He was mayor of St Petersburg. Putin was his deputy. The two were so close that when Sobchak senior was accused of corruption, Putin helped spirit him out of the country on a specially chartered aeroplane. That was in the s. Remember those days? Russia was in chaos. Its president, Boris Yeltsin, was frequently drunk and barely functioning. The men in grey suits in the Kremlin thought they'd found just the solution - another grey man, a blank slate, from which to build the ideal antidote to Yeltsin.
They began grooming Putin as his successor. Then, suddenly, just as Putin was running for president for the first time, his old friend Anatoly Sobchak died, at the age of 62, in a hotel room in Kaliningrad. The autopsy said it was cardiac arrest but can't find any trace of a heart attack. Sobchak's widow suspected foul play and had her own autopsy done.
Her name is Lyudmila Narusova. I met her recently and asked her if she thought her husband had been murdered. She paused long enough to say "Yes" 10 times over, and then replied: "I don't know. Some have suggested Putin may have had a hand in his death. Did Sobchak have something on him? In the past, he has said that the west is behind the massive street protests that have shaken Moscow and other Russian cities.
No one! He said that the ultimate goal of the demonstrators was to "destroy Russian statehood and usurp power". In fact, there is no evidence to support Putin's fantasy-claim that his opponents are western stooges. Rather, the demonstrators are simply fed up with Putin's corrupt system and his revelation that he had privately agreed with Dmitry Medvedev a long time ago to serve a third term in the Kremlin — regardless of whether Russian voters wanted him there or not.
The demonstrators' demands are actually modest: a re-run of December's flawed poll; the freeing of political prisoners; the sacking of Russia's discredited elections' chief. Their mood isn't revolutionary. They merely want a genuinely plural political system and fair elections. The fact that Putin doesn't understand this shows he has lost touch with reality , the perennial problem of leaders everywhere who stay in power too long.
Within minutes of Vladimir blubbing in public his spokesman came up with an ingenious explanation: it was the wind. The prime minister's lachrymose performance had nothing to do with his agitated emotional state, Dmitry Peskov said, but was the result of an icy breeze whipping over the Kremlin's historic cobbles. True, it was chilly in Moscow: temperatures were well below freezing. But the explanation clearly stretches credulity, and was of the: "You know I'm lying, and I know I'm lying, but — hey!
Russia's leadership has a long history of coming up with convoluted explanations to obscure an obvious truth. And then this relatively obscure national security adviser named Carter Page, who is much more amenable to Moscow than some of the hawks. You add into that Michael Flynn, the national security adviser, who Putin had dinner with in Moscow.
And now, the chance to strike back. The White House had been penetrated. The Pentagon had been penetrated. And frankly, they were utterly ill- equipped to deal with it. I did that once as we were writing a reconstruction of this hack. They never bothered. And so for months, the hackers were inside the DNC, working away, burrowing in, collecting information and transporting it overseas. Now they were released and would sow chaos among the delegates.
It was chaos in Philly. It depends on the polarization of politics in America. There were divides, and Russia was pushing out material that exploited those divides, that broadened them, that called attention to those divides. We are all the same— we are all dirty bastards. Why should I tell Putin what to do? It was about the things that were said in those emails. They were terrible things. That is a huge factor.
I have nothing to do with Putin. He sees this as just, you know, part of the circus, you know, of American democracy. His response is to invite them to do it more. And we sat there with our jaws open. But now, at CIA headquarters they said they had something more, direct evidence that Vladimir Putin himself was personally involved.
Putin is setting its goals. So for them to get this kind of intelligence was pretty significant. That really shook me. What kind of actions should they take? How public should they be about raising the alarm? He could have stepped in to reveal information about Putin himself and his financial connections to the oligarchs. He had all kinds of cyber choices. And then he had all kinds of non-cyber tools, sanctions, things like that. And I just think they preferred to stay out of it.
And they were afraid that if they weighed in now, it would look like they were really putting their thumbs on the scale. This is a kind of a classic case of the Obama administration over-thinking something while the Russians were just kind of punching them in the gut. They were all there. And we briefed them on what we knew. And I took offense to that and told them that this is an intelligence assessment. This is an intelligence matter. Some questions were asked.
Vladimir Putin clearly enjoyed himself when he was asked these questions in the beginning of September. He gave some, well, conventional answers with some wink, but that was all. A lot of them are freelancers. Is that really important? The important thing is the content that has been given to the public. The scene was the G summit in Hangzhou, China. Putin understood the gravity of this, the seriousness with which Mr. President Obama viewed it, and the need to cease and desist.
We would never interfere in your system the way you interfere with our system. We would never do such a thing. The battle of the ballot is heating up—. What does it look like to you? And then other people will seize on it, and dissemination happens at light speed. A lot of times, these kinds of efforts involve things that are only half true, but create doubt and suspicion. But because of the way in which you were experiencing the news and what you were reading, you could spend your whole day being fed information that reinforced this belief that Hillary Clinton was hiding something.
Give me a break. But the fringe became the center of American political life. There is no objective truth. That was the line, and he became increasingly successful in blurring it for people, including in the United States and the West. Did they do it to influence the American political election?
So he enlists his intelligence chief, James Clapper, and his Homeland Security Chief, Jeh Johnson, to put out a statement in their names, hoping that that will be perceived as less partisan than if the president had done so himself. First, it gave us no details. Second, it was incredibly late. And it took the intelligence community more than two months to be able to come up with a few sentences that essentially confirmed that story.
His name got taken out of the final statement because of a concern over sources and methods and of concern about appearing to be too provocative. It was unprecedented that the U. This was going to be a big story. And we started figuring out how quickly we could get it up on the web, ripping up page one. And along comes one even more wild.
And some breaking news, this coming in just in the last few seconds. NBC News has just become aware of a video capturing Donald Trump making vulgar comments about women—.
And that tape becomes the dominant story of the day. And the media all were like cattle and they went off and grazed in the other end of the pasture. I mean, the warning that the Obama Administration was desperately trying to convey with that statement ends up at the bottom of that avalanche. Wikileaks is about to release, quote, significant material tied to Hillary Clinton—. Zinichev's body was reportedly draped in the country's tricolour flag.
After Putin paid his respects to the departed hero, he went and sat with the minister's widow Natalya and son Denis at the ceremony. The Sun reports that some are of the opinion that Putin was actually grooming Zinichev as his eventual successor. He was reportedly trying to save documentary filmmaker Alexander Melnik, 63, who had fallen into the icy waters of the Arctic during a military drill on Tuesday, September 7.
Melnik too died. While the details surrounding Zinichev's death are still not completely public, Daily Mail reported that he died at or near the 90ft Kitabo-Oron waterfall at Putorana Reserve.
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