Trump's war on the press is straight from Putin playbook

The pen may not be mightier than the sword, but it still has the power to wound. How else to explain the extraordinary remarks of the former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, this week in which he revealed how stung he'd been by an editorial in The Times?

- ALAN RUSBRIDGER

You’d think Russia’s elite had enough problems on their hands at the moment. Roaring inflation and interest rates. Sanctions. Labour shortages. The spiralling cost of war. The mounting casualties in Ukraine. But, no, it was an editorial penned by an unknown hand in London that really got under the skin of Putin’s close ally, who now serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s security council.

Perhaps Medvedev didn’t get through the entire leader column but just glanced at the headline, which was in response to the assassination of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov on the streets of Moscow. It read: “The targeted killing is a legitimate act of defence by a threatened nation.” Whatever, it sent him into a spasm of rage, describing the editors of The Times as “legitimate military targets”. The anonymous editorial team at The Times

were “miserable jackals who cowardly hid behind their editorial. That means the entire leadership of the publication”. Drawing himself up to his full 5ft 6in he warned them: “So be careful. After all, a lot of things happen in London.”

Indeed, they do. In 2017, Buzzfeed, then a muscular investigative website, probed no fewer than 14 suspicious Russian-related deaths in which assorted critics of the state variously dropped dead from “heart attacks” or “suicide”. Others fell out of windows or suffered from malfunctioning helicopters. Poisoning and strangling were other options, while we may never know the truth of the man who died inside a red sports bag that had been padlocked from the outside.