The Bell, 4/1/25

Russians’ wellbeing levels surge in face of war, sanctions and repression

Despite being hit with unprecedented Western sanctions, the war with Ukraine has been accompanied by a noticeable increase in the well-being of Russians. A new study has revealed the extent of the domestic feel-good factor, with economists at the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economics (BOFIT) finding the level of Russians’ satisfaction with their household and personal circumstances has hit its highest in a decade.

-To understand how the restructuring of Russia’s economy during wartime affected Russians, economists Sinikka Parviainen (BOFIT) and William Pyle (Middlebury College, USA) used data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Service (RLMS), which has been conducted by the Higher School of Economics almost every year since the 1990s. This research tracks the economic well-being of Russian households and individuals with a sample size of around 6,000-8,000 households and 17,000-21,000 people.

-The economists looked at RLMS data from 2013-2023, scrutinising responses to the questions: “how satisfied with life are you right now?” and “how satisfied with your financial circumstances are you right now?”. They also looked at whether households had made large purchases over the past year, how much they spent on cultural events and how long they could maintain their current lifestyle if they lost their main source of income.

-They concluded that the first two years of Russia’s invasion — 2022 and 2023 — saw the highest levels of general satisfaction, and specific financial satisfaction had also returned to 2014 levels for the first time. That year is seen as a benchmark before Russia was plunged into an economic crisis following the annexation of Crimea, imposition of Western sanctions and an oil price crash.

-Large purchases fell to a minimum in 2022 but demand for non-food goods has since increased faster than inflation and wages, in line with The Bell’s earlier calculations. There was also a sharp rise in the proportion of households spending money on entertainment: in 2023 this reached 2018 levels, the researchers noted. The number of respondents who said they would be able to last more than a few months on their savings reached a 10-year high.

-These findings correspond with Russia’s official statistics which also point to improved financial circumstances since the start of the war. In 2023, real incomes in Russia not only returned to 2013 levels after a decade of lost living standards, but surpassed the pre-Crimea level by 5%, the researchers highlighted.

-There are no surprises as to the cause — a huge increase in state spending on the invasion and the military-industrial complex that has driven record labor shortages and pushed wages up across the economy. The high salaries offered by the state to people sent to work at the front, as well as those paid to soldiers (from 200,000 rubles a month) have played a big part, and the main winners have been residents of Russia’s poorest regions, which have recorded an unusually sudden increase in bank deposits.

Why the world should care

Putin’s regime is unlikely to face any internal threat as long as Russians’ well-being and overall happiness is on the rise.

Are Russia’s war emigrants heading home?

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russians left the country. Most of them were highly-skilled personnel who could work remotely or find jobs abroad. The Russian authorities are sticking to their story that most of those who were “scared off” at the start have since returned. And by the end of the third year of the war, foreign media outlets started writing about Russia’s brain drain being replaced by an influx. However, as new research by OutRush shows, the number of Russians that have actually returned since summer 2023 is no more than 8%.

-In July 2024 The Bell calculated that since 2022 the most modest estimate for the number of people that had left Russia and not returned stood at around 650,000. The Russian authorities initially insisted that most who left, either after the invasion or after the September 2022 mobilization later returned. The topic of Russian emigres returning home has been picked up by analysts and media outlets, some of which estimated return rates ranging from 15% to 45%.

-But researchers Emil Kamalov (European University Institute, Florence), Ivetta Sergeyeva (Stanford University) and Karolina Nugumanova (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa) have conducted their own measurements as part of the OutRush project, based on a sample of 8,500 Russian emigrants living in more than 100 countries from summer 2023 to 2024.

-OutRush’s research suggests that, from 2023 to 2024, there has been no mass return to the motherland. The survey showed that over the year-long period studied, only 8% of emigrants who left Russia after the war began had returned home. A further 5% said that they planned to do so in the foreseeable future. In addition, 21% of those surveyed had moved from one country to another, while another 28% were planning to move to somewhere different, but not Russia.

-“We are seeing a kind of stabilization of migration: about 6-8% return each year, but roughly the same number leave, so the overall figures do not change very much,” the authors of the report concluded. Moreover, only 54% of those surveyed said that they would consider returning to Russia under any circumstances — including the end of the war or the fall of Putin’s regime.

