I can’t think of a more fucked-up place on planet Earth. Not a destination. Not a dream. Not even a bad idea pitched over drinks that everyone laughs off by the second beer. Russia—under Vladimir Putin—has become the one place no one imagines themselves going toward. Not for Christmas. Not for summer. Not for reinvention. It’s not a getaway; it’s a warning.
That alone should tell you something.
We live in an age where YouTubers with GoPros and an excess of optimism pedal bicycles through war zones, jungles, and failed states like it’s a lifestyle brand. They wander into the Congo and grin while gorillas crash through the brush and rain turns roads into mud sermons. They cross deserts, slums, pirate coasts. And yet no one—no one—wants to stroll the streets of Russia. Not because it’s unknown, but because it’s known. The knowledge is the problem.
Putin spends his waking hours not building anything worth inhabiting. He destabilizes economies, corrodes democracies, poisons borders, annexes land, and calls it history. To what end? That’s the question people keep asking as if there’s a grand philosophy hiding behind the brutality. There isn’t. The end is control. The means are fear. The aesthetic is decay. His face—starched, frozen, embalmed in grievance—might as well be stamped with the slogan he never needs to say out loud: death to freedom.
Look at the numbers and tell me this isn’t a regime devouring itself. An estimated 330,000 Russian soldiers and contractors are dead in Ukraine. A million more injured. That’s not strategy; that’s meat grinding. That’s a nation burning its future because one man refuses to imagine a world where he isn’t feared. Progress doesn’t run through mass graves. Empires don’t resurrect themselves by amputating generations.
Putin isn’t riding the wave of the future—he’s clinging to the undertow. All his technology, all his cyber ambition, all the digital sleight of hand isn’t aimed at creation but corrosion. Not innovation, but interference. The goal isn’t peace; it’s paralysis. Free-moving countries. Countries at peace. Countries are boring enough to argue about zoning laws and school boards. Those are the targets because stability is the enemy of thugs.
This is thug governance. A mafia state with nuclear codes. A worldview that can only survive by convincing others that freedom is chaos and repression is order. It’s a fucked-up scene, and everyone knows it, even if they pretend not to.
And then—yesterday—the world heard something different. A real voice. A steady one.
Blaise Metreweli, the new chief of MI6, stood up and didn’t posture, didn’t bluster, didn’t shout slogans. She described the world as it actually is: a space between peace and war. A grey zone. A place where the shots aren’t always fired from rifles, where the damage arrives quietly—through code, influence, manipulation, pressure applied just below the threshold that would force an open response.
Russia, she said, is testing us there. Bullying. Fearmongering. Manipulating. Not because it’s strong, but because it’s afraid of a world it can’t dominate outright.
And then she said the most important thing of all.
The defining challenge of the 21st century is not who has the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the most extraordinary wisdom.
Read that again. Sit with it.
Power is no longer neatly contained in capitals and ministries. It’s diffusing. Slipping into corporations. Into networks. Into individuals with laptops and intent. Control is unpredictable now—authority leaks. The old men who built their identities on tanks and borders can feel it slipping through their fingers. That’s why they lash out. That’s why they burn.
Metreweli didn’t romanticize intelligence work. She modernized it. She called on her officers to master technology not as an abstraction, not locked away in labs, but in the field. In tradecraft. In the daily texture of how intelligence is actually practiced now.
“We will become as comfortable with lines of computer code as we are with human sources,” she said.
“As fluent in Python as we are in multiple languages.”
That isn’t a threat. It’s a promise. And it’s the opposite of everything Putin represents.
Because Putin wants a world frozen in his image—rigid, fearful, obedient- he wants history to stop where he feels powerful. He wants technology to serve coercion, not liberation. Surveillance, not understanding. Sabotage, not connection.
But the world doesn’t move backward for men like that. It moves around them. Past them. And eventually, over them.
So do yourself a favour. Watch the clip. Not for spectacle, but for clarity. Because while one man is busy trying to drag humanity into a darker century, others are quietly, deliberately preparing to outgrow him.
Cheers.
His orange acolyte is in danger himself of becoming yesterday's autocratic wannabe. Oh, for a year of sanity. The world might get used to it.