the country was kept secret for fear of people knowing who had made such a mess.
Maskirovka, little masks, are the games the regime played for years. Time and again they hid a detail here, a famine there, until the whole thing blew up — quite literally — with the nuclear plant at Chernobyl. That was the moment it couldn’t hold. The cloud of radiation falling on Belarus exposed the inability of the little lies to hide a huge truth.
For Putin, stuck in Dresden as the KGB officer in charge of helping the Stasi keep the East Germans subservient, this was the end of a world. In 1989, his empire collapsed. As the Berlin Wall came down he went from being a prince of the night to a night worker, as he took up taxi driving in the evenings to supplement his falling salary.
But while the world changed, he didn’t. The gift for silence never left him. Who are his family? Where are his children? Every moment of retail politics that’s so common in the politicians we all know is absent from a man who has never dirtied his hands with the intricacies of actually winning an election. Instead, like the covert operator he is to his core, the deals are stitched up in the dark, quiet corners of the Kremlin.
An oil concession here, a gas field there, and power is bought and sold. A yacht, a football club, just the smallest threat of assassination, and all that was lost in the ballot can be won back in the shadows. This is the way power works in Putin’s Russia.
Corruption doesn’t just stay at home. Over the past decades, the creeping spread of influence has poisoned London, sometimes literally, with the spread of the little lies that hide bigger crimes. And London has become home to so much of it.
Laundering everything from cash to reputations has been lucrative for many in our service sector and allowed the flow of money stolen from the Russian people to find its way into the very best London streets. Agencies and firms have pocketed their profits as they scrubbed the blood from the hands of the newcomers. But the dirty water has to go somewhere. For years it has poured into the street. Now we’re seeing the effect.
Many Russians came to Britain for the freedom. They fled the arbitrary arrests and punishment of the gangster era that followed the end of Soviet tyranny. But others came for different reasons. As Putin emerged from the chaos of the early days of freedom, he didn’t end the oligarchs; he nationalised them.
Those organs of the state that had once protected the nation now defend his profits. And the reverse, too. Those profits, carefully stashed in secret accounts through shell companies, were used to build the world Putin wanted.
Over the years, the oligarchs’ pools of wealth became tools of influence in bribing politicians and building the same gangster economies in neighbouring states.
Many needed no help at all. The early rulers of Ukraine were cut from the same cloth as those in Russia and helped themselves rather than helping others. But in other parts, that wealth was corrupting. For Britain, this caused a problem.
Secret accounts and legal help in hiding assets wasn’t just a tax problem for foreigners anymore. It became a security problem for us. By 2017 the situation had degraded so much that the Foreign Affairs Committee I chair published Moscow’s Gold on the secret web that was damaging our nation. We listed the difficulties in defending our interests against the current of cash and the solutions we needed to deploy to stop it. But little changed.
After the courage of Ukraine’s president and people in holding out against incredible pressure, we’re now seeing a change. Volodymyr Zelensky may not just save Kyiv but London, as his courage is pushing us all to clean up our acts. And for the gambler? Perhaps Putin has laid one bet too many.
Tom Tugendhat is chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee
