October 13, 2018

In early 2016, when Mohammed bin Salman was still deputy crown prince and Donald Trump still a contender for US president, the then 30-year-old Saudi summoned senior British officials to Riyadh to see him. He had one thing on his mind, said two of the officials present that day – how to deal with Vladimir Putin.

The Russian president’s role in the Middle East had suddenly expanded and his footprint throughout Europe and the US was growing just as rapidly. The young prince seemed curious about what the mercurial Putin had been up to: annexation, intimidation, deflection, the denial of objective facts. But he kept coming back to one question, the officials recalled: how does he get away with it? “He was fascinated by him,” one of the Britons told the Observer. “He seemed to admire him. He liked what he did.” Two years later Prince Mohammed is embroiled in a crisis unlike any other in his short, combustible time as the world’s most powerful thirtysomething. The crown prince stands accused of ordering the brutal death of a prominent critic on foreign soil – a state-sanctioned hit that is without precedent in the kingdom’s modern history, but is not quite so unknown in Russia.

The events, as described by Turkish officials, are staggering and have shaken confidence in Prince Mohammed even among his closest allies, who until the past week had been steadfast in their support for his ambitious reform programme. Turkish intelligence and senior officials insist that the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a 15-man hit squad that had arrived from Riyadh on the same day and then dismembered his body.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/13/saudi-arabia-khashoggi-chulov