In “Putin’s Net”, the English journalist Catherine Belton attributes the annexation of Crimea to the survival strategy of the KGB “in the last days of the Soviet Union before the collapse”. The German edition of the book was published last spring. In an interview with this newspaper (FAZ of March 29), Belton described the wave of lawsuits that were filed against her in England after the publication of the original 2020 edition. Oil company Rosneft lost in court. With oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Roman Abramovich, “we agreed to make some minor changes that didn’t matter,” the author says. “Had we gone ahead with Abramovich’s case, my publisher would have had at least a 2.5 in the UK High Court cost millions of pounds. By filing the same lawsuit in Australia, Abramovich was able to double the amount.”
After being published in more than twenty countries – from Japan to the USA – the extensive book is now also to be published in French on July 13: “Les hommes de Poutine”. It contains representations of economic interdependencies and dependencies, the extent of which France has not really taken note of. It’s about the Le Pens and the oil company Total. But the legal resistance to the publication comes from Switzerland. About two illustrious figures who are hardly known even to well-informed contemporaries: Serge de Pahlen and Jean Goutchkoff. They are not nouveau riche oligarchs, but descendants of Russians who fought in the White Movement against the Bolsheviks and went into exile after the revolution. Both are demanding corrections to the content of “Putin’s Net” from the French publisher and are threatening to ban the book. This is what “Le Parisien” reports: The “European bestseller (…) that frightens Putin’s friends”.