President of Darkness

A discussion with Christopher Steele, the British intelligence professional and author of "Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy"

Christopher Steele, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, began his twenty-two-year career as an intelligence professional and Russia expert within the British government in 1987, soon after graduating from Cambridge University. He was posted to Moscow, where he served through the fall of the Soviet Union, and Paris, before returning to London to become one of the government’s senior intelligence experts and advisers on Russia. In 2009, he founded the private intelligence company Orbis Business Intelligence. His series of intelligence reports, collectively known as the Steele Dossier, helped expose Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin.

About his excellent and essential new book, Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy, I wrote this:

The war on reality is a war of attrition, and we are losing.

Twenty twenty four has set a new standard for gaslighting. We are asked to ignore Trump’s convictions, indictments, fraud rulings, rapes, and obvious footsie with Putin; to laugh off JD Vance’s history as an NRx, Red Caesar fascist; to take seriously Trump’s egregiously awful picks for cabinet and staff positions; to consider mass deportation, which is merely a euphemism for genocide, as a reasonable position. Trust-washing, truth-washing, sane-washing, normalizing: small wonder that 2024’s entry into the popular lexicon is “brain rot.”

And then comes Christopher Steele, the British intelligence officer turned intelligence professional turned target of MAGA wrath, to our rescue one more time, with his first book, Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy, published on October 8th. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Not only does Steele provide his own account of the so-called dossier—a much-needed supplement to the historical record—but the book is like the houselights coming on full blast, overwhelming the gaslighting. In the fever dream of Trump/Russia lies in which we must now make our febrile way, Unredacted is a bracing splash of cold water.

Given that Steele has been right about Russia and Trump for many years now, I was especially eager to talk to him. We discuss the Dossier, the kompromat tape, Dmitri Simes, Prague, Rosneft, Ukraine, the FBI, political cowardice, lawfare, Putin, Trump, Xi, Keir Starmer, the political situation in Canada and Western Europe, Elon Musk, and a lot more.

Here are three takeaways from our discussion:

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1. Putin is, and always has been, an evil SOB.

In Unredacted, Steele writes about a meeting he had in 2008, after Russia invaded Georgia. This was eight years after Putin came to power, and six years before Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea:

I saw Putin as an enemy of the UK and the West—and I was convinced his policies and behavior would worsen. I was not sure how much evidence we needed of this after the apartment bombings of 1999, which we firmly believed were ordered by then prime minister Putin, a man prepared to kill 307 of his own citizens in order to secure his control over the country; after Putin described, in 2005, the end of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”; after the prosecution of the dissenting oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the seizure of his gas and oil company by the state; after the shooting and killing of Anna Politkovskaya and other journalists and critics of Putin; after the Litvinenko assassination; after Putin brought his black Labrador to a public meeting in 2007 with then German chancellor Angela Merkel, who he knew had a phobia of dogs, at a time when Germany and Russia were in dispute about energy supplies; and now after the attack on the pro-West state of Georgia. I felt the West, and certainly the British government, should have long since moved on from President George W. Bush’s assessment of Putin in 2001: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

“Putin,” Steele continues, “was a generational threat, and an ever-worsening one, and we needed to treat him as such.”

He was spot-on in his assessment.

And yet the West—including Britain, which has allowed Putin’s oligarchs to set up shop in London, and to weaponize its antiquated defamation laws to silence critics; and the United States, which has seen president after president attempt a “reset” with this Kremlin monster—has failed, time and again, to hold the Russian strongman to account for his brazen criminality.

Steele tells me:

And it’s a lack of understanding of what sort of person you’re dealing with here, because, you know, he dresses up in a smart suit and speaks good German or passable English. He’s able to carry himself off as a politician…or as a sort of half-respectable politician. The man’s a gangster and a thug.

