1. “For Putin, Brexit was a highly desirable outcome. His pan-European objective was to break up the EU and weaken the UK and NATO. Brexit would do precisely that. It might estrange London from Paris and Berlin, do damage to Britain’s economy, and inflame a promising little cultural war between cosmopolitan and English nationalists. 

The same battle, in fact, that was about to define and shape America in the age of Trump. 

The appeal to Moscow of Brexit grew after the EU and the US slapped sanctions against Russia for its theft of Crimea. Then in 2015 the unthinkable happened: Cameron won a general election with a majority of twelve. An in-out EU referendum would take place, Cameron said - by 2017 at the latest, and probably in 2016. Polls pointed to a Remain victory. The government said it would support staying in Europe.

For Moscow the route forward was obvious: to encourage Britain’s destructive Eurosceptic political forces. The scenario was perfect for Udod [spy, undercover FSB officer] and his embassy colleagues. In a fifty-fifty situation their efforts might have a dramatic effect on the outcome. The stage was set for Russia to interfere in Brexit, as it would with Trump in the US. The two espionage operations took place over the same time frame. The scene was often London. The dramatis personae knew each other. The plays overlapped.” pp. 181-182 ch. 9 MOSCOW GOLD 

2. “From what we’ve seen, the parallels between the Russian intervention in Brexit and the Russian intervention in the Trump campaign appear to be extraordinary,” Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on and chairman of, the House Intelligence Committee told the New York Times. In similar remarks to the New Yorker, Schiff pointed to the parallel roles played by Russia’s ambassadors in London and DC. Both were conduits of “malign influence,” he said.” p. 204. Ch.9 MOSCOW GOLD

3. “Meanwhile, the cabal of politicians who made Brexit happen, breaking electoral law along the way, were now encamped in Downing Street. In July 2019 Johnson won a vote of Conservative Party members to succeed May. He immediately appointed a hard-right cabinet, all committed to an extreme, ideologically pure version of Brexit, involving a possible EU crash out. Johnson’s behaviour was ominously Trumpian. It was characterised by populist slogans designed to fire up Brexit voters and a breezy indifference to truth. The US president made the comparison himself. Making clear his approval for Johnson and dubbing him “Britain’s Trump.” Johnson’s own priority was to suck up to Trump big time, in the hope of a US - UK trade deal. 

Johnson was the culmination of what looked like a Bannonite project to bring about the creative destruction of the traditional Conservative Party...

Britain’s new prime minister had his own curious links with Russia…He had spent the night at an opulent palazzo in Perugia belonging to the ‘ex-KGB’ agent Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny. The Russians owned London’s Evening Standard newspaper. They were known for throwing extravagant parties for actors and celebrities.

Johnson had left his security detail behind. This was unorthodox, akin to Trump’s refusal to allow US officials to listen in on his private fire-side meetings with Putin…

It was a strange time for Johnson to be hanging out with Russians; the previous day he had held talks in Brussels with Mike Pompeo about the Salisbury novichok attack. A year after the mysterious Italy trip the Evening Standard endorsed Johnson as the best Tory candidate for prime minister - a view at odds with its Remain-voting metropolitan readership.

As Britain’s political chaos continued, Yakovenko exited London. After eight years the ambassador was moving on. The pro-Brexit forces he had done much to encourage were in government.

On August 24, 2019, the Russian embassy in London tweeted a valedictory photo of Yakovenko’s home in Kensington Palace Gardens. It said the ambassador had relinquished his duties and returned to Russia. His new job: rector of Moscow’s Diplomatic Academy.

If he looked out of his aeroplane window, Yakovenko might have felt content as he took off for Moscow. Below him was a troubled land beset by destructive forces and on the brink of Brexit. Britain was febrile, weak, and at war with itself. Meanwhile, an actual war - in which thirteen thousand people had died, shot and ripped apart by shellfire - was taking place in the borderlands of Europe.” pp. 210-212 ch. 9 MOSCOW GOLD 

4.  “Under Trump’s watch the US had become uniquely vulnerable to Russian disinformation…It had aquired some distinctly Putin-like tendencies. It was a place where personal vendettas and money making deals were conducted under the cloak of executive power, just like in Russia…

In Moscow a group of KGB officials led by Putin had taken over the government machine. For two decades, they had used it for self-enrichment. Their stealing was done stealthily, under the din of state propaganda. Increasingly, Trump’s America seemed to be going in the same direction. As the Kyiv Post pointed out, by following his natural instincts the president was creating a political system that eerily resembled Russia’s. Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov, became a billionaire, while Jared Kushner was rescued from insolvency when his father-in-law took over the White House. There was a distinct possibility of a Trump political dynasty.

