How times change!

Back in 2007 Time magazine named Russia’s president Vladimir Putin as its person of the year. In explaining its decision, the magazine described him as a “steely and determined man” who had “emerged as a critical lynchpin of the 21st century.”

It added: “Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech. He stands, above all, for stability – stability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for a hundred years.”

Where as as early as 2010 there were reports coming out of Russia into the press on the repression of the state stating that Russia was in fact a ‘mafia state’ with the Kremlin relying on criminals and rewarding them with political patronage, while top officials collect bribes ‘like a personal taxation system.

On the 24th September 2024 there was a Statement by Foreign Secretary David Lammy at the UN Security Council where he went on to say Putin’s Russia is a “mafia state” that is “built on lies”. Britain’s top diplomat directly accused Vladimir Putin of running a “mafia state” and likened him to a slave-owner in a fiery address at the United Nations Security Council.

David Lammy, the U.K.’s foreign secretary, took aim at the Russian president during the New York gathering Tuesday, telling Russia’s representative: “We know who you are.”

Lammy invoked the legacy of slavery to take aim at Putin’s conduct in the invasion of Ukraine, and accused the Russian government of running “roughshod over international law” while claiming to stand up for the “Global South.”

“Your invasion is in your own interests,” he said. “Yours alone. To expand your mafia state into a mafia empire. An empire built on corruption.”

He added, “Mr President, I speak not only as a Briton, as a Londoner, and as a foreign secretary.

“But I say to the Russian representative, on his phone as I speak, that I stand here also as a Black man whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun to be enslaved, whose ancestors rose up and fought in a great rebellion of the enslaved.

“Imperialism: I know it when I see it. And I will call it out for what it is,” Lammy said.