-Of those Russians who left since 2022, only 1% are considering leaving Western countries such as Germany, Spain, the Netherlands or the USA. A second group of countries saw middling rates of departure — around 13-16% had left Israel, Argentina and Serbia. Russians that settled in non-EU countries were most likely to have left — like Georgia (58%), Turkey (47%), Armenia (47%), Kazakhstan (40%) and Montenegro (33%). However, sizeable numbers of them were heading to other countries, not Russia, with Serbia being the most popular destination as a second country for Russians that left after 2022.

-Among those who returned to Russia, 34% complained that they could not find good jobs abroad. Another 34% missed their homeland and 32% were dissatisfied with the country they had moved to. The numbers planning to return were higher among people who left due to fear of the draft, for family reasons or in search of better opportunities.

-By profession, 43% of those surveyed worked in tech. The most popular destinations for them were Cyprus, Spain and Portugal. Workers in the arts, culture, science education and media made up another 21% of those who left, with France, Israel and Britain the most popular destinations. Since leaving, 7% have set up their own business and 28% plan to do so. The most popular locations for starting a new enterprise were Argentina, Brazil and Spain, along with Serbia, Montenegro, Georgia and the United States.

Why the world should care

People who left Russia after 2022 were mainly motivated either by politics (their opposition to the Kremlin and the war) or fear of being mobilized. For the most part, neither group seems interested in coming back.

By James Carden, Substack, 4/15/25

Only three months into his second term, Donald Trump’s national security team looks to be seriously divided. As I reported late last year as the administration was taking shape, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who led the transition and is known to have played a major role in vetting candidates for top national security posts, was intent on repeating the mistakes of the first Trump term by handing hardline neoconservatives plum roles within the administration, including, fatefully, the job of national security adviser to Florida Congressman Michael Waltz.

The division between America First stalwarts such as Vice President JD Vance and neocons like Waltz burst out into the open last month thanks to Signal-gate. The decision to bomb the Houthis (and killing at least 13 civilians in the process) was met with childish exuberance by the likes of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Vance, on the other hand, was the sole participant on the now infamous chat to express any reservations about the (pointless, illegal, immoral, and counterproductive) airstrikes. Addressing the underlying motives for the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes is how an America First, rather than an AIPAC First, foreign policy ought to be conducted.

That aside, last week Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff, who is Secretary of State in all but name, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Witkoff, like his boss, appears to favor dialogue and diplomacy over endless war. To the former real estate moguls, it’s about the art of the deal. Witkoff’s elevation over the ostensible Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recalls a time when the national security advisers under Nixon and Carter (Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski) ran roughshod over the good men (William Rogers and Cyrus Vance) who were then serving as Secretary of State. The difference here of course is that while the nation would have been far better served if Rogers and Vance had won their respective power struggles with Kissinger and Brzezinski, President Trump has made the right call in downgrading Rubio. Trump appears equally intent on downgrading Rubio’s department–proposing a 50 percent cut in the State Department’s budget for FY2026.

Not surprisingly, the divide between the Neocon (Waltz, Rubio) and the American First (Vance, Gabbard) camps extends to the administration’s policies toward Russia, Iran and Africa.

The recent Russian airstrikes on Sumy only underscore the humanitarian imperative to put an end to the conflict. On that score, Europe is being particularly unhelpful, its continent-wide policy hijacked by the smallest yet hardest-line nations within the EU. A former Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, is at the forefront of the effort to prolong the war in her new role as the EU’s chief diplomat. Last week, European states committed to sending $24 billion in military aid to Ukraine to Kiev. This no doubt came as welcome news to Trump administration hard-liners. According to a Tuesday (April 14) report in the Wall Street Journal, Rubio and Trump’s Envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, have “recommended more caution when dealing with Putin and for a harder line against Moscow’s demands for territorial concessions from Kyiv.” Yet, the Journal concedes that Trump continues to back Witkoff in his effort to broker a deal to end the fighting.

Trump and Witkoff are facing similar headwinds from their own team when it comes to talks with Tehran. Witkoff has said publicly that Trump has suggested the establishment of “a verification program so no one has to worry about the weaponization of your [Iran’s] nuclear material.” The mere prospect of Witkoff succeeding (and thereby thwarting Netanyahu’s long held dream of an American war on Iran) has the neocons foaming at the mouth. Matthew Continetti, who, like his father-in-law Bill Kristol, has never been shy about his desire to send your kids to fight in wars he never would, believes that Iran is ripe (yet again) for regime change. And, unfortunately, there are elements within the Republican party and Trump’s own NSC that are inclined to agree.

