A MEGALOMANIAC madman mumbling nonsense about neo-Nazi drug addicts to justify a disastrous invasion? That’s not the warm, kind, generous Vladimir Putin I once knew.
No, when I was Vlad’s art dealer, party planner and confidante for more than a decade, he was an urbane, confident leader who would never think of violently repressing anyone apart from Chechnya.
I would walk into his simple billion-dollar palace on the Black Sea where he would be lounging beneath a portrait of Stalin – who he admired purely as a person – discoursing knowledgeably on the work of Jeff Koons and the effectiveness of vacuum bombs.
Other than the single occasion when I saw him beating a member of an opposing political party until his knuckles bled, he was never less than gracious and convivial. And we all have bad days.
If you’d met the Vlad I met, you too would have enjoyed his witty, lighthearted company and found it difficult to believe he had ordered the agonising poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium in a London hotel.
He seemed so rational, so strategic. Not at all the kind of man who would cause the entire city of Salisbury to be decontaminated because he’d ordered enough nerve toxin to kill tens of thousands to be used on one former double agent.
I’m baffled as to how the former KGB officer who invaded Georgia, backed a coup in Montenegro and annexed the Crimea has come to this. That’s not the Putin I knew. That’s not him at all.
