Steve Rosenberg

Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister, had become acting president and was elected president a few months later.

Clearly, he was a very different kind of president from Boris Yeltsin.

Boris Yeltsin had a thick skin.

There were TV channels in Russia that criticized him, and he didn't care.

He didn't close them down.

Also, he was not from the KGB or the FSB now, the Russian Security Service.

He was a party apparatchik, Communist Party apparatchik originally.

Vladimir Putin, his background was security services.

He was a much younger leader.

And he came into power at a very difficult time for Russia.

There'd been a banking crisis.

Many Russians were craving stability.

And Putin came into power and said, look, okay, I'm going to restore order.

But it was clear pretty quickly that restoring order meant restoring the power of the center, the power of the Kremlin.

And anyone who resisted that, clearly the Kremlin was going to ensure that you couldn't defeat the Kremlin.

And that's what happened.

But I think it's probably wrong to say, looking back at those years, it's wrong to say that everything changed when Putin came in because the seeds of what's happening now were sown, I think, in the 1990s.

Things changed pretty quickly, I'd say.

In the days after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities passed a series of laws, repressive laws, designed to punish dissent and to silence criticism of the authorities and of the war.

And I remember that our bosses in London were obviously concerned about the implications of