In the meantime, the effectiveness of Russian active measures was worrying. Lies dreamed up in Moscow were reaching US public life, thanks to Trump and his Republican associates, who repeated them. The same post-truth politics was visible in other Western democracies, including Boris Johnson’s Britain and a growing number of nations across Europe…

That Putin had leverage of some kind over Trump seemed indisputable. There was no alternative explanation for Helsinki. Putin was a wilier and more experienced operator than Trump as their one-sided encounters illustrated. In international affairs, the US had embraced the Russian agenda. Global enforcement and alliances were a thing of the past; the US’s new creed was nationalism and unilateralism…

Trump and Putin shared a paranoid view of the world grounded in conspiracy. The informal rules of Trump and Putin-land were not so very different. Personal loyalty was everything; the law, something for your enemies. Friendships were stronger than institutions. Human rights and values were a joke, climate change a con. 

America’s twenty-first-century wounds were largely self-inflicted. But at the dawn of a new decade, the twenties, it was possible to conclude that Russia had done more than game politics and democracy. It had succeeded, to some degree, in making the United States in its own shadow image.” pp. 300-301 ch. 12 QUID PRO QUO 

5. “Unmentioned, of course, was the role Russia had played in helping Trump and Johnson along. The day after his victory the prime minister dropped in on a Christmas party. The venue was a £6 million stuccoed property in central London. The hosts were Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev. Alexander - the ‘one-time KGB’ foreign intelligence officer - had flown in from Moscow. He was celebrating his sixtieth birthday with a few friends…

During the election campaign, the prime minister had refused to publish a report by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC] that had been two years in the making. The report wasn’t as elaborate or detailed as Mueller’s, but its subject similar: the Kremlin’s influence on the UK and its allies, especially in the field of politics. 

Witnesses gave evidence. One of them was Christopher Steele. In 2016 he had briefed intelligence professionals about his dossier. 

A summary was given to the  cabinet. Instead of taking steps to find out if it was true, the British government “threw a blanket over it,” Steele told MPs. 

Theresa May and Johnson were “more reluctant” than their predecessors to “see (or act upon) intelligence on Russian activities when these present difficult wider political implications,” he wrote in a memo.  

Johnson appeared terrified of offending Trump. The prime minister deliberately ignored warnings that Moscow had “a likely hold” over the president and his family, Steele suggested. In the same fashion, Johnson refused to recognize “indications” that Putin had interfered in the Brexit referendum and may have provided “clandestine funding” to pro-Leave groups…

The committee called on the government to launch a Mueller-style inquiry into Russia’s actions around Brexit. Johnson refused. This was a mistake. The Kremlin supported the PM’s anti-EU project for its own reasons…

Instead of acting, Johnson cheerfully thumbed his nose at his opponents, appointing his newspaper-owner friend Evegeny Lebedev to the House of Lords. (The PM also entailed his own brother, Jo, as well as campaigners for a hard Brexit.) This was an act of shameless cronyism, done against the advice of Britain’s security agencies. They were concerned by Lebedev’s “family connection” in Moscow, I was told. Lebedev Jr. was duly sworn in as the UK’s first-ever Russian-born peer. His ceremonial title? Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation. 

Johnson’s Trump-style cover-up vis-a-vis Russia augered badly for the integrity of future elections. By 2020 the prospect of Russian meddling in the US and UK hadn’t receded…pp. 302-305 EPILOGUE: VLADIMIR THE POISONER OF UNDERPANTS   

6.  “In February 2020 Trump was acquitted after a trial scarcely worthy of the name. It was a boon to Putin and despots everywhere. It confirmed that you could engage in corrupt practices without serious consequences, and that for the Republicans the pursuit of power was more important than democracy. It normalised wrongdoing. It was an invitation to any foreign power to meddle in US politics - this was okay, the message said, provided it benefitted Trump. 

Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee had been carrying out its own counter-intelligence investigation into Russian interference. Its report - released in summer 2020 after three years of work - went further than Mueller’s. It provided new, sometimes extraordinary details about Trump’s links with Moscow.” p.307 EPILOGUE: VLADIMIR THE POISONER OF UNDERPANTS  

7.  “The international situation was now very much to Putin’s advantage. Over two decades, he had provoked and tested the West with one outrageous deed after another…not to mention invasions of neighbours and annexations. 

A Trump second term would guarantee more of the same. 

It was Lenin who best described this strategy: “A state of partial war.” It involved the elastic and opportunistic use of a wide variety of tactics, including deception, concealed penetration, subversion and psychological warfare. And - as George Kennan, the US ambassador in Moscow, noted back in the 1950s - the adroit exploitation of every conceivable form of division in Western societies. This was true in terms of alliances “ and within the domestic framework of “enemy” states.

This unofficial war was set to continue. Russia’s spies had suffered recent stumbles. GRU chiefs had a remarkable habit of dropping dead. But Moscow’s secret services were formidable - a deadly shadow monster, on the rampage still.” pp. 308-309 EPILOGUE: VLADIMIR THE POISONER OF UNDERPANTS

8.  “In 2017 Putin’s most charismatic opponent, Alexey Navalny, announced plans to run for president of Russia. For sure, he had little chance of success. The authorities would find a way to keep him off the ballot paper - in this instance, a phoney criminal charge dating from three years earlier, which saw him convicted of defrauding the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher. Nobody seriously doubted Putin would win re-election in the 2018 presidential vote - or “vote.” 

Nonetheless, Navalny represented a serious problem for the Kremlin. A lawyer by trade, he joined opposition politics as an anti-corruption activist and blogger…

He played a leading role in the anti-Putin marches and street protests directed against fraud in the Duma elections. He coined a phrase for the ruling United Russia faction that struck a chord with fed-up ordinary Russians: “A party of crooks and thieves.”

Navalny attracted a following…He didn’t disavow his early nationalism, but his platform grew into that of a pro-European democrat. He called for free and fair elections, an independent judiciary and a minimum wage. 

By the time he announced his decision to challenge Putin, Navalny’s YouTube videos were clocking up millions of online views. His anti-corruption foundation revealed details of Kremlin sleaze…

The authorities arrested Navalny repeatedly, and state TV channels broadcasted smear pieces about him - falsely - a CIA puppet…

And so in 2017 the Kremlin initiated a secret protocol. Only one person, it was understood, could have approved an action of this sort. A group of FSB operatives began shadowing Navalny on his frequent trips to the provinces…Their CVs suggested their assignment went beyond mundane surveillance: several were experts in the use of chemical weapons, with extensive specialist training; others were doctors. 

The FSB operatives appeared to belong to an elite undercover poisoning unit…

Navalny took himself off to the restroom. Soon his cries filled the aircraft. Passengers heard a low animal moaning. It was at this juncture that the FSB’s plot went awry. Instead of continuing to Moscow, the pilot made an emergency landing in Omsk. Navalny, now unconscious, was taken off the plane on a gurney and loaded into an ambulance. The doctors treating him administered atropine, the same antidote which saved the Skirpals, and he was put on a ventilator. 

While Navalny’s wife flew to Omsk and pleaded for his evacuation to Europe, the Kremlin went into cover-up mode. At the hospital the FSB removed the evidence: Navalny’s clothes. After two days Putin allowed a German medevac plane to take Navalny to the Charite clinic in Berlin. Possibly the FSB had assured the president that all traces of novichok had been carefully erased; or else a calculation had been made to shove Navalny into exile, where his ability to influence Russian politics would fade.

In mid-January 2021 Navalny shrugged off advice from his closest aides to stay in Germany and flew back to Moscow with Yulia. It was an extraordinary act of bravery - and a direct challenge to the man in the Kremlin…

At passport control, a group of uniformed officers were waiting. Navalny kissed Yulia goodbye as he was led away into custody. It was poignant.