“Moscow is silent,” an officer told him. His friend Sergei Roldugin said he had never seen Mr. Putin so emotional as when he spoke about those East German informants whose identities had been revealed. “He said it was equal to treason,” Mr. Roldugin told Mr. Putin’s biographer, Steven Lee Myers. “He was very upset, extremely.”Scores of intelligence agents turned to the West at that time, as defectors or informants, and Mr. Putin cannot speak of them without a lip curl of disgust. The tone was set around the time of Mr. Putin’s first election as president in 2000 — the day before, in fact.

Source: New York Times September 10, 2018 02:45 UTC