On 19 February 2026, the Russia-Ukraine peace talks ended without a breakthrough: the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion was reached on 24 February.
The subject of Putin’s rise to power is too wide for me to cover in a short article. I recommend reading The Man Without a Face – the Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gesson, but my fears have escalated over the decades with his increasing grip on power.
My first introduction to the ‘Putin effect’ was when I was fortunate to visit Latvia, newly independent from the Russian Federation, (as it is now). It was an interesting and enjoyable trip: I loved talking to the people there. It seemed to me a peaceful, loving nation. However, I soon learned more about the darker days of the 1970s when Latvia was within the USSR.
Two university lecturers told me of being arrested during the night at their homes and bundled into cattle wagons in a nightmare journey over two weeks to a Siberian gulag, where they spent the next 20 plus years in a hard labour camp. They were both beautiful women, but their hands were gnarled and disfigured by hard labour. They showed me their home, which had been confiscated by the party elite as their Baltic seaside retreat. The KGB lieutenant colonel in charge of the operation was one Vladimir Putin.
Despite now living in a free country, you could hear the fear in their voices; their only crime had been to lecture in English literature studies. Effectively, the communist regime was intent on ridding Latvia of the intelligentsia.
The lecturers’ fears were echoed by a farmer whose home to the east of Latvia is within an hour’s drive of the Russian border. His recurring anxiety was of waking one morning to seeing Russian tanks roll across the open plains towards Riga, the Latvian capital.
Western business and governments
After the rise to power of Putin, I was very surprised by how quickly various companies in the west scrambled around to make deals with Putin and the Russian newly-found major corporations.
For instance, BP was one of the foremost. By 2022 it had become a major long-term investor in Russia stretching back over 30 years and only severed its financial ties with Russia’s state-owned oil firm Rosneft reluctantly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Why on earth did Germany agree to the installation of a gas pipeline in the Baltic direct to Germany? Angela Merkel should have seen the warning signs at the meeting she had with Putin in 2007. Putin allowed his big dog to wander near her during a photo opportunity, which many observers viewed as a calculated, intimidating ‘power play’.
Meeting with a young Russian business executive
In 2009, the opportunity came whilst staying at a beach resort hotel in South East Asia to question a young Russian businessman, Egor, on why there is such unequivocal support for Putin. We were both in the bar enjoying our happy hour drinks. His English was very good, having spent two years at Newcastle University. He was a 33 year-old sales manager working for a large coal exporter responsible for clients in eastern Europe and certain western companies like EDF.
Quite soon, my wife and Egor’s wife left us to our conversation of politics and democracy. He asked me to be quite frank with my questions so I opened with: “Why does he and so many young Russians support Putin when many of us in the west fear his motives and his tactics?” I related my own experiences in Riga some years before and how the Latvians feared him very much.
Apparently, according to him, those now in power in Latvia were not democratic and he claimed that the country was just being controlled by a few powerful businessmen. When I questioned the tactics being employed against the opposition parties in Russia, he simply countered that the presidential elections in the USA four years before saw Al Gore gain more votes than George Bush, but did not win.
I tried to explain that the vote was very close and the Electoral College system could lead to anomalies in such cases. He didn’t seem prepared to discuss the intimidation of opposition leaders and journalists in Russia as being undemocratic. I queried him on the control of the press by Putin and he simply answered by saying that the BBC was a mouthpiece for the British government and that Russia didn’t get a fair hearing.
We parted good friends but the conversation certainly troubled me. For instance, Egor at one point had said that Putin was the best leader that they had had for a hundred years and he was the best leader in the world, by far. Ho hum! What hope is there for real democracy?
Ukraine is a bulwark against Putin’s territorial expansion
If Ukraine falls then Putin will expand his territorial ambitions to the eastern European countries. In my opinion Ukraine is a bulwark against Putin’s expansionist programme and we must stand fast with that country to ensure its freedoms. We failed when he successfully invaded the Crimea, which encouraged him to invade Ukraine itself.
So far, the conflict has lasted longer than the Great War with no end in sight. Casualties mount for Ukraine’s civil population and for military personnel on both sides, but significantly more for the Russian forces who have no choice but to do Putin’s bidding.
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