4 ideas
Zygar argues that many Kremlin decisions were not dictated by one master plan from Putin. Courtiers who were competing for favor acted on what they guessed he wanted, and he often endorsed the result afterward. Policy therefore comes out of rival factions trying to anticipate the leader, so a single personality or ideology does not explain it well.
In October 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos and then Russia's richest man, was arrested after funding opposition parties and challenging Putin over corruption at a televised meeting. His company was later broken up through tax claims, and much of it ended up with state-owned Rosneft. The other oligarchs took the message: keep your wealth and stay out of politics.
Zygar recasts Putin's path from would-be Western partner to confrontation as a series of perceived betrayals. The episodes he cites include NATO expansion, the Iraq war, the color revolutions and the handling of Libya. Each one hardened the belief in his circle that the West was hostile and would not treat Russia as an equal. Read this way, events like the Crimea annexation look like the result of built-up resentment and less like calculated grand strategy.
Zygar traces how liberal technocrats and Yeltsin-era holdovers lost ground over time to siloviki and Putin's long-time personal associates. These insiders had their own power bases and interests, and they and Putin depended on each other. As the circle narrowed, fewer people contradicted him, and bad assumptions were more likely to go unchallenged.