Plot foiled: Why the little man who wants to be a big tsar put me on his list

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Plot foiled: Why the little man who wants to be a big tsar put me on his list

By Tony Wright

All these anxious covert years I held to the hope that my role in Vladimir Putin’s downfall would remain secret.

Hopes are vain.

I have been outed.

Sanctioned. Put on a list.

Banned from entering Russia.

I am not alone, though I had no idea of the eminence of my fellow 120 plotters.

Good lord, Peter Costello has been in on it all along, apparently! Gina Rinehart. Ita Buttrose. Patricia Karvelas. Andrew Bolt. My colleague John “Sly of the Underworld” Silvester. The Age’s editor Gay Alcorn and The Sydney Morning Herald’s Bevan Shields too. Imagine!

ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose is among those to be sanctioned by Russia.

ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose is among those to be sanctioned by Russia. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Why did no one say anything? The loneliness of bringing down Putin would surely have been eased. Oh, Gina.

I would like to tell that it began, as these things do, in Dresden, East Germany, during the depths of the Cold War.

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In this version I would relate that a scribbler of my acquaintance, John Le Carre – or so he called himself – pointed out a thin fellow with furtive eyes and a mean mouth. “Putin,” murmured Le Carre. “KGB resident. Keep an eye on him. He’s just moronic enough to go a long way.”

And he did, as we know.

But alas. I was not in Dresden that day. Perhaps it was Costello. Or Ita. Or Lachlan Murdoch, who also appears on the sanction list.

Naturally, however, I tracked Putin’s rise and rise. The bodies left in his wake. The wealth growing to unimaginable proportions. The favours extended to the oligarchs and the demands that they pay and pay.

But everyone with the ability to read tracked these things, too.

Even now, I hesitate to tell the most terrible truths about the fellow, mainly because I was never spy enough to winkle out the details.

Tetyana Mudra, aged 65 years old, was photographed by The Herald and The Age’s Kate Geraghty in the moments after she was evacuated out of Irpin. Geraghty, who toured Ukraine after the Russian invasion, has also been sanctioned by Russia.

Tetyana Mudra, aged 65 years old, was photographed by The Herald and The Age’s Kate Geraghty in the moments after she was evacuated out of Irpin. Geraghty, who toured Ukraine after the Russian invasion, has also been sanctioned by Russia.Credit:Kate Geraghty

It is true that in the ebbing days of the Soviet Union I travelled around the old place, witnessing its death throes, and stayed in hotel rooms that were almost certainly bugged. Could Putin have come across an ancient reel-to-reel KGB recording of me talking in my sleep in 1988?

Or did I neglect to tip the fierce old crone who guarded the hotel corridor, an oversight that placed me on a list?

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Perhaps Putin and his henchmen took umbrage at an article I wrote as Russian troops were sent in to Ukraine in February this year. I called Putin a sociopath, vaulting towards the status of war criminal, and described him, a fox at the door of a henhouse, as taking pleasure in the cruelty of humiliating an old comrade.

But why would that get anyone sanctioned?

It’s nothing but the truth about this little man who dreams of being a big tsar.

It is, in the end, a puzzle how we all got to be placed on this strange list. Lacking an original thought, I am put in mind of Winston Churchill’s view of Russia: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”

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The secret about my role in Putin’s downfall is that I have had no role at all.

Pity, really. Now, I suppose, I’ll have to abandon my hopes of ever dancing with the Bolshoi.

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