One such Trump adviser is the improbable Sebastian Gorka, who is now serving as NSC senior director for counterterrorism. Unceremoniously shown the door during Trump’s first term, the Hungarian-British operative is back with a vengeance. According to career neocon stenographer Eli Lake, upon returning to the White House this year, one of the first things Gorka did was to,

…order new lanyards for his team with eight letters and an ampersand: WWFY & WWKY. These cryptic abbreviations were drawn from a quote from Gorka’s boss, President Donald Trump: “We will find you, and we will kill you.”

The terrorists Gorka wants to find and kill seem to be, well, everywhere. At his urging, Trump has already launched airstrikes on Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Somalia looms large in Gorka’s imagination and a battle seems to be shaping up within the administration over what approach to take in Somalia as the terrorist group Al Shabab threatens Mogadishu. Last Thursday (April 10) the New York Times reported that at an interagency meeting in early April,

…Mr. Gorka is said to have argued against shrinking the U.S. presence, contending that it would be intolerable to let Al Shabab take over the country and proposing to instead step up strikes targeting militants.

Intolerable for whom?

Cooler heads are said to be arguing for closing the US Embassy in Mogadishu and withdrawing diplomatic personnel from the country. They should also consider withdrawing the 500-600 American troops stationed there as well.

By Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone, 4/1/25

Leaked documents show UK intelligence operatives grooming British politicians to silence academics expressing skepticism of London’s Ukraine proxy war effort. One of the targets, Richard Sakwa, believes the campaign resulted in real-world harassment.

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Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal a high-level British intelligence plot to smear and silence British political scientists such as Richard Sakwa, who is widely regarded as one of the English-speaking world’s foremost authorities on Russia.

In a March 2022 email entitled “Russians in our Universities,” British military intelligence officer and former senior NATO advisor Chris Donnelly accused Sakwa of being a Russian “fellow traveller” who’d been “gradually breaking cover,” insisting the professor was “far too well-informed about Russian strategy to be called just ‘a useful idiot.’” Another email reveals Donnelly fantasizing about publicly exposing the Sakwa for being “funded by Russian entities” – a claim the professor strenuously denies.

Donnelly fired off the emails just two weeks after the UK’s then-Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi pledged that the British government was “already on the case and is contacting [their] universities,” after being asked whether the UK government would intervene directly to stop anti-war academics from “acting as useful idiots for President Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine.”

The Grayzone has revealed Donnelly as a key figure behind a secret British military and spying cell dubbed Project Alchemy, which was created in early 2022 to keep Ukraine fighting “at all costs.” A core component of that effort was to silence journalistic voices and media outlets – including this one – deemed a threat to London’s control of the proxy war’s narrative.

The newly-exposed messages show that Donnelly was conducting similar operations in the academic world as well. Though Professor Sakwa has long challenged dominant Western narratives on Putin’s Russia, criticizing both NATO’s rampant expansionism and its refusal to include Moscow in the European security structure following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, he was effectively disappeared from mainstream debates on the conflict since the Ukraine proxy war erupted.

The leaked emails strongly suggest the direct intervention of Donnelly, a known British intelligence asset, may have been responsible for marginalizing Sakwa. Messages show Donnelly contacted influential UK lawmakers to stamp out the “influence” of Sakwa, whom he called his “number one” target, while calling for the blacklisting of other academics who might expose inconvenient truths about the conflict in Ukraine.

Donnelly’s determination to silence the professor apparently extended beyond the duration of the conflict. In private, he fretted that once “fighting slows down” in Ukraine, “appeasers” would “start talking about lifting the sanctions,” and “the Sakwas of this world will be spearheading the effort to change Western strategy.” In other words, even when the war ended in failure for Kiev and its proxy backers, Connelly and his associates would remain determined to prevent any public reconsideration of the West’s relationship with Russia.

Sakwa “a redoubtable opponent” who’s taken “very seriously”

While recently smeared as a Kremlin apologist and “disinformation” peddler in certain quarters, Sakwa’s works have historically elicited glowing mainstream reviews. Even after the Ukraine proxy war erupted, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs journal positively appraised the professor’s recent books dissecting the Russiagate fraud, and the origins of the Ukraine conflict. Clearly, it was Sakwa’s credibility and formidable body of knowledge that made him a target of British intelligence following the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

In emails exchanged with James Sherr, a career think tank staffer who once headed the Russia and Eurasia program at the British government-linked think tank Chatham House, Donnelly expressed discomfort about the prospect of Sakwa’s ideas reaching impressionable Western audiences. Sakwa’s “knowledge of Russian politics is very high,” Donnelly warned Sherr, making him “a redoubtable opponent” whom the “majority” of British students and “junior/mid-level politicians” would likely take “very seriously.”

