Echoing the war in Ukraine, ex-KGB agent Sergei Jirnov publishes The geara startling work on the political mysteries of the Kremlin held with an iron fist by Vladimir Putin, whom the author has met on several occasions.
Today a refugee in France, Jirnov is not just anyone. This former senior KGB officer and spy is a former classmate of the Tsar of Moscow, although the two did not know each other at the time. They will meet for the first time when Putin is only a “zealous little civil servant” in August 1980 during the Olympic Games in Moscow, recalls the author. “I was 19,” he says over the phone. I was summoned to the KGB office after a telephone conversation with a French tourist that seemed too long and suspicious to the authorities. »
The interrogation will be led by the “opportunist” Vladimir Putin. The student Jirnov then discovers a character from the shadows, but ambitious, who had traveled from Leningrad to the capital in the hope of climbing the echelons of power in the central apparatus of the KGB.
“By interrogating me to possibly arrest me and send me straight to prison, he was no doubt hoping to do a good job, especially when he learned that I had a copy of The Gulag Archipelago of Solzhenitsyn. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t work since the copy in question had been loaned to me by a friend from university, none other than the grandson of Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. »
The event will slow down the rise of Putin, who will later be considered “unfit” within the spy service, while Zhirnov will quickly join the “S” directorate of the Andropov Institute, a section prestigious for the training of spies.
“They realized after a year that he was not at all suitable for the job, since he was unable to foresee the dangerousness of the consequences of his actions. So he was sent back to Leningrad to gnaw his bone in the provinces,” says Jirnov.
Tactical nuclear weapons
For the author, even by accessing the highest functions of the Russian State, Putin has never really changed and he has the same flaws, not hesitating today to threaten the whole world with the use of ‘nuclear weapon. “We can see that the KGB was not mistaken about its capabilities,” he says. In addition to misjudging his army, he was wrong about the Ukrainian people, about President Zelensky, about Europe, about NATO and about the reaction of the international community. But this man now has the power to destroy humanity, and that’s what’s really scary. »
The fact that Putin wielded the ultimate weapon just days after the start of the war in Ukraine demonstrates that he is in a bind, having understood that his conventional forces would not allow him to win. “What makes Russia powerful are only its nuclear warheads,” he adds. When Putin mentions atomic strikes, I interpret that as an admission of weakness. »
The worst according to him? If the conflict were to get bogged down, the Russian president could be tempted to use so-called tactical nuclear weapons, missiles of shorter range, but just as devastating. “That is why we should not rejoice over a possible Ukrainian victory against the Russian army. If kyiv wins this war, the repercussions could be catastrophic for the planet. »
As uncertain as the Russian president’s intentions are, he remains the one and only person to decide the fate of the planet, worries Jirnov. The Russian president has made his country a kind of “Potemkin village”, in which the institutions are nothing but empty shells, he terrorizes those around him, and those who dare to stand up to him disappear.
The essay also details the recent wave of “suicides” among the rare oligarchs who have dared to criticize the policies of the despot or the suspicious deaths of those close to power, in particular Putin’s former bodyguard, Evgueni Zinitchev, who became a minister. emergency situations.
Putin, the new Hitler
The book also details Putin’s last years in the Kremlin, isolated, reclusive in a secret place, sick and constantly protected by an imposing praetorian guard. A question then arises: has Putin gone mad at the risk of us assuming the worst?
“I hope Putin won’t cause a global conflict, but I’m not entirely sure. The despot is an increasingly radicalized secretive and tortured ruler. When dealing with an individual who has the power to press the red button, everything in his personality must be taken into account,” says the author who compares Putin to Hitler and Russia to Nazi Germany.
Western sanctions, foreign military aid, the exclusion of Russia on the international scene, everything indicates that the Third World War has indeed begun, whether we like it or not, he insists, criticizing the the attempts of the French President, Emmanuel Macron, to maintain the dialogue with the tsar of Moscow. “President Macron has never understood how Putin works. With the Russian president, everything that is not brute force is weakness. We cannot negotiate with Putin. His goal is to exterminate the Western world, which is openly his enemy,” he concludes.