Arkady Babchenko on the Ukraine war and Russia’s future

Mr. Babchenko, you left Russia in 2017 because you feared for your life because of your criticism of Putin. Today you have asylum in a European country, but your current place of residence is secret. How big is the risk for you right now?

It was thirty years after Salman Rushdie. Money paid for the hit man who was sent to hunt me, but the job isn’t done. One of the potential killers disclosed the matter to the Ukrainian secret service, but the backers are still active. The chain goes all the way to Russia and probably all the way up to “Putin’s chef,” Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the security and military company Wagner, which operates on behalf of Putin. At least that’s how the Ukrainian secret service sees it.

In order to find out these connections, you even faked your assassination by Russian secret services in 2018. A not uncontroversial action.

I don’t know it. Death is part of my life. In 2014 I was about to be shot in Crimea. I was naked with a sack over my head. I could hear the soldier’s nervousness from the noise of the rifle. His bullet missed me.

Your book «Im Rausch. Russia’s War». It’s a kind of diary made up of essays or Facebook posts, going back ten years. Three days after Russian troops began invading Ukraine in February of this year, you write: “Russia lost the war. Even now.”

If you look at Russia’s goal today, namely the total subjugation of Ukraine, then you can say that this goal has been missed by a wide margin. Ukraine kept its sovereignty, its army, and now the counterattack is coming.

At the moment the situation is such that the war can last for a very long time. You speak of a “Syrianization” of the war.

The Russians thought they could do it like they did in Syria, but there’s no comparison. Ukraine is not Syria. The country has 40 million inhabitants and measures a thousand kilometers from north to south. Russia just doesn’t have enough missiles to turn Ukraine into a Syria. The Russian army is already running out of material. But what is like in Syria: The aggressor has targeted housing developments.

You know the Russian military from your own experience, as a young soldier you were twice in the Chechen war and you have described your traumatic experiences in the book The Color of War. The desolate army and its brutalized morale are drawn in the darkest colors. What does Vladimir Putin know about his army and the chances of this war?

Every dictator lives in his information bubble. Putin hates bad news. He doesn’t use the internet. The news is placed in paper form on the table for him. Dictators do not necessarily surround themselves with professionals, but with loyal, very devoted beings.

Possibly Putin lives on the idea of ​​just winning the war?

I don’t know, but he hates losing. Whatever one may think of the qualities and capabilities of the Russian army, it is absolutely superior in terms of human resources. I am convinced that Russia will launch another attack on Kyiv.

Putin will send more people to war?

If you look at Russia’s population of 140 million people, you can assume that 100 million of them live in poverty. For these people, the current soldier’s pay of 200,000 rubles is a fortune. Therefore, one can assume that Putin can recruit 200,000 men at any time. So he still has supplies. There are also around 400,000 inmates in Russian prisons. If just one in ten agrees to serve in the army, that’s enough.

You went to war in Chechnya when you were eighteen or nineteen. Do you understand the young people who are now going to war in Ukraine?

There are many who are not informed. Not on the Internet and nowhere else either. Those who are eighteen today actually only know Ukraine as an independent state, comparable to France or Germany. But anti-Ukrainian propaganda works great in Russia. It is the main weapon of Russia. It’s not the submarines or the nuclear missiles, it’s the zombie box of television.

Can you contribute to a kind of counter-narrative with your work? Who else can you reach in Russia?

nobody. I don’t even want that. The time for talks is over. It’s like the war year 1943. Nobody would have asked if it wasn’t better to talk to each other. I no longer associate myself with Russia. I’m Ukrainian now.

Your relatives still live in Russia?

Yes, my mother stayed.

Are you talking to your mother?

Practically not. Very rare. She considers me a traitor and believes that there are fascists in Ukraine. When I was eighteen as a soldier in Chechnya, my mother followed me. She has seen everything. She hated the Russian army. Yeltsin and Putin. Now she thinks I ran away as a traitor. This is the effect of Russian television.

In which direction is this re-education of one’s own people going?

Europe must finally understand that a fascist state has formed on its eastern border. Not a fascism-like, but a de facto fascist state. Russia has already included in its official ideology the annihilation of neighboring nations. And this fascist state will exist for a long time. At least fifteen, twenty years. And you have to adapt to that.

What is fascistic about contemporary Russia?

The goals and the propaganda. In 2014 I saw an entire nation go insane.

During the occupation of Crimea?

Yes. In history class at school, I didn’t understand how a people could get so mad as to burn people in crematoria and scatter the ashes in the fields. I saw it with my own eyes in 2014. People were crazy. A Russian professor of geology explained to me at the time that Ukraine had to be destroyed. Since then I have had no more questions about German history. If you look at German history, you know what is happening in Russia today. It’s only going to get worse.

How exactly can it get worse?

I’m afraid that the big war is still ahead of us. After the first defeats, Russia might withdraw and regroup, but attack again after a few years. Other locations will be Kazakhstan and Moldova. Maybe the Baltics. The problem is not only Putin, but also what comes after. The only thing that works against Russia’s expansion plans is total isolation. Maybe it will help if the country is forced to withdraw into itself. But maybe it won’t work either, because Russia is enormously rich in raw materials.

Her book brings together blog entries from the last ten years. The entire construction plan of the Russian aggression against Ukraine is already foreshadowed. Shouldn’t the West have just read along?

The West acts out of a mixture of naivety and economic self-interest. Europe has not fought for 75 years and believed that there would be no more shocks. NATO itself considered itself superfluous.

Has the West failed to notice that Putin has been permanently living in a world at war, at least since working for the secret service?

All of Russia is always at war. After the end of World War II, Russia took part in forty wars. A war every two years. Always on foreign territory! Putin is a creature of this permanent state of war.

You write that Putin managed to get the worst out of people.

Here, too, we have not yet reached the deepest abyss. There’s no bottom, we’re still in the middle of the fall. Soon they will start hanging gays in Red Square. The propaganda works. And the fear in the population is increasing.

How great is the suffering capacity of the Russian people?

The Russian people have lived in humility for three hundred years and may continue to do so for another three hundred years. The West still sees the Russian people as a subject of politics. In truth, however, it is only an object of politics. It has no impact at all. The only thing that matters is the Tsar’s will. It’s always been like that. And so it will always be.

We thank Olaf Kühl for translating during the interview.