Sherr responded that he had “no doubt” Sakwa was “on the Kremlin payroll,” but insisted the academic criticized NATO expansion “not [for] money,” but “out of hatred of the United States.” If there was “hard evidence” that Sakwa was “funded by Russian entities, then this should be made known,” Sherr added, but even if footage existed of Vladimir Putin personally “writing [Sakwa] a cheque over dinner… the University of Kent will continue to employ him, and he will continue to be adored by those who adore him.”

Donnelly agreed with his friend’s false assessment, but was evidently undeterred from pursuing Sakwa, telling Sherr, “we can try!” He added that Andrew Monaghan, another academic who had long warned of the perils of military confrontation with Russia, hadn’t been heard from “for a while,” and asked Sherr: “who else should we be keeping an eye out for?” A day later, Donnelly posed the same question to his longtime associate Victor Madeira, an academic closely connected to former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove.

This followed another email by Donnelly to Conservative MP Bob Seely, a hawkish military veteran and then-member of parliament’s foreign affairs committee. Donnelly asked Seely whether he was “concerned about Russian influence in our Universities,” because “if so, I’ve got some interesting material for you.” Forwarding the unsolicited email to Madeira, Donnelly boasted, “l may have an opportunity to get this addressed,” and bragged that he would soon be discussing the subject with the then-chair of British Parliament’s education select committee.

“cells in the British governmental apparatus…which subvert the fundamental principles of British democracy”

In comments to The Grayzone, Sakwa said Donnelly’s actions were “extremely disturbing,” and suggested the emails indicate “there are cells in the British governmental apparatus who are working in ways which subvert the fundamental principles of British democracy, tolerance of divergent political views, and the encouragement of open debate and dialogue.”

The professor argues that “by traducing scholars and civic activists,” Donnelly and his collaborators “precisely undermine the values which they are ostensibly trying to defend,” and “practice guilt by association.”

“The assumption [that] questioning official policy on a particular issue must be motivated by mercenary concerns, in this case being in the pay of Moscow, is a dreadful manifestation of the McCarthyism we had hoped we put behind us with the end of the Cold War,” Sakwa adds.

“In fact, it demonstrates [that] Cold War II is potentially more dangerous than the first, with the attempt to blacken the reputation of critical voices, and thus assumedly weaken their public impact. This is not only morally and politically wrong in itself, but also damages the possibility of coherent, informed and dispassionate analysis, and thus weakens the coherence of intelligent policy-making in its entirety.”

When Sakwa retired from his university position in August 2022, he was unaware that British intelligence operatives had waged a plot to silence him for over a year. Now, however, the professor wonders whether an incident that occurred two months prior may have been related. That June, the Canterbury anti-war movement organized an event at which Sakwa was the guest speaker. “To our astonishment, about 20 Ukrainians and associates picketed the meeting, with banners condemning me and the organizers,” he told The Grayzone.

Rather than being turned away, the protesters were invited in – “minus placards,” Sakwa noted. However, “they then proceeded to try to disrupt the meeting,” until the event chair warned them “that if their anti-democratic behavior continued, they would be asked to leave.” Following the warning, the event continued in peace. Sakwa said “most” attendees felt his address “struck the appropriate balance between sympathy for the plight of the Ukrainian people, and political analysis of the situation.”

The incident likely would have ended there, but counter-demonstrators seized on leaflets calling for an official inquiry into the ever-mysterious Bucha incident which were distributed by another attendee. Ukrainian officials and their British backers charge that Russian forces carried out a massacre of innocent civilians in the city of Bucha, but have blocked attempts at UN investigation, and refused to release names of purported victims.

While Sakwa believes calls for such a probe to be “not unreasonable”, he said he had nothing to do with the leaflets’ production, and was unaware of their contents at the time. He only learned of their existence when one of the Ukrainian activists who disrupted the event accused him of condoning “conspiracy theories,” leading the University of Kent to open an internal inquiry.

“To the University of Kent’s credit, they dismissed any potential charge of misconduct, and defended the principle of freedom of speech. The institution lived up to its reputation for collegiality and the robust defence of academic freedom,” Sakwa says. “However, the initial charge was clearly malicious and malevolent, and demonstrates the danger of ‘Ukraine syndrome’ damaging the quality of civic life in England.”