And, you know, when [Putin] was…the head of foreign relations in St. Petersburg, he was known as the Mayor of the Night. His boss, Sobchak, was the Mayor of the Daytime, and he was the Mayor of the Night. And I think that sums him up. He is the President of Darkness, and everything he’s done in Russia, really—certainly in the last 10 years—I would argue, has been to push Russia from being a sort of messy, semi-democratic, semi-tolerant, semi-rule-of-law state into an authoritarian one, and now moving towards more of a dictatorship like existed under Stalin.

This is what makes Putin’s apparent hold over Trump so dangerous. Donald respects Putin, fears Putin, is beholden to Putin, and wants to be Putin—and to import Putin’s thuggish methods to the United States.

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2. The Russia-China alliance is not an equal partnership.

To use an SAT-style analogy, Xi is to Putin as Putin is to Trump. As Donald commands attention with his antics, giving cover to Moscow to operate under cover of darkness, so Putin struts and preens on the world stage, allowing Beijing to do its thing quietly.

“I think it’s an unequal relationship,” Steele tells me. He cites a 1990 book by the late historian Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, “a very good book about Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia in the nineteenth century,” telling me that

one of things it brings out is the way in which Russia humiliated China in the nineteenth century by taking lots of land off it, by suppressing it as a trading power, and what have you…. Xi and other Chinese leaders talk about the “Century of Humiliation.” And of course, usually that’s attributed to Britain and to America and Germany and others, the Opium Wars or whatever. But actually Russia was up to it in the northern part of China. And the Chinese haven’t forgotten that; they’re fully aware of that.

So I don’t think it’s an easy relationship at all. Xi clearly doesn’t want Putin to be…defeated in this war, because Russia might then collapse, and China may then have to face off against the West on its own. Russia is a good sort of foil, if you like—a good distractor, a good deflector for China, as China goes about its business in a more subtle, more evolutionary, more economic way than Russia does, in increasing its influence, its power in the world….

And what China has done is, it’s hidden behind Russia behaving as this sort of spoiled child, throwing its toys around the world stage, vetoing things in the UN and what have you. But meanwhile, China’s steadily been building up its power and influence. There’s no trust between China and Russia fundamentally, there never has been, and there never will be. But there are cynical interests that China has in Russia not failing or being defeated.

The good news is, there are ways in which this unequal power dynamic works to the West’s advantage—if we choose to exploit it, which so far we have not.

“Having said that, on the positive side, there’s also evidence from what I’m seeing and reading that China has put certain stipulations on Russia about the war,” Steele says. “‘You mustn’t use nuclear weapons. You mustn’t escalate to try to take out Kyiv,’ and all the rest of it.”

In short, as he says, Russia needs China way more than China needs Russia. “I think it’s less unipolar than people think. It’s not an unlimited alliance at the expense of everybody else. It’s a limited alliance which has certain uses for China, but which China also quite helpfully I believe has put certain limits on.”

This seems like useful information, given that the main reason the West has given for denying Ukraine the weapons it needs to take out Russia is fear of nuclear retaliation. If Xi has expressly forbade Putin from using his nuclear arsenal, such as it is, then Washington could have done a lot more than it’s been doing these last few years.

On the subject of the war, Steele reminds me of the “peace plan” for Ukraine dating to 2016-17—involving, per the reporting in the New York Times, Mike Flynn, Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, Paul Manafort, and a pro-Putin Ukrainian politician, Andrii V. Artemenko—“which was entirely in Russia’s interests, in terms of the terms and conditions that it’s set.”

Fast-forward to 2025. We are, Steele tells me, “now facing down another situation where the same sort of team and the same sort of attitudes are going to be presenting another peace plan for Ukraine, which could well result in letting Putin off the hook.”

This is an outcome Putin desperately needs. Russia has lost an astonishing number of men in Ukraine—something like 800,000, by some estimates; half of that in the past year—and has resorted to using North Korean troops to fight its battles.

“So we are talking about a very, very serious conflict,” Steele says. “It is at the moment on the sort of level of the First World War, but Russia is bleeding out, essentially. And anything that allows Putin off the hook at this point would be catastrophic for Western collective security going forward.”

