2025-03-14
39 分钟Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.
I'm producer Mia Sorrenti.
Today's episode is part one of our recent live event, the Age of the Strongman, Understanding Putin, recorded at Smith Square hall in Westminster.
This was the first event in our new series, the Age of the Strongman, in which chief foreign affairs commentator for the FT, Gideon Rackman, speaks to leading experts about the political leaders defining our times.
To kick off the series, we wanted to begin with the arc of Typal strongman leader Vladimir Putin.
In recent years, Putin has waged a relentless campaign to expand his influence beyond Russia's borders and to undermine Western democracy.
War in Ukraine, interference in democratic elections, the sponsorship of extremist politics to destabilize Europe.
But how did he come to have such control over Russia?
And what is it that he really wants?
Gideon was joined in conversation with Arkady Ostrovsky, Russia editor for the columnist, and Catherine Belton, reporter on Russia for the Washington Post and author of Putin's People, who joined live from Kyiv.
This episode is coming to you in two parts.
If you want to listen to the live recording in full and ad free, why not consider becoming an Intelligence Squared premium subscriber?
Head to intelligencesquared.com membership to find out more or hit the IQ2 Extra button on Apple.
Now let's join our host, Gideon Rackman with more.
Hello, welcome everybody to this evening on the Age of the Strongman and specifically on Vladimir Putin.
Before I introduce our panelists and the subject, I've been asked to say a few words about the series that Intelligence Square is putting on, the Age of the Strongman, which is, I think, kind of partially based on a book I wrote which came out three months before the Russian invasion of full scale invasion of Ukraine.
So I think it'd be a good idea to just sort of briefly rehearse what I meant by a strongman leader before we tried to put Putin into that context.
When I was writing the book, one of the things that I thought was an issue I had to deal with was was it really legitimate to put a pure autocrat like Xi Jinping in the same category as a democratically elected leader like Donald Trump or Erdogan in Turkey or even a sort of semi autocratic leader like Putin?
Was there really a common framework?
And the argument, of course I made since I wrote the book was yes.