Today, “Ukraine syndrome” remains alive and well in Britain as Prime Minister Keir Starmer proudly declares his desire to deploy troops and aircraft to Kiev to participate in hostilities despite UK military chiefs warning that London lacks the men and materiel to even consider such a mission. A depressing official review of the British Army has prompted the head of the Financial Times’ editorial board to conclude “their forces would struggle to fight a European war lasting more than a few weeks.”

While Richard Sakwa and other genuine regional experts warned over many years that transforming Ukraine into an anti-Russian bastion would lead to disaster for all involved, Western leaders turned instead to the paranoid pronouncements of spies like Chris Donnelly for guidance on how to respond to Moscow’s forcefully stated opposition to Ukraine joining NATO. And before the belligerent plans of Donnelly and his cadre could be discredited, they made certain that no one would be left to call them out.

Reuters, 4/15/25

Summary

-Russia says not easy to agree Ukrainian peace

-Russia will not give up lands in Ukraine

-Russia will never depend on the West again

-Globalisation of world economy is over, Lavrov says

MOSCOW, April 15 (Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that it was not easy to agree with the United States on the key parts of a possible peace deal to end the war in Ukraine and that Russia would never again allow itself to depend economically on the West.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly said he wants to end the “bloodbath” of the three-year war in Ukraine, though a deal has yet to be agreed.

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“It is not easy to agree the key components of a settlement. They are being discussed,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper when asked if Moscow and Washington had agreement on some aspects of a possible peace deal.

“We are well aware of what a mutually beneficial deal looks like, which we have never rejected, and what a deal looks like that could lead us into another trap,” Lavrov said in the interview published in Tuesday’s edition.

The Kremlin on Sunday said that it was too early to expect results from the restoration of more normal relations with Washington.

Lavrov said that Russia’s position had been set out clearly by President Vladimir Putin in June 2024, when Putin demanded Ukraine must officially drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed by Russia.

“We’re talking about the rights of the people who live on these lands. That is why these lands are dear to us. And we cannot give them up, allowing people to be kicked out of there,” Lavrov said.

Russia currently controls a little under one fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and parts of four other regions Moscow now claims are part of Russia – a claim not recognised by most countries.

Lavrov praised Trump’s “common sense” and for saying that previous U.S. support of Ukraine’s bid to join the NATO military alliance was a major cause of the war in Ukraine.

But Russia’s political elite, he said, would not countenance any moves that led Russia back towards economic, military, technological or agricultural dependence on the West.

The globalisation of the world economy, Lavrov said, had been destroyed by sanctions imposed on Russia, China and Iran by the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden.

Biden, Western European leaders and Ukraine describe Russia’s 2022 invasion as an imperial-style land grab, and repeatedly vowed to defeat Russian forces.

Putin casts the war in Ukraine as part of a battle with a declining West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by enlarging the NATO military alliance and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence.

By Eugene Doyle, Solidarity, 3/29/25

The Germans have a word for it – as they always do.  Putinversteher – one who “understands” Putin. It is meant as a slur and has recently gained traction in Western IR (international relations) circles but Professor Geoffrey Roberts, a British historian of Russia, embraces the term.  “I think it’s a very good term,” he told me last week. “It’s my professional responsibility to try to understand Putin.”  

He is one of a growing number of ‘free thinkers’ who are rejecting the standard Western propaganda model that frames Putin and Russia as merchants of evil, instead ascribing to them motives that are both pragmatic and commonplace.  This leaves plenty of room to criticize Putin’s regime and its hardball geopolitics.  These academics, however, have shouldered the intellectual’s role to challenge the dominant narrative and expose underlying untruths (“Russia’s totally unprovoked war”, “Russia wants to conquer all of Ukraine”, “If we don’t stop them in Ukraine, the Russians will keep going”, etc). 

“That stuff is absolute nonsense,” Roberts says. “Yeah, Putin does have ambitions; he has ambitions to change the global polity in ways that will suit Russia and Russia’s interests.”

“Putinversteher” and Putin’s vision for a post-war world

Professor Roberts has sat in rooms with Putin, heard him speak at length, and unlike 99% of people in the West has taken the time to study his words unmediated by the various arms of the Western media. He seeks to disrupt the perceptions of a world misinformed by cartoonish good guy/bad guy narratives that make resolving crises all but impossible. 

