The Putin whisperers

In the early hours of March 3 2022, Richard Conn, a lawyer in Weston, Connecticut, took a call from Moscow warning that the world was on the brink of nuclear war.

Conn had only spoken to the person at the end of the phone once since leaving Russia 15 years earlier. But these, the man yelled down the encrypted line, were desperate times. It was a week since Vladimir Putin had ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Russian president's war was not going according to plan.