Published by The i Paper (14th October, 2025)
If you want to ponder Vladimir Putin’s endgame, travel back in time to those hours on 31 December 1999 as the clock counted down towards a new millennium when an ailing Boris Yeltsin handed him the presidency on a plate.
These moments are caught in Putin’s Witnesses, an astonishing film made by the Ukrainian-born Vitaly Mansky, who was then head of documentaries on Moscow’s main television channel but now lives in exile.
A bloated, bumbling Yeltsin shocks Russia by resigning. Then we see his successor, a former KGB officer, musing on the advantages of democracy as he promises to protect freedom while discussing how the life of a monarch holds no appeal for him.
The reality could not have been more different. Putin – seen as a malleable stooge by the chancers enriching themselves amid the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union – had been appointed prime minister four months earlier.
His popularity had soared after Russia launched a second war in Chechnya based on bogus propaganda and horrific flat bombings – almost certainly the work of his security force allies – that killed more than 300 people.
The day after his appointment as acting president, Putin signed a decree granting Yeltsin immunity from corruption prosecution, a state pension and a country house. Yet we see in that documentary the shift in power as he humiliates his mentor by declining to take his call of congratulations.
So even in those early days we see his trademark style that fooled so many people – including a pathetically naive Tony Blair, who is seen visiting the theatre with Putin on a hastily arranged visit two weeks before the presidential election, delivering the imprimatur of Western approval despite growing outrage at atrocities in Chechnya.
We can see the cruelty, the lies, the lip service towards democracy and the cold, ruthless pursuit of power while exploiting Western weakness and posing to his own people as simply a humble and patriotic technocrat.
The documentary offers riveting insight into this palace coup. Yet for all his smooth talk about freedom and giving up the reins of power, Putin also talks about control and his determination to restore pride in the Soviet Union.
Six of his next 10 decrees related to boosting the military as he drove up defence spending. Within months, this lethal strongman had crushed two wealthy rivals to demonstrate his power and seized control of key federal television networks.
And then he began pillaging the riches of Russia with his cronies and supplicants, resulting in that billion-pound palace by the Black Sea exposed by his critic Alexei Navalny – who ended up dead like so many of Putin’s opponents.
Now most people in Western countries – apart from a few silly populists – can see the sinister reality of Putin’s reign. He has stamped out freedoms at home while spreading carnage abroad from Georgia to Ukraine, from the Sahel to Syria.
He is a leading figure in the global struggle for supremacy between autocracy and democracy – backed by brutal allies from Beijing to Pyongyang and Tehran – that is most starkly visible with the bloodshed in Ukraine.
Only a fool now falls for the Kremlin propaganda about a threat from the defensive alliance of Nato when it comes from this deluded despot, who compares himself to Peter the Great while exposing the weakness of Russia’s modern armed forces.
Have no doubt that he attacked Ukraine – initially in Crimea in 2014, as I witnessed – because he felt threatened personally when his close Slavic neighbours, infuriated by the corruption of his pals, demanded democracy and freedom.
Yet after 25 years of this toxic regime, so skilled at the exploitation of media and propaganda, his efforts at empire-building are supported by many Russians far beyond his avaricious Kremlin inner circle.
So what about his endgame? As Sir Winston Churchill once said, dictators ride upon tigers, which they dare not dismount from fear of being devoured.
This is why Putin was so transfixed by the 2011 killing of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, caught cowering in a drainage ditch before being shot by rebels after a 42-year rule. He is terrified that a similar fate awaits him if he loosens his vice-like grip on power that he began exerting in those dying days of the last century.