TWENTY FIVE YEARS OF KLEPTO-PUTINISM

Professor Mark Galeotti claims that Putin's Russia is not so much a mafia state as a state with a nationalised mafia.

- JOHN DOBSON

When I met Vladimir Putin back in 1994, any thought that this introspective, uncommunicative person would be President of Russia in less than six years' time was simply absurd. The occasion was the visit of Prince Charles to St Petersburg in May of that year, the first by a member of the Royal Family since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

The four-day visit followed an invitation from the city's first democratically elected mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, a lawyer turned politician who had been Putin's professor at Leningrad State University 20 years earlier.

Royal visits require a huge amount of planning and during the six months before the visit I had been a member of the team from our embassy in Moscow which met regularly with Russian officials in St Petersburg, headed by Sobchak's head of the Committee for External Relations, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. In March, Putin was promoted to become the First Deputy Chairman of St Petersburg's government, which meant that he played a larger role than initially expected during the visit.

What we didn't know at the time was that Putin was already a wealthy man. It later emerged that he had entered into legally dubious contracts with obscure firms to export raw materials, such as oil, timber and minerals, in return for food.

As we ourselves experienced at the time, food shops were almost always empty because of supply chain problems and roaring inflation, so Putin's efforts to bring the much needed nutrition into St Petersburg's shops was warmly welcomed.