Ukraine War Diaries: Portraits of Putin

This unusual mixed genre book begins with a one-page open letter "To Comrade Putin, et al." It is a piece worth reading — for history geeks and fiction bookworms alike — before taking a rain check on this special volume. As you will soon learn, the "fashionable" idea that an evil dictator named Vladimir Putin singlehandedly tricked or forced his 140 million-strong "nation of innocent and unsuspecting victims" into attacking Ukraine is an illusion — one suited only for trendy small talk. The book is a rare collection of ten interconnected, mind-bending narratives based on previously unknown facts carefully procured by an anonymous author (see below) who spent over fifteen weeks in Ukraine's war zones from March to July of 2022 and worked in Ukraine and Russia for over two years between 2014 and 2021.

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See the backdrop of this ghastly war by witnessing remarkable private encounters — in the Kremlin, in a secret Siberian bunker, and beyond — with the president of China (Jinping); with the president of Belarus (Lukashenko); with Russia's Head of Foreign Intelligence (Naryshkin), the Foreign Affairs Minister (Lavrov), and the Kremlin's Press Secretary (Peskov); and even with a centenarian shaman who drove Putin to a psychotic break. Discover the provocative, uncensored reality of the Russo-Ukrainian War (a.k.a. the Russia-Ukraine War) in the context of Russia's century-old regime and in light of Putin's secretive life: the book links the key geopolitical events leading to and in the first six months of this war to the broadly misunderstood Russian ideology responsible for nurturing Vladimir Putin to power from an early age.

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The ten narratives converge into a symbolism-rich life story that builds emotional and logistical continuity around facts that came from sources who have since perished, or were reported anonymously, or are deemed incomplete, or relate to parties deserving of privacy. At the same time, the twenty documentary appendices and over one hundred detailed historical and analytical footnotes help shape the landscape of pertinent (and factual) locations, names, times, and cultural references.

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Learn why Russia fired cruise missiles at civilians in Ukraine’s Vinnytsia on July 14, 2022; how the notorious Grigori Rasputin is related to Putin; how Russians use war propaganda to drive and measure public sentiment; why Russia [really] annexed Ukraine’s Crimea; when Putin emotionally committed to this war; how killing street animals as a child or taking LSD as a KGB agent in Dresden shaped Putin's mindset and spirituality; what Russians toast to when they drink Ukrainian vodka… and much more. This unprecedented book is rich in engaging cultural and political facts and inferences that point to the true causes and define the potential outcomes of this shocking conflict.

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The Circle of Forced Trust is at the root of Russia’s (not Putin’s) motives. It refers to ‘the circle of collective responsibility’ — a set of informal-but-strict organizational practices used in Russia's criminal and political groups — designed to reduce errors, advocate hostility, encourage silence, and promote loyalty and unity by tying responsibility for all group actions to each group member regardless of his/her factual inputs. This is a key principle of all dictatorial leaders in Russia since 1922, including Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Putin.

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The Author… QWERTskY is the pen name of an apolitical, anonymous writer whose permanent location and legal name are unknown. QWERTskY's "day job" is that of a humanitarian envoy tasked with high-risk conflict remediation. QWERTskY has no social media presence but maintains a public-facing website — qwertsky.com — that you may visit to learn more.