Russian journalists have quit in protest of the war and Moscow's speech restrictions; Russian businessmen have criticized their nation's leadership; the Russian military is disintegrating; Russian military bloggers are raising hell; Russian citizens are fire bombing military recruitment centers — and now a 20-year veteran of Russia's foreign ministry, Boris Bondarev, has blasted the Kremlin, saying that "after February 24, we just jumped into an abyss and there can be no going back to normal, no going back to anywhere." His is a portrait of Russia in freefalling ruin and nearly on fire.
The diplomat, who has worked on arms control at Russia’s Geneva mission, posted the above comment on his Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and emailed copies of it to media outlets and his fellow diplomats. Bondarev's disavowal and condemnation of the federation's foreign policy realm started at the top with President Putin, who he said squandered 20 years of potential national development. Instead, wrote Bondarev, Putin thrust the nation "into some kind of total horror, a threat to the world." And then the diplomat resigned.
But not before he put a few other and even more searing remarks into his farewell notice. "For 20 years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on Feb. 24 of this year," he wrote, while regretting he had not resigned sooner.
"Today the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not about diplomacy. It is all about warmongering, lies and hatred," he continued. "It serves the interests of few, the very few people thus contributing to further isolation and degradation of my country." Bondarev saw his country as it really is: "Russia no longer has allies, and there is no one to blame but its reckless and ill-conceived policy."
Mr. Bondarev is the first Russian diplomat to go public with outrage over the war and the "very few" who "live in pompous tasteless palaces," "sail on yachts," enjoy "unlimited power" and "complete impunity." Putin's diplomatic envoy for climate resigned two months ago (and left Russia) because of the war, but he did so quietly, as some midlevel civil servants have also done. Others have picked up the slack, in journalism, business, personal writings and, on occasion, in violent protest. The noisy departure of a decades-long professional in foreign policy, however, is a haymaker blow to the Kremlin's prestige, assuming some word of Bondarev's written resignation seeps into the public arena.
Russia is a powder keg and kindling is everywhere. In a phone interview with The NY Times, Bondarev admitted that his disconsolate views of the war and Russian leadership are uncommon within the diplomatic corps, but other dissenters do exist, he said. "There are people — not so few — who think as I do..... Most, I think, are still in the thrall of this propaganda that they receive and that they, in part, create." Nevertheless, small fires growing larger are appearing nearly every day in Russia, and someday, one will reach the power keg. You can smell the smoke from the eastern air.
One part of Bondarev's phone interview, I think, he might want to reframe. He told the Times that the Russian foreign ministry was to blame for the war as much as Putin. "They got Ukraine wrong, they got the West wrong, they basically got everything wrong," he said. “We diplomats of the Foreign Ministry are also at fault for this, for not passing along the information that we should have" — for "present[ing] information that was certain to be liked." His analysis omits what was far more fundamentally wrong: that Russia even pondered invasion in the first place. There was nothing to get "right"; the idea itself was tellingly corrupt.
Looking ahead, Bondarev said he was unsure of his plans. They might immediately include speaking at this week's Davos Forum; the executive director of U.N. Watch, Hillel Neuer, has asked that he be allowed to do so. Otherwise, his thoughts are drifting — smartly — to relocation. "I think that if someone offers to help [i.e., offers political asylum] in this difficult situation, I think it would be very gratefully accepted.” Absolutely, since he added that returning to Russia "would not be a very good idea right now."
There is one thing that Boris Bondarev knows for sure: "I simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless and absolutely needless ignominy." Even more liberating, though, is that he can now watch the powder keg explode from afar.