“Putin is a visionary whose overarching goal is to end American global hegemony”, Roberts says, “and usher in a new, post-Western system of international relations – a multipolar system of sovereign states based on diversity, equality and common security. It is not an empire that Putin is seeking to build, but a new world order that will safeguard the long-term security of Russia and its civilisational values.”

Back in October I wrote an article “US is spending $28 billion to colonise your brain” which outlined the staggering sums of money spent on US disinformation/perception management campaigns which involve owning journalists, editors and entire media outlets, and which seeks to dominate our mental landscape by purging alternative voices. Swimming in this ocean of Russophobic, Sinophobic propaganda makes it all but impossible to assess Russia, the Chinese or, until recently, the Palestinians, in anything approaching a balanced way. 

Former head of the CIA Russia desk George Beebe spoke eloquently recently of the duty of analysts to “empathise” with the Russians, to walk in their shoes – which, he pointed out, is different to “sympathising” with the Russians (accepting their positions). Along with former US Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, Quincy Institute scholar Anatol Lieven and people like Pascal Lottaz, Professor Glenn Diesen and others, Geoffrey Roberts enriches our thinking at a time when the Western media seems incapable of nuanced dialogue. 

Fellow British historian Robert Skidelsky, a member of the House of Lords, spoke on Neutrality Studies last week about the danger of dragging out the war in Ukraine and having endless hostility with Russia.

“The whole European position is disingenuous. It’s misleading. It’s self-deluding. It’s as though people have had bits of their brains lobotomized so they can’t think about these things any longer. I find it terrifying.”

This is why, for all the madness, dangers and incoherence, the Trump Moment may at least be a circuit breaker, an opportunity for the West to rediscover the lost art of diplomacy. 

Challenging Putin Myths

Geoffrey Roberts has 50 years of scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union behind him. The author of many books, including Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (who led the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad) and The Soviet Union in World Politics: Coexistence, Revolution and Cold War, 1945-1991 (The Making of the Contemporary World), he has also penned innumerable articles trying to build understanding.

“One of the things I’ve been trying to do all my life is counter this vilification of Russia and, more recently, the demonization of Putin – the complete distortion of Putin’s views.”

Historians like Geoff Roberts prefer the long view, looking at events from a distance, which helps them to be as dispassionate, as objective as possible. But sometimes history calls historians to comment when the smell of cordite is still in the air. 

In terms of Russophobic propaganda, Roberts says, the last three years have been more toxic than anything he has seen.  It has compelled him, he says, to eschew some of his scholarly habits – being an “archive rat” – and step into the ring.

Through articles, interviews, YouTube platforms and his own email database he seeks “to provide alternative perspectives and to cut through the propaganda blizzard in respect to Ukraine. I also do it to make sense of it myself.”   

His 2022 article “Now or Never: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine” appeared in various outlets, including the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies. It made a significant contribution to the discussion. In June last year Brave New Europe published his “Negotiate Now, or Capitulate Later: Ten Incentives for Ukraine to Make Peace with Russia” which spelt out in crisp and sober terms the stark realities that are increasingly obvious to everyone today: Ukraine faces a crushing defeat if they press on, the West is indifferent to the death of Ukrainians, the demographic crisis is real, and to save Odessa and access to the Black Sea, Ukraine should pursue a settlement now. 

Most Ukrainians, Roberts says, now believe that even a bad peace will be better than the continuation of a disastrous losing war. Delaying and fighting on makes no sense.  As some have argued for years: Ukraine would have a brighter future as a bridge between Russia and the rest of Europe, not as a fortified outpost for either side. 

The courage to oppose a dominant discourse comes at a price. Powerful forces are pressing in on academics and others who dare to express alternative views. Staying silent or parroting the party line is the safer option. Geoff Roberts is made of sterner stuff. 

“I had that option of keeping quiet, keeping my head down. But at a certain moment, I guess in 2014 when the crisis broke, I felt compelled to comment. It’s been easier for me to dissent because I’m retired. I’m loathe to criticise anyone in academia for not speaking out. But there are younger academics who dare to speak truth to the powerless. For me, they are the true heroes of the resistance to Russophobia.”

I admire independent thinkers like Geoffrey Roberts.  They risk vilification in order to foster truth and the understanding that Ukraine is a thorny issue with faults on all the many sides of this disaster.  Without this healthy perspectivism, making peace and moving forward is blocked. Does that make me a Putinversteher? So be it. Ich bin Putinversteher.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz. This article may be reproduced without permission but with suitable attribution.