Vladimir Putin casts a shadow over our lives, but it wasn’t always that way, there was a time when the West was in love with Putin, so what’s happened? Today Tony and his guests Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan unpick the man from the myth.

They discuss how Putin was shaped by a tough childhood in Leningrad, his KGB years and formative time in East Germany, how he rose through the political ranks in the 1990s as a ‘everyone’s favourite bag-man’, until he was hand-picked to be Yeltsin’s successor.

At first President Putin restored order and wealth to a chaotic Russia, but he also built a system of fear and cronyism around him, similar to a Medieval court. They argue that once he could have been remembered as a stabiliser, instead he is now viewed as a paranoid strongman, whose need for control has dragged Russia into repression and conflict.

Hosted by Sir Tony Robinson | Instagram @sirtonyrobinson

Producer: Melissa FitzGerald | X @melissafitzg

With

Mark Galiotti | X @MarkGaleotti

Honorary professor at UCL and director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence, Mark has been studying Russia since 1988 and was banned indefinitely from it in 2022.

‘Downfall: Putin, Prigozhin, and the fight for the future of Russia’ (Ebury/Penguin, June 2024)

'We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West gets him wrong' (Penguin, 2019) 

Anna Arutunyan | X @scrawnya

Russian-American writer who spent two decades as a journalist in Moscow, where she wrote for The Moscow News and other publications around the world. She served as senior Russia analyst for the International Crisis Group before leaving Russia in 2022 and is the author of five books about the country, its politics, society and its wars. She is currently associate director of Mayak Intelligence and lives in the UK.

‘Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from the Tsars to Navalny' (Polity Books, May 2025)

‘The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult’ (Interlink Books, 2014)

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Thank you, Love Tony x

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