Until 1992, Sergei Jirnov was a Russian spy, an “illegal” living undercover in France. Thirty years later, he frequents television sets, where he crushes President Vladimir Putin, this former “bandit of Leningrad” whom he accuses of having invaded Ukraine as a “kamikaze”.
The former shadow agent, 61 years old and sporty, has crossed paths four times with the one who will become the all-powerful head of state of the Russian Federation. A man he “despises”, he says in “The gear”, a book he devotes to him, released in June. Vladimir Putin “is Russian like me, but he embodies everything I don’t like: cynicism, lies, lack of empathy, brutality”, he warns from the first pages of the book.
During their first meeting, when he was just a student, Sergei Jirnov claimed to have been “psychologically tortured” by the future president, already a kagebist, because he had spoken too long in French to a foreigner during the Moscow Olympics in 1980.
