Status Updates From Hotel Ukraine (Arkady Renko...

It was classic Putin, he thought. Set the underlings against each other, give each of them enough power to make them loyal to him, but not so much that they might become a threat. By the same token, there were gradations of power, and Volkov obviously had more than Kazasky.

It was classic Putin, he thought. Set the underlings against each other, give each of them enough power to make them loyal to him, but not so much that they might become a threat. By the same token, there were gradations of power, and Volkov obviously had more than Kazasky.

perhaps, given time, he might grow to feel the same way about her that she did about him, but maybe he wouldn’t, and it was a slow death, letting someone love you when you didn’t love them back.

Arkady found it all difficult to comprehend. Dasha may as well have been a cosmonaut for all he knew. He asked the first thing that came into his head: “This influencing… it pays well?” ...Arkady did the math. A million and a half dollars—not rubles—a year for a handful of photos on a cell phone. He didn’t want to be that guy, the ‘world gone mad’ guy, but, really, the world had gone mad.