March 8, 2022 - 3:00pm
As well as reporting for the BBC for 14 years, Leonid Ragozin wrote the Lonely Planet guides to Ukraine and Moscow. In the past few weeks, he has watched places he knows well be destroyed — and has had to challenge his underlying assumptions about his own country.
Ragozin was reporting in Siberia when Putin began marching troops to the Ukrainian border at Belarus. Despite the menacing signs, he was vocal about his scepticism on Russia’s intentions to invade. And he was not alone. Political analysts across the world were unconvinced by Biden’s military intelligence, citing America’s media hysteria and history of hawkishness. Many pointed to the Iraq War and Russiagate as examples of other crises concocted by Western powers. But when tanks rolled into Ukraine over a week ago, the intelligence didn’t seem so far-fetched. Ragozin was left, like many, wondering: why had he got it so wrong?
First, he felt the two countries were too intertwined for an invasion to be conceivable:
This war is, first and foremost, fratricidal. […] Putin stated that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. By his own logic, he is now murdering his own people. And it registers with Russians. Everywhere around Russia, you have people born in Kharkiv or born in Odessa, people who have grandparents, sisters, brothers in all those places.
Russia has never seemed so far from the West. And yet Ragozin still suspects that, had the opportunity been seized, it could have gone another way:
If Russia were properly invited into the European Union and NATO in the late 1990s, and the early 2000s, Putin would have made a perfect Eurocrat. It’s just that in this fork, he chose to go that way, the West chose not to press on Russia being integrated. It decided that it would be better to get the neighbours of Russia on board, which led to Russia’s alienation and isolation.
He describes Russia as a Frankenstein’s monster of NATO’s creation — and now Western powers may be prodding Putin into a corner:
It gradually was becoming clear that there is this hawkish community in the US and Britain, which I don’t want to be aligned with. There is a lobbyist party in the West which lives in symbiosis with Putin’s regime. They feed on each other’s anger and hatred, and they essentially promote conflict, promote escalation.
Instead, Ragozin says, they should be providing an off-ramp for the Kremlin. At the same time, he supports Ukraine’s right to fight back:
I’m seeing that it’s not just the Ukrainian leadership, it’s the entire Ukrainian society that basically thinks that it should fight the Russians. I basically show solidarity with Ukrainian society. If they want it, then as victims of aggression, I think they are right. If they keep fighting, the West is right to supply those lethal weapons to them.
Much has been made of Putin’s psychological state since the start of the invasion. He might be irrational, but according to Ragozin, Putin has proven himself to have a good poker face:
I don’t really believe in Putin being a KGB guy as the fundamental pattern and fundamental feature of his psychology. He is more of a 1990s gangster type from St. Petersburg. The main thing was to be as unhinged as possible in how you escalate. You have to go to the very limit, and you always have to outdo your rivals in this game of escalation. The Russian term for it is ‘atmoroza’: someone who is frozen out, someone who is devoid of any feelings.
In the best case scenario, Russia’s military efforts stall and a public backlash can force Putin to deescalate:
Ukrainians are hoping that the Russians would exhaust their resources, their military resources, their economic resources, that within Russia, thanks to the Western sanctions, the economy will collapse, and people will go into the street and protest this war.
At worst, Ragozin hesitates to even speak the words:
I’m mortally horrified by this whole thing. The very cities and towns that I was covering, like Kharkiv or smaller places, like Vasylkiv in northern Ukraine, they are either being destroyed by Russia aviation, or they are being occupied by the Russian troops. There are Russian flags there. So for me, it’s a brave new world.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeAssange was never the maverick he claimed. His focus was always on leaks that supported his left-wing positions. So he was very keen on Edward Snowden because these leaks damaged the west, but there was no way he’d ever have sought or posted anything about, oh, Putin organising Novichok assassinations in Salisbury, for example.
He also tried to suppress the Climategate leaks. You’d think if he were really a fan of impartial transparency, he’d have wanted to publish details of climate scientists trying to “hide the decline” rather than suppress them. It’s almost as though he’s in favour of transparency or not according to whether it supports his bien pensant left wing views.
His support for openness is like Jeremy Corbyn’s pacifism and anti-racism. He’s in favour of disarming the west but not the IRA; he’s opposed to racism unless it’s against Jews, who deserve it.
The best place for someone like Assange probably is jail, really. As the article makes clear, nobody misses him, and women are safer that way.
Very well said.
Regarding your first paragraph, I have always found the Salisbury poisonings peculiar! The Russian government would have known that the daughter was visiting her father at that time and it was a pretty botched job. Also the reason given for finding a scent bottle with the poison in it in a Chemist shop a good distance away from the first crime was hard to believe. However no one else seems to think the same way as me!!.
I’m reading Mark Urban’s book on this so he may suggests otherwise but my assumption is that the ineptitude of the Litvinov and Skripal poisonings was deliberate. It conveyed the key point that the Russian government is prepared to murder its critics anywhere. An unfortunate car accident would not have the same profile, and might not even be noticed. Using a poison only a government could obtain, in contrast, tells you that the Russian state orders, equips and contrives hits, and you can’t avoid them by leaving Russia.
You can tell this article is a defence of the war criminals which Wikileaks exposed by the ad hominem way it begins. No need to read any further.
You don’t really get credit for exposing dodgy people unless you do so without fear or favour, though. Nobody would ever accuse Assange of leaking without partiality, so he’s just the latter-day equivalent of those useful CND idiots who wanted to disarm only the West.
From the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian, by Richard Craven, a sonnet happily superseded by events:-
Sonnet 151
He’s to be scoped, the r@pey narcissist,
athwart on camp-bed with a cigarette,
recalling ruefully his Swedish tryst.
It’s pretty gamey in that oubliette,
and latterly his visitors are few
and low status: just junior attachés
and interns. No more television crews
now camp beneath his balcony; that craze
of troubadour paying court to caytiff king
has passed. Now Julian’s the apostate,
there’ll be an end of virtue-signalling.
Let Cumberbatch and Gaga find new mates;
the creep will linger like a nasty smell
inside his Ecuadorian hotel.