Jules Evans

Stephen Jennings is very tall — about six feet seven. He wraps his body into contortions to fit his limbs into his chair in his central Moscow office. He would certainly suffer in Aeroflot’s economy class —  but luckily he has his own jet. He’s also a towering figure in Russian business. His investment bank, Renaissance Capital, is worth up to £3 billion, and he owns roughly 80 per cent of it. He is, says another Moscow banker, ‘the only foreign oligarch in Russia’. This 47-year-old Kiwi hasn’t just had a front-row seat in the turbulent changes of the last 15 years of Russian business and politics. He’s played a key role in those changes.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the drums of revolution beating once more in Washington. The neoconservatives have found another regime that needs changing, another enemy of ‘freedom’, and they are setting about putting matters right in their usual way. This time the target is Belarus, a small country in between Poland, Ukraine and Russia with a population of 10 million. Since 1996 Belarus has been run as a communist dictatorship by President Aleksander Lukashenko. All the usual precursors to a US-sponsored ‘revolution’ are in place: an influential Washington NGO — the US Committee on Nato — has said that fostering democracy in Belarus is an ‘essential, moral and strategic imperative for US foreign policy’.

In a white room in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a tattooed man from Georgia is trembling violently. His eyes are rolled back to the whites, his spine is arched, his arms flail in front of him as if he is being electrocuted. Behind him stands another man, Asiatic, completely bald, with dark piercing eyes. He shouts, almost raps, into the convulsing Georgian’s ears, ‘Drive out the filth! You are a strong man, charged with energy! Help yourself out of this!’ He repeats this over and over until the Georgian has a spasm and collapses in a trance. He is put on to a stretcher, carried out of the room and laid in a bed with high metal sides.