This is why it was so important to the Kremlin that Trump win. To Putin, the 2024 U.S. election was existential.

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3. Things in the United States, and therefore the West, are moving in a very, very bad direction.

The 2024 election was existential for our side, too. American democracy may not survive a second Trump (or a first Vance) term.

“I think we’ve got to realize that a lot of the things that we’ve taken for granted our whole lives, and in fact for longer than that in the West—democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, strong civil society, secure national security policies, alliances and so on; collective security—are now in question in a way that they’ve never been since 1945,” Steele tells me. “And I think that’s the stark reality of this.”

He is, as he points out, a longtime intelligence professional, an expert in Russia, someone who has lived and worked in countries that are not democracies. He knows as much about how Putin operates as anyone in the West. And in terms of pure villainy, the Mayor of the Night has routinely outperformed even Steele’s predictions.

“I made this point actually when I was giving evidence to the British Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee in 2018, I think it was,” Steele recalls. “And I was saying that there have been these paradigm shifts in the way Russia operates, things it’s done which were unimaginable before. And I said that each time was worse than the previous one, and I wouldn’t have even predicted what each one has been before it happened.”

And now, in 2025? “[I]t’s far worse than even I had imagined. And it will continue to be like that until we have the resolution and the unity to stand up and play to our strengths, which we have many of. We are far wealthier, we’re far more creative, we’re far more trusting and unified even now than Russia could ever be with any of its allies. And we have to make the most of this.”

But there are things that can be done, even now:

What can we do about it? Well, we have to be very vocal. We have to be brave. We have to be together. In Britain, we have to reach out more to our European, Western European in particular, allies to get them to stand up to the plate and realize that we’re living in a new era. We’re not living in the post-war world anymore. We’re living, some people have said, in a pre-war world. I’m not sure it’s quite that bleak.

What’s bleak is Russia’s future:

Russia is in a vortex of decline now, which is really quite dark. It’s in a very dark place. And I mean, quite apart from anything else, the amount of crime and violence that’s going to result, from PTSD [and] soldiers coming back from the front lines and everything else, is going to tear Russia apart, I believe. I believe Russia has a very bleak future at the moment, as it’s going under Putin.

As Steele points out, we in the West have tremendous advantages in this struggle for democracy, not least the fact that living in a Russian-style autocracy sucks. How many of the 347,275,807 residents of the United States will be truly happy with MAGA tyranny?

We shall soon find out. On Monday, we inaugurate our own President of Darkness.

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Mayor of the Night, President of Darkness (with Christopher Steele)

Christopher Steele began his twenty-two-year career as an intelligence professional and Russia expert within the British government in 1987, soon after graduating from Cambridge University. He was posted to Moscow, where he served through the fall of the Soviet Union, and Paris, before returning to London to become one of the government’s senior intelligence experts and advisers on Russia. In 2009, he founded the private intelligence company Orbis Business Intelligence. His series of intelligence reports, collectively known as the Steele Dossier, helped expose Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin.

Greg Olear talks to Steele about the Dossier, the kompromat tape, Dmitri Simes, Prague, Rosneft, Ukraine, the FBI, political cowardice, lawfare, Putin, Trump, Xi, Keir Starmer, the political situation in Canada and Western Europe, Elon Musk, and Steele’s excellent new book, “Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy.”

Buy the book:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/unredacted-christopher-steele?variant=43103633899554

Follow Christopher Steele:
https://x.com/Chris_D_Steele

Follow Orbis:
https://x.com/orbisBIofficial

Follow Greg on BlueSky:
https://bsky.app/profile/gregolear.bsky.social

Subscribe to The Five 8:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0BRnRwe7yDZXIaF-QZfvhA

Check out ROUGH BEAST, Greg’s new book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D47CMX17

ROUGH BEAST is now available as an audiobook:
https://www.audible.com/pd/Rough-Beast-Audiobook/B0D8K41S3T

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Photo credit: Maxim Shklyaev. St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow.