This week, our guest is Andrew Roth, Global Affairs Correspondent at The Guardian. We discuss the twists and turns of Andrew’s ten-year career as a reporter in Moscow.
This week, our guest is Andrew Roth, Global Affairs Correspondent at The Guardian. We discuss the twists and turns of Andrew’s ten-year career as a reporter in Moscow.
*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter Slezkine: Hi, all! I, once again, have to start with what has become a traditional disclaimer during these turbulent times. Andrew and I recorded this episode two weeks ago, before the recent flurry of developments surrounding Ukraine. Our conversation covered the entirety of Andrew's 10-year career as a reporter in Russia, so nothing that follows is at all out-of-date, and some of it might have even been proven a bit prophetic.
I just wanted to explain why we don't address any of the dramatic twists and turns of the last few days. With that, I hope you enjoy the episode.
I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue Project at the Stimson Center. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
[00:00:58] Andrew Roth: (Speaks Russian) I'm going to keep that in.
[00:01:02] Peter Slezkine: What did you say?
[00:01:03] Andrew Roth: I'm going to keep that in. (Speaks Russian)
[00:01:04] Peter Slezkine: Absolutely.
[00:01:06] Andrew Roth: (Speaks Russian)
[00:01:07] Peter Slezkine: My guest today is Andrew Roth, Global Affairs Correspondent at The Guardian, based in Washington, D.C., not London, because the special relationship has a certain hierarchy, I suppose. So, we first met in 2012, 2013 through mutual friends in Moscow, is that right?
[00:01:27] Andrew Roth: That's right, yeah. We were living on Bolshaya Spasskaya, over by the train station. So, you and I were living, I think, in the same building. Then, we met accidentally outside one day. Or maybe I'm just making that up, yeah.
[00:01:39] Peter Slezkine: Yeah, this is already mythology instead of reporting. I think you had lived in the building that my family apartment was in. But by the time I met you, you had moved out. In any case, you were already working as a journalist then at some publication that I can't remember. I wasn't doing much of anything at all between undergraduate and graduate studies.
[00:02:04] Andrew Roth: That's right. It was the good old times, like, our, kind of, salad days. But we were in Russia. I was working at a publication called Russia Profile, which was, at the time, owned by RIA Novosti. It no longer exists, naturally. And it was a very different time in Russia, when there were a lot of young journalists running around a lot of young academics, NGO workers, et cetera, et cetera, nobody is really there anymore. But it was very nice to meet you when we were there, because I felt like there was a lot of young talent and people who were studying the country and trying to figure out what was going on. And it feels like everything has gotten quite grim at this point.
[00:02:37] Peter Slezkine: I'll put young talent in my title, although I don't know if I deserve either descriptors. So, can you give us a quick rundown of the media platforms that you've worked for over the years and where you've been based?
[00:02:51] Andrew Roth: Yeah, of course. So, I'm from New York, originally. And I moved out to Russia in 2011. That was my first job after college. So, I'd studied Russian. I studied math as well at Stanford.
[00:03:02] Peter Slezkine: So, you went from Brooklyn to the bay.
[00:03:05] Andrew Roth: Brooklyn to the bay.
[00:03:06] Peter Slezkine: Studied Russian at Stanford and then went directly to Russia to become a reporter. Were there some detours along the way?
[00:03:12] Andrew Roth: Not really. I had six months on my couch in New York, figuring out what to do after college. I studied Turkish for the summer, and I nearly moved to southern Turkey. But ultimately, there was a job open as a starting journalist in Russia, and I decided it was a thing that I would do for one year or so, just get out there, try it out, adventure to tell my friends about later on. And 10 years later, you're still working there. So, that’s the kind of thing that happens.
So, I moved to Russia in 2011. In 2012, I started working for The New York Times. Ellen Barry was the bureau chief there, Andrew Kramer, a couple others. Went through. And there was a lot happening in Russia at the time. And this was right as Putin was coming back for his third term. So, we've gone through the Medvedev years, and the country was changing quite quickly, and there were a lot of these big stories that made it into the news. Pussy Riot was going on while I was there, kicking out a lot of the NGOs, the Dima Yakovlev Law that made it illegal for Americans to adopt Russian children, various other things that indicated that things were, maybe, not going in a great direction. Nut that definitely picked up in 2014 when the war…
[00:04:18] Peter Slezkine: That started in 2011, when you first arrived. So, you arrived out of Stanford, having studied Russian, presumably, read some nice Russian books. How did you like the place once you arrived? How long did it take you to become a truly jaded journalist?
[00:04:33] Andrew Roth: I was pretty terrified when I arrived as a journalist. And I very much did not know, kind of, what I was doing, when I got there and when I started doing that kind of work. I'd interned for a summer, but just the day to day, the will to pick up the phone and start, like, looking for people, finding people, calling them, especially because I was doing this in Russian. I'd been studying it, but to actually try to do the full job in Russian, it was very steep learning curve when I first started out. And that was balanced by the fact that nobody was really reading what I was writing. So, if I screwed up, then nobody would know about it anyway. And that, kind of, took the pressure off a little bit.
[00:05:05] Peter Slezkine: But how did you like the country? Because you were not only learning to become a journalist, you had also visited Russia, which is a massive and interesting place.
[00:05:14] Andrew Roth: I guess, at the time, like, my sense was that, I mean, it was still very rough around the edges, but that the people were living, I guess, in a, kind of, more direct, immediate way than I think that they were in the States.
So, my first sense was just that it was very spontaneous. Like, the ways that you ended up in different places and that different things could happen. You would start the night meeting, a couple of friends, they would take you over to somebody else's house, where you'd get introduced to maybe somebody like yourself or Russian friends. You guys start drinking. You're hanging out. And all of a sudden, it's 4:30 in the morning. You become best friends with the people that are in the kitchen. You've basically talked with them through your entire life. And you got to get home and then do a bunch of stuff and then get up for work the next morning, or maybe just go directly there.
So, actually, I remember one thing that the day that I showed up at the office, the people that I was working with were really just, you know, dour. They just seemed really mean, basically, when I walked into this office at Russia Profile. And I'm like, “Man, these guys are really not friendly. Don't want to hang out.” It only comes out, like, two months later, basically, they're like, “Yeah, we were that way because we had jumped directly from the bar when you walked in for your first day.” So, I guess I'm talking a lot about drinking, but in general, you know, the culture there was that it would be very spontaneous. People aren't planning three months in the future. They're not thinking so much about, “What's your five year plan,” putting away money.
[00:06:32] Peter Slezkine: Soviets were good at five-year plans. That's not a Soviet American characteristic.
[00:06:34] Andrew Roth: Well, the Soviets were good at five-year plans. No, yeah. But just felt like anything could happen any day.
[00:06:38] Peter Slezkine: But so, what did happen in a social sense? Who were you hanging out with, other Western journalists?
[00:06:43] Andrew Roth: At the time, there were a lot of… there was, you know, the Western journalists were, it was a huge number of them then, you know, hundreds. And there was a group that was called, like, the hack pack, which, basically, they would spend a lot of time hanging out, talking about stories.
[00:06:57] Peter Slezkine: So, you even working for something as low profile as Russia Profile were recognized as part of the group and were paddling around with The New York Times, BBC, Guardian, and then other journalists from major platforms.
[00:07:10] Andrew Roth: No, absolutely. I mean, you might hang out with them, but there was a sense of, like, who the adults are and who the kids are. And so, I still see people now that I remember meeting at this time and I'm still thinking, like, “Oh, yeah, that's, like, I don't know, that's, like, Simon Schuster or that's, like, you know, Simon Ostrovsky or something like that.” They were more established journalists at the time. And so, you still always… it's like being a kid when you go back home. You know, you freeze yourself in that place with your relations to the other people. And so, I still, kind of, recognize that, like, I remember the generation that was above me when I showed up, and they still remain like that, even though we've become colleagues at different papers, basically.
So, aside from them, yeah, there was a kind of symbiosis and you were meeting a lot of people who worked in liberal media in Russia at the time as well, all the, kind of, usual suspects for liberal Russian journalists, who, at the time, were becoming like a real force. This was around the time of Bolotnaya.
[00:08:04] Peter Slezkine: Tell us what Bolotnaya, what it means.
[00:08:04] Andrew Roth: Yeah. So, Bolotnaya is an area of Moscow. It's close to the Kremlin. It was the site for some of the biggest anti-government protests that existed in the country, I mean, basically, ever. It was the biggest protest movement of the Putin era.
[00:08:18] Peter Slezkine: Which was triggered by his…
[00:08:20] Andrew Roth: Which was triggered by…
[00:08:20] Peter Slezkine: What were you going to say?
[00:08:22] Andrew Roth: Which was triggered by his decision to come back in. I was going to say, unless Peter wants to, wants to correct me. I'm always a little bit afraid to say something, like, so categorical about Russia in front of you, because I feel like you might jump in and correct me at some point.
[00:08:32] Peter Slezkine: Well, it depends on when it happened. I'm a historian, so 2012 is not quite distant enough in the past. You're a journalist, maybe it's a little bit too far over the horizon for you to remember a few facts.
[00:08:43] Andrew Roth: I'm trying to remember as I go, but I'll see how I do. So, jump in to correct me if I get anything wrong.
Basically, in 2011, Vladimir Putin says that he's going to come back for a third term. This is a major turning point in Russia because there was a sense when he handed over to Dmitry Medvedev that maybe he would step back from politics a little bit and that there would be successive generations of other people running the country rather than him. So, this was the moment that people realized, “Okay, that's not going to be the case, and this might be a dictator for life kind of situation, president for life, and the country might slip further into authoritarianism.” Spoiler, that does eventually happen. So, anyway, in 2011, Putin says he's going to come back. And that's when, for the first time, we start to see real serious protests inside the country that grow into this gigantic protest movement.
[00:09:30] Peter Slezkine: But were you excited by this prospect? So, you weren't just a journalist covering these events, you probably felt a part of it, to some extent, the people protesting were from your friend circle, part of this historical exciting shift to, perhaps, a greater degree of democracy in Russia.
[00:09:51] Andrew Roth: I mean, I think I was witnessing it, but I was very careful, I feel like, not to overstep the lines. And I think that people were doing that to varying degrees, and people were making up and discovering their, kind of, personal ethics in journalism as though it was happening.
I was super excited to be there and, like, watching it, even though I was not super bullish on the idea that this was going to create a revolution in Russia, there were too many forces on the other side. And the other thing I thought to myself is these people look a lot like me. So, yes, I can imagine that, in another place, in another time, if I had been there, I would have been protesting as well. That's definitely a possibility.
[00:10:23] Peter Slezkine: But it's not entirely hypothetical. So, obviously, you're there in a different professional role, but most of your friends were either from the crowd that was protesting, or they were from the liberal opposition media that was both reporting on and supporting these protests, right?
[00:10:43] Andrew Roth: I would say the majority of my friends protested or were sympathetic to the protests against Putin's return for a third term. And a lot of the Russian journalists that we knew at the time, people who were at Novaya Gazeta, at Kommersant, who I'm still friends with now, a lot of them were, yeah, they were at the protests, either personally protesting or they were covering them.
But I think for the Russians, in particular, there was a different form of journalism or a different style of it. I'm thinking of guys, like, I don't know, Ilya Azar would be a, kind of, leading one, I would think. He saw it that journalists have to have a, kind of, position and a public position, too. Whereas, in the United States, we might say you have to stay away from any kind of… you know, you have to act as though you don't have a political affiliation.
I do think that a lot of the journalists in that case did get involved. They were very clearly part of the protests. They were out there holding signs as well. But they were also writing about it in their publications, like Novaya Gazeta. I do feel like there's something more honest in that, in the idea that we all do have biases and sometimes it's worth just coming out and saying it and, kind of, living that in your reporting as well. That can go bad, too, though, because RT, Russia Today, had the same ethos. And they were basically, like, “Yeah, we're biased. And this is what we think.” So, they leaned into…
[00:11:52] Peter Slezkine: So, what's the difference, other than your sympathies?
[00:11:53] Andrew Roth: Yeah, I don't like Russia Today, would be one of my sympathies. I guess, it explains their popularity, to a certain degree. Because they struck a nerve. In the same way in the U.S. now people want authenticity, they want, kind of, verve. They don't want to feel like they're being lied to. At least they feel like that thing is being clear about what its biases are.
So, it can speak more sharply, more aggressively, and maybe do something that's gonna bring the reader in much more. These Russian journalists, I think that they were pretty clear about where their loyalties lied, but they also wrote some of the best stories about the protest movement because they got close to these people. They were close to people like Navalny, close to Ilya Yashin or Boris Nemtsov. These are all different protest leaders who they were able to write good stories about because they were close to them, because they were their friends.
[00:12:39] Peter Slezkine: Let's try to explore the sociology of foreign reporting in Russia over the decade plus that you were there. So, how many foreign reporters were in Moscow at a given time? What range of publications? What was the relationship like with local Russians?
[00:12:57] Andrew Roth: When I got there, there must have been hundreds of foreign reporters working for different places. So, very large journalist crowd, I'd say, more than 100 Americans and hundreds of others from all the European publications had somebody as well.
[00:13:11] Peter Slezkine: Did you know, basically, all of them professionally and socially? Or were there cliques within that larger crowd?
[00:13:18] Andrew Roth: There definitely were cliques. There were people who had been there for a very long time. And there was people who had been friends for a long time, people who had beef for a very long time. It was like a little… I mean, Hack Pack is a good description of it, because it was like a little ecosystem in this country. And it is easy to get insular within that as well. You know, you go out for drinks with those people. They share the same experiences that you do, which is being a foreign journalist in Russia is, like, a sign that you can't really take off. It becomes your identity, because any conversation with a Russian person, as soon as you say, “I'm an American journalist,” like, they're immediately going to want to talk about, what do you think about our country? What do you think about how you report in my country? Is it fair, is it fair, is it not fair? And the conversations get so cyclical that you could almost do them in your head at a certain point. The second a taxi driver asks me, you know, what do you do? I would be like, “Oh, man. I don't know if I could do this tonight.”
[00:14:11] Peter Slezkine: You didn't come up with a series of alternative professional stories.
[00:14:15] Andrew Roth: I was occasionally a consultant because that would end the conversation pretty quickly. So, if I didn't feel like, I don't know… I mean, Russian taxi drivers is another topic. But multiple times, I've heard the question, “So, what do you think happened on 9/11?”
[00:14:28] Peter Slezkine: What did you think happened on 9/11?
[00:14:29] Andrew Roth: I just mean to say that, like, you would go through these conversations so many times that you could almost do them by heart.
[00:14:36] Peter Slezkine: So, there's some story. How many of the hundreds of Western journalists rushed to cover the same event and call the same sources? How much overlap was there in the work that all of you were doing in Moscow?
[00:14:51] Andrew Roth: There was a ton of overlap. Because very often, if there was something that was interesting to a Western paper in Russia, it would be big enough that it was interesting to every one of them, right?
[00:15:02] Peter Slezkine: So, how do you do that without all, sort of, stampeding over each other or calling the same person who then gives the same comment 50 times?
[00:15:10] Andrew Roth: It does happen quite a bit. I mean, you could see the kind of… the similarities in stories. There were certain analysts or certain people that were best known for covering certain things. Events like covering Pussy Riot, for instance, you know, you had dozens of different outlets that were trying to get to the same people in order to get an interview or get comments or anything else like that.
And we did stumble over each other a lot, if I can tell a story really quickly. I mean, in 2013, I was working at The New York Times. It might have been 2012, but it was after the Boston bombings. So, this did not seem like a Russia story at the time. But there was one day when, all of a sudden, they said that the names of the two brothers, and then it said that they're from Chechnya. And so, everybody rushes off to Dagestan. I had been in Dagestan recently and was able to find the contacts for the father of the bombers pretty quickly. And it ended up that everybody wanted to talk to this family. These children had carried out the Boston bombings, and it turned into, basically, like a stakeout outside of their house. And you could see how many foreign reporters there were in Russia at that point. It was more than 100, definitely went down for this event, which was on all the front pages of all the U.S. newspapers. It was quite grim in a certain way, the negotiations and the attempts to try to get an interview with his family, who couldn't say that much about why their children did what they did.
And eventually, the family was pushed to the point where they gave a press conference. And the journalists were, kind of, pushing the mother to give more comments. And somebody asked, the mother, I think at one point, “Do you regret coming to America?” And she just broke down. And I saved the audio from that because I was like, actually, I don't ever want to be in a situation where I'm getting somebody to do that on camera in front of a room of people. And, like, how can I maybe not be a part of this the next time that this happens?
[00:16:55] Peter Slezkine: For a story like that, that one, obviously, was directly related to the United States. So, Western American journalists play a particular role. But just a big story, what's the difference in the way Russian reporters and Western reporters would approach this, sort of, sources? Were there even more Russian reporters camped out of this poor woman's house in Dagestan? Or, basically, it was just you guys because it was American story?
[00:17:25] Andrew Roth: It's a lot of Americans in this case, which isn't always true, but often, I guess different stories had different interests. I think, even at a place like Pussy Riot, there would be more foreign reporters than there would be Russian reporters because I guess there are different interests in terms of what our coverage demands.
[00:17:40] Peter Slezkine: Well, let's talk about that then. What does your coverage demand? Because there are some massive stories, Boston bombing, Pussy Riot, that get headlines. But you live there throughout the year, have to find something to write day to day. So, what was newsworthy? How different was it from journalist to journalist or publication to publication? How influential are the editors? Are there stories that you would pitch that the editors were not interested in? At what point did you realize what would make the front page or what would satisfy the bosses? I mean, how does that work generally when we're not talking about the highest profile of stories?
[00:18:21] Andrew Roth: Yeah, it depends. I think, in terms of, we were driving the majority of the journalism from Moscow. People would ask me very often, especially Russians, “Do you just do what your editor says?” And the answer is no, because generally, they don't have anywhere near enough attention to be thinking about every single country on Earth and telling the journalists what to do and being across the news. So, they, kind of, rely on you to push stuff.
But there was a way of understanding, kind of, what was going to make news and what wasn't. And it's not that far away from the idea of, you know, a Google search. Editors intentionally put in words that are more likely to make articles pop up, right? This idea did not exist when I started, I think, in, like, 2012, but we know that, if a story directly involves Vladimir Putin, it's more likely to get into the news than if it involves a Moscow bureaucrat or some guy from a different part of the country, which makes sense.
You have to think, to a certain degree, about a person sitting in the United States reading this newspaper. They are not worried about 90%of the stories, I think, that Russians would be covering on a day-to-day basis because it doesn't carry any immediacy for them. So, it either has something like a very important politician involved in it, would be one. Two would be, obviously, some kind of bad accident or event that feels…
[00:19:36] Peter Slezkine: What kind of Russian politicians? Because other than Putin and whatever star opposition figure of the moment, I doubt Americans could name a single Russian politician.
[00:19:45] Andrew Roth: You're, obviously, I think, driven toward stories that, and we do this pretty much in every country where journalists work, you're supposed to, kind of, criticize power, right? The idea is that it’s not a story if somebody's not telling you not to do it, basically, that you push against whatever the, kind of, main source of power is in the country. A lot of the stories are about something that Vladimir Putin has done wrong or something that, you know, bad that somebody under him has done as well.
I could see stories like about Sergei Sobyanin, who's the mayor of Moscow, maybe Dmitry Medvedev, some of the businessmen and oligarchs who are close to Putin, those could get into the paper as well if it was a really exceptional story. But, I mean, yeah, find me an American who knows offhand who Sergei Chemezov is, or Boris Rotenberg, even. And, like, these are big names in Russia. But for us, you have to often keep it fairly simple for an American audience. I think, on the day-to-day news kind of situation, you're telling them something that they would really need to know about what's happening in the country or that they could quickly understand.
[00:20:44] Peter Slezkine: There were so not what they need to know, but what you think would register. And given their very limited awareness of Russian reality, it has to involve one of the star characters. And that is limited to Putin and the leading opposition figures.
[00:21:02] Andrew Roth: I think, on a day-to-day basis, yes. That is the status quo, I would say. That said, I mean, that's the thing that we often would have to push against because you'd say, “I think this is a good story for this reason or that reason. It shows something, like, a, kind of, lyrical way,” or, “This is a really inspiring character that I've interviewed, and I just think that this is a person that somebody would be willing to stop for a little bit and to sit down and to read, you know, the newspaper and look at it.”
[00:21:30] Peter Slezkine: Or, that be just a more colorful or lyrical version of the same general story, or would you sometimes manage to capture something about Russian life that really had nothing to do with the Kremlin and its power?
[00:21:52] Andrew Roth: I don't know. I wrote… No, the Kremlin would usually play some way into it. But yeah, I mean, there were cases where you did get to write about things that had nothing to do with that. You know, I wrote profiles of the women's Olympic hockey team, which had a very young star who was coming onto it and was just fantastic, and talking to women about what it was like to try to get back into hockey after having a baby, talking to them about the difficulties, in general, of convincing people that it's just as important a sport as men's hockey in Russia, which is a big deal. That was a story that was just 90 kilometers from Moscow and was something that was really quite exciting. But I don't think that has anything to do with the main story, right? That's something that's colorful and interesting.
[00:22:30] Peter Slezkine: [crosstalk 00:22:30] because inside Russia, female hockey is probably not central to life or sports fandom, but women's sports was clearly part of American values over the last few decades, right? So, the triumph or difficulties of women's sports in Russia is hard to divorce from a general contrast in values in the West and East.
[00:23:02] Andrew Roth: I don't think that this was, like, a story that was really about politics between the different countries. And I don't think I mentioned the U.S. in it. I do think that there's scope to talk about people's experiences that's outside of the realm of politics, which is important because Russia is a place where, once we get past talking about the Kremlin, people, if left to their own devices, they end up doing very crazy and fun and insane things. And I think it's, and not in a voyeuristic way, but it's exciting to go places and to meet people who are just on their own initiative, I think, like, really creating things. That would be fun to read about no matter what kind of paper you're in.
I was in East Ukraine in 2014 and ‘15. So, this was a period of time when there was, basically, a Russian-backed armed opposition in the country that was fighting against the Ukrainian army. Donetsk, Lugansk, these places had been taken over by the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. And I was there on that side of the lines and working as an American journalist, trying to talk to the leaders of the so-called DNR and LNRs. Basically, it was a very precarious, dangerous, but enlightening experience.
But one of my favorite stories that I did there, it was a profile and it was the last story I did for The New York Times about these two young guys who were living in Lugansk who had made a super popular YouTube channel that was all about them doing different kinds of science experiments. And it was called Kreosan, was the name of the channel. And the two kids, basically, they had deconstructed a microwave and they had started using it as like a directional weapon to blow things up. And they had videos of them just, like, blowing up, like, radios and various other, like, things. They'd cut this all together.
[00:24:41] Peter Slezkine: The great microwave radio war of the future.
[00:24:44] Andrew Roth: I mean, it was, you know, if you made this thing a lot more powerful, actually, it would be scary. So, they were doing this and they, like, they edited all of these different videos together, and then they put it up online. And it went gangbusters. They got, I think, hundreds of thousands or millions of views. They were a really funny pair of kids. And they were living in, like, the middle of a war zone while they were doing this.
And so, my videographer, like, must have seen their video online, and he was like, “Let's go meet these kids.” So, we go out to Lugansk, we meet them, and they start hanging out with us. It turns out that they're Jehovah's Witnesses, which is, first, unexpected, but second of all, it's a pretty dangerous situation for them because there's already been a lot of people of that faith in East Ukraine had been attacked for that. And they're in the middle of a war zone. They didn't talk about politics. They said they were pacifists. They didn't want to talk about the war at all.
And that is the idea. I mean, it's an ideal kind of story, in the sense that you get to show somebody's full life within the war. And you don't really politicize it yourself. You just put it all out there on the page. And you can read into this story in various ways, but I mean, to me, it was a very non-political story about, like, what is life inside of this war zone like right now?
And, yeah, it was brilliant. I very much recommend to your listeners to go look up the story. Grant Slater was my videographer, and he did an incredible cut of all the things they'd blown up. And then he put it to that piece of music. It goes like, “Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do.” It's really good.
[00:26:16] Peter Slezkine: Sounds amazing. Microwave's murdering radios is much better than human warfare.
[00:26:21] Andrew Roth: It's much better, yeah. It was a lot of fun. And it was a really grim time in East Ukraine to be doing it, so it was a really… I remember that story really fondly.
[00:26:29] Peter Slezkine: Well, so, let's talk about Ukraine now, since you were in Russia in 2014, you were in the Donbas in ‘14, ‘15.
[00:26:40] Andrew Roth: And ‘16, yeah.
[00:26:41] Peter Slezkine: And ‘16. Then, there was a bit of a freeze, and then everything kicked off again in ‘22. Where were you when the war, the most recent and massive iteration started?
[00:26:54] Andrew Roth: The full scale war?
[00:26:55] Peter Slezkine: Full scale is, I guess, yeah, the term of art.
[00:26:56] Andrew Roth: Yeah, I was in Russia when the full-scale invasion took place, when missiles started raining down on Ukraine. I'd woken up, for some reason, very early. I think that LBC, the radio station, had called me at 5:00 in the morning, and I had missed the call. But I woke up, and I looked at the phone, and I mean, I saw the news that there were all the attacks going on. And I immediately sat down at the computer and started writing. It was a day that changed everything, I guess, the day that changed, obviously, the world for Ukrainians, changed the world for Russians as well. Definitely, changed my life, changed my world, too. So, it was something that a lot of us expected to happen, but I still was hoping against it up until the very last moment.
There's a military analyst named Michael Kaufman, who writes about Russia a lot and he had come in December. And there were already a lot of signs that this war was going to start. There'd been a lot of talk about this. Is there going to be a war? Is there not? People were making fun of each other and saying, “Look, you said the war was going to start, and it hasn't.” But they were watching the signs and you see the preparations taking place. There's, kind of, a point of no return when you put all your troops on the front. And for whatever reason, I met him just before Christmas at Kofi Mania. It's a really good Russian cafe, actually. I miss some of their dishes a lot. The chicken was very good. Anyway, I met Michael Kaufman at Kofi Mania and he said to me that this is the last time that we're ever going to see each other in this country. He said that I'm never going to be able to come back, and I don't think you're going to be able to stay here either after what happens does happen. So, he said that he'd been coming in to get a last look at the country before heading back to the U.S. I'd listened to him, but I didn't really expect that his prophecy would come so true, that he was absolutely right. So, I stayed in the country. I was in Russia for about a year after the war started and reported on it. But, t's changed the country completely, and it's changed it for me as well.
[00:28:47] Peter Slezkine: So, you were reporting on the separatist or Russian side in ‘15, ‘16, and then you were in Russia but not in Ukraine in 2022. So, what was that like? Like, in 2015, how many Western journalists traveled to Donbas?
[00:29:07] Andrew Roth: 2014, 2015, I mean, I'd say also hundreds of Western journalists traveled to Donbas and worked from both sides of the lines, just like we worked from both sides of the line. I had started going there because The New York Times didn't think anything was going to happen. One colleague had gone to Kiev for Maidan, which was the revolution there. Somebody else went to Crimea because of the annexation. And they said, “You're the young guy. You go to Donetsk and do a story about miners not liking the Maidan and the, kind of, crusty, conservative east of Ukraine.” So, I went there and I really liked Donetsk. I really liked working there. It was a really impressive city. And it was a place that had, like, a really vibrant, kind of, political life when I was there, too.
So, I had started going in 2014, and already had some sources and had friends there, young Ukrainians. And I was there when the, kind of, counter-protests started, from the, kind of, you could say, pro-Russian, in some cases, Russian-backed. This is still something that's political in terms of how you talk about it. Some people see those protests in the east of the country as entirely manufactured by Russia. But the truth is that there were a lot of people who were there who were sitting around and watching what was happening in Kiev, and saying, “Well, what about us?” It was a very economic protest at first. It was, “We're the miners. Like, nobody is really helping us. And these other people are coming in and replacing the president.” That's, kind of, how they saw it.
But once Russia got more involved and started talking about the genocide of East Ukrainians or of Russians in Ukraine, I do think that Russia had a very big role in, kind of, driving up the rhetoric about what was going on there. And so, by the summer, in East Ukraine, there was already armed fighting. Some people with ties to Russia had also come in and begun taking over.
[00:30:50] Peter Slezkine: But who was doing the fighting, for the most part?
[00:30:53] Andrew Roth: For the most part, it was East Ukrainians. I mean, you could meet all the fighters. But there were Russians who were coming in as well. I mean, and we have… that's been very well-documented. Groups from Chechnya, a lot of volunteers from Russia, but also, some regular Russian army were also doing the fighting. I guess the argument would be that they were fighting against the new Ukrainian government that was led by Petro Poroshenko at the time. A lot of the grievances were based around identity and identity politics, language, rules. So, very much about the idea of, “Do we have to speak Ukrainian or do we have to use Ukrainian in official documents?” Very much the idea of, “What is our connection with Russia going to be? What about Russia and the economy, et cetera, et cetera?” I mean, it feels like an almost, like, classic kind of conflict, historically. This area of one country that has close ties to a country that's close by. And so, people start to rise up.
But I mean, for me, to watch this happening was, I guess, it was eye-opening because it was the first time that I'd been in this situation. And because I'd been going to this place from before, I recognized that Donetsk was a very complicated place. There were these, kind of, minors, people who really wanted to be closer to Russia. There was also a very large group of pro-Ukrainian people there as well. A lot of people, especially around the university, who had felt closer ties to Kiev and Ukraine felt more strongly about the Maidan and about the protests there. And I did also watch as a lot of those people were driven out. You know, this is also the first place where I saw somebody killed in Donetsk during street fights in 2014 in April.
[00:32:21] Peter Slezkine: What do you mean during street fights?
[00:32:23] Andrew Roth: So, what happened is, there was a, kind of, fight for the city at first. And so, what started as these, kind of, counter-revolution protests, people coming out and saying, “We don't like the, kind of, new government in Kiev,” and their attempts to take over the local administration building. There were also pro-Ukrainian marches that were taking place in the city as well. And so, on one of those days, you know, during one of these pro-Ukrainian marches, I remember going out on the square. It was April of 2014. It must have been like 1,000, maybe 1,500, mostly students, I'd say, on the Ukrainian, pro-Ukrainian side. And then you could see, it must have been 5,000, like, people on the other side, the, kind of, pro-Russian side. And, I mean, you could see the difference in physiology, I would say. Much bigger guys, they weren't students, these were people in their 30s and 40s. You just got the sense that evening, I guess, like, something really bad was going to happen. I think, after, like, 30 minutes or so, there was just a rush, and all of a sudden, the pro-Russian contingent just descended on the Ukrainian side, the pro-Ukrainian side.
[00:33:29] Peter Slezkine: The reverse was happening in Odessa, right, where the muscular men were the ones on the Kiev side?
[00:33:36] Andrew Roth: Yes, this is around the same… this is before the Odessa fighting and then the fire that was set.
[00:33:43] Peter Slezkine: What happened in the fire?
[00:33:44] Andrew Roth: There was street fighting, basically, on the streets of Odessa. The pro-Ukrainians were much larger, contingent there. Although, Odessa was in the balance at a certain point. Anyway, there was fighting. Pro-Russian side went into, I think it was the trade building, right? Although, I can't remember now.
[00:33:59] Peter Slezkine: The trade union.
[00:34:01] Andrew Roth: The trade union building, that's right. And then, I haven't seen the actual, like, I don't have a video of it, but the pro-Ukrainian side was throwing all sorts of Molotov cocktails at it, set fire, basically, to the building. And the number of dead was 50 or something around there. A lot of people were killed, basically, in this trade union fire inside of the building.
And it was another moment that I think radicalized and made a lot of people support the Russian side much more, I would say, in places like Donetsk or Lugansk and other places, because they felt like this incident was swept under the carpet and wasn't properly investigated.
[00:34:31] Peter Slezkine: So, if you had to write an essay now, giving us the eight-year, 10-year history leading up to 2022, because what's interesting is that both sides claim that the war did not start in February, 2022, right? The insistence in Western reporting on full-scale invasion is supposed to emphasize the fact that the Russians had been present in eastern Ukraine before and that the invasion had started earlier. The Russian narrative also insists that this started much earlier and that what happened in February isn't just naked aggression, but a response to an ongoing conflict that had its origins in Maidan. So, since both sides insist on this longer history, but it's rarely told, you don't have to write a book on the subject.
[00:35:18] Andrew Roth: But you want me to tell you what happened?
[00:35:19] Peter Slezkine: Since you were there for much of it.
[00:35:20] Andrew Roth: Yeah. I mean, the truth of what… I mean, to me, the truth of what happened is that… and this is very much, I guess, based on my experiences in Donetsk and Donetsk Lugansk in the East, is that, there was real anger there and then real dissatisfaction, I think, amongst many people about what happened on Maidan. They didn't want a revolution in the country. And that was the kind of protest that was expressed vocally, but I wouldn't say violently, necessarily, to the degree that we expected.
Russia took that protest spirit, I would say, armed it, and escalated it and turned it into a war. So, there were real grievances from the East, and I don't think that those should be ignored, about the economy and the questions of language and other stuff about what would happen next. I don't think this wouldn't be a war if Russia hadn't sent leadership in, if Russia hadn't sent money in. And I do think that Russia knew exactly what it was doing. It was a three-part story that Russia wanted. After the revolution in Kiev, the first one was the annexation of Crimea, the second was stoking a civil war in Donetsk and Lugansk, right, setting the country at war. And the third part of the plan was that the country would grow tired of, either economic chaos or the military chaos that was taking place, and that, eventually, the country would turn back toward a pro-Russian line.
And I think that they were close to that. I mean, Poroshenko lost the elections, this is the former president in 2019, to Vladimir Zelensky, who I profiled and was, like, with on the campaign trail, from pretty early in his campaign. And a lot of people, if you look at the polling, voted on a pro-peace platform. He didn't have a massive platform, but if you remember, it was very much an anti-establishment platform that he was built around. So, he's an actor, comedian. The way that he was campaigning is he didn't have campaign speeches or anything like that. He was throwing free comedy shows or low-priced comedy shows on the various damaculture, like, a, kind of, the local rec center, I guess would be the best way to describe it. And he just did this, kind of, I would say, like, pretty lowbrow comedy. He is very funny. But he did one where he was pretending to play a piano with his penis. He just was very good at connecting, I think, with people. And once again, we talked about the idea of authenticity.
[00:37:34] Peter Slezkine: Nothing more authentic than playing a musical organ with your organ.
[00:37:40] Andrew Roth: It was a riot. They really enjoyed it. And a lot of people didn't take him seriously as a kind of politician, but he knew how to connect with people and he had tapped into something in the country, which I think was being fed up with the sense of corruption and being tired of the war and other things like that.
[00:37:57] Peter Slezkine: Also, being tired of the anti-Russian line, to some extent, right?
[00:38:01] Andrew Roth: Yeah, he was the prestige of this three-part trick, right, that the Russians were trying to throw. And so, the idea was that, in the end, you bring it all back. And he seemed like a good candidate in my mind to bring it all back. Russian speaker, right? He didn't really speak Ukrainian when he became president, from Kryvyi Rih, which is a fascinating city in the east of Ukraine, which is also Russian-speaking, would seem like he would be a normal constituent for the pro-Russian line.
He wasn't part of the, kind of, popular ruling class of elites. He was elected on a, kind of, anti-establishment group. One thing that he had told me was (Speaks foreign language) which means, like, when spring comes, we're gonna plant. And the joke is basically that plant (Speaks foreign language) also means to put people in prison. So, when spring comes, we're gonna start arresting people. You know, this really angry form of a, kind of, protest vote.
[00:38:52] Peter Slezkine: Arresting establishment figures, corrupt businessmen, that sort of thing.
[00:38:58] Andrew Roth: Yes, [crosstalk 00:38:59].
[00:38:59] Peter Slezkine: The far right types, were they a target of his ire at that point, or no?
[00:39:04] Andrew Roth: Not really, no. I would say he was more a target of their ire at the time. He was definitely seen as a, kind of, I don't think people ever told me the word “traitor,” but they very much saw him as a, kind of, SOP to the Russian side, pro-Russian or somebody that secretly was harboring, kind of, like, pro-Russian views. He was, I think, somebody who had performed in Russia, I think, said that he was ready at the time to negotiate directly with Vladimir Putin, which was a difficult kind of… Petro Poroshenko or other, kind of, Ukrainian politicians at the time wouldn't have said that. So, it did seem like he was going to take a different political bent.
And I think the thing that stopped that from happening is that Russia did almost everything it could, it felt like, to antagonize Zelensky from the first day of his time in office. The day that Zelensky was inaugurated, the Russians upped the number of passports that they were going to start giving out to people who were in East Ukraine. And this creates a massive problem, because if you have millions of Russian citizens now in East Ukraine and not just pro-Russian, East Ukrainians, you get to the point where you can never really go back, right? You have to leave it so that there's a path out of this conflict. But they immediately upped the ante the second that Zelensky became president.
My understanding was that, over time, the Russians became convinced that Zelensky was not a serious person and not somebody that they could really make a deal with. And so, rather than try to come to terms with him or negotiate something out, relations got worse and worse.
[00:40:36] Peter Slezkine: But why did they come to that conclusion?
[00:40:38] Andrew Roth: Basically, because they decided that he didn't stick to the, kind of, agreements that he had made. The other thing that had happened was, I think, during the campaign, he had been pushed into saying something derogatory about Putin. And I'd heard that was something that also irritated Putin personally, and that, basically, by the time he became president and then after for the following year or two, they decided that, if they made deals with Zidensky, that he wouldn't necessarily hold up his side of the bargain.
[00:41:03] Peter Slezkine: But you're saying that, if not for a few accidents, remarks, misconceptions, that there actually was an opening there for a reconciliation between Kyiv and the Kremlin.
[00:41:18] Andrew Roth: Yeah, I think it was very much almost a personal kind of conflict emerged. And it was specifically that I think that the Kremlin decided they didn't respect Zelensky. That was the key on the Russian side. On the Ukrainian side. I mean, I do feel that Zelensky came in with a fair amount of political capital to, kind of, do what he wants. But there is a very entrenched pro-Poroshenko or, you could say nationalist or rightist, politics in the country as well. And they're very much focused in Kiev, so it's quite strong. There are a lot of people who really don't like the way that Zelensky is running the country. They very much don't like Russia. And they play a very strong part of politics inside of the country as well.
So, you could see Zelensky run against those headwinds as well from when he started as president. You could see… I profiled him and I can go back and look at it, but I spoke to a couple of people in that profile who were very much against him and suggested that he could hand away the keys to the country, that he couldn't handle Putin or that he was in Putin's pocket. There's been a drumbeat of that kind of talk since he became president and a very strong campaign against Zelensky personally. I mean, he definitely had a lot of political opposition in Kiev, saying pretty bad things about him, pretty much, from, like, the very beginning of the time that he was president.
I wouldn't say his presidency was not exceptionally successful, but it's not going to be defined now by the events of 2019 or ‘20 or ‘21. Zelensky’s political legacy is defined now by what's happened since the war. The thing is that, like, nobody really expected him to show the kind of backbone that he did after the war started. I do think he, kind of, vastly outperformed expectations, in terms of, you know, what was the old line that maybe he had been offered a ride and he said, “I don't need a ride, I need ammunition.” That quote might be apocryphal, actually, because it turns out that might not have been actually said. But it definitely was what he did in spirit. He showed up. I remember the videos of him showing up, basically, and saying that, “There are people who are saying I've fled the country. I'm here. The economy minister is here. The head of my administration is here, et cetera, et cetera.”
So, it was after the war started that he, kind of, transformed into this wartime leader. Everything, from the clothing that he was wearing, to his demeanor, he was working out a lot. And he suddenly became this, kind of, military wartime president. I don't see it as, like, a natural evolution of his stature. To me, he still is that, like, that comic that he was back in 2019 when I met him for the first time.
[00:43:39] Peter Slezkine: But so how does the story end?
[00:43:41] Andrew Roth: In order to sign some kind of peace, it's possible that Zelensky is going to have to make concessions that are going to go over very poorly at home. Ukraine also needs to have presidential elections at some point. We've not had those in a while. And the question is, can Zelensky win another election in Ukraine after everything that's going on? How many hundreds of thousands of people have died, young men being drafted, anger over the draft, in general, anger over the fact that they haven't been able to leave the country in years, anger over the economy. We saw how powerful that was in the U.S. this year. If you know want to talk about inflation or unemployment or something like that, like, Ukraine is in much more dire straits.
And the uniting factor is that people are really angry at Russia. And if you're signing a ceasefire with them, it's possible that that's going to create a lot of backlash from the other side, too. So, I think that, when a deal is signed, if a deal is signed, that Zelensky could be unlikely to win another term. I mean, it could end with him leaving power. It remains to be seen how he's going to be seen by the country after that happens if he were to lose and if he were to leave the presidency. A, is he going to remain a politician? And B, will he be seen as the kind of the president who stood up, who didn't run away? Or, will he be seen as a president who, you know, lost the war, lost the U.S. support?
It would be nice to see his legacy, at least, maintain the fact that I do think that he did perform quite impressively under very difficult circumstances at the beginning of the war, and set an example, I think, for the country, in terms of his bravery. But ultimately, yeah, maybe he didn't have the kind of political chops to figure out a way to maintain U.S. support and to keep fighting the fight, basically, against Russia. That said, we'll see what the actual terms of the deal are. It's still very unclear.
[00:45:28] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Well, it seems like a Trump-Putin meeting might be in the offing. But in any case, Zelensky's political career arc is certainly fascinating, no matter where it goes from here. So, Tulsi Gabbard, in a hearing, recently, was asked provocative questions about Edward Snowden, whom many might have forgotten about. You were in Moscow when he arrived. Tell us about the Snowden phenomenon as seen from Moscow. How long was he the subject of your attention? When did he disappear from the scene? Did anybody pursue him for interviews after you missed him at the airport?
[00:46:05] Andrew Roth: Yeah. Actually, I was at the Tulsi Gabbard thing recently. So, it's nice to be able to keep the story alive and see Tulsi being asked over and over again, “Is Edward Snowden a traitor,” you know, kind of, stuff. So, it was interesting to see her responses and her trying to get out of that. I was in Russia when Edward Snowden came to the country. And as the youngest person at The New York Times at that time, I was sent to the airport to try to track him down.
[00:46:31] Peter Slezkine: And you ended up like Tom Hanks in Terminal.
[00:46:33] Andrew Roth: Look, there were people who went and did not leave the airport. But I had the self respect to, like, get out once in a while and to go home.
[00:46:39] Peter Slezkine: Wait. First, he was supposed to get on a flight from Moscow to Latin America, and there were journalists who bought tickets for that flight, right?
[00:46:47] Andrew Roth: Yeah, a lot.
[00:46:47] Peter Slezkine: And they found out that his seat was empty.
[00:46:48] Andrew Roth: I think they filled that flight. Somebody had said that Edward Snowden was going to fly to Cuba tomorrow on this flight. All the journalists buy tickets immediately for this flight. I did not buy tickets for this flight. Everybody gets on, and they wait until the doors close, and there's no Edward Snowden. And I think a friend of mine actually tweeted out a picture being, like, “We're all here, but Edward Snowden's not, just an empty chair.” These guys are on a 14-hour flight to Cuba. And Aeroflot is laughing all the way to the bank, basically. The joke was, basically, that Aeroflot was just making it up in order to sell out some of their tickets for the flights.
So, it was one of those moments, like you asked about before, when you saw just how many foreign correspondents there are in Moscow because everybody was at the airport. And Edward Snowden was supposedly somewhere in the terminal. And the plan was to walk around the terminal until we ran into Edward Snowden, which is a great plan. So, I, every day, or three days or four days in a row, I would go and buy a ticket to somewhere. And it had to be an international destination, right? Because I had to go to the international terminal, go through passport control, and then I would just walk around this, kind of, like, area, just like staking out Snowden for a very long time. I never found him.
[00:48:02] Peter Slezkine: So, how many days did you do this?
[00:48:02] Andrew Roth: I think three days in a row. Everybody was thinking, like, “What is my other… am I going to write a story about walking around the airport looking for Snowden?” Which I think I did. There was a radio spot that I did on NPR. I actually did break news during this story because I got to know the person who runs the visa section in the airport. And so, one day, he wrote me and he said, “Edward Snowden just got, like, a Russian visa,” or something like that.
And so, I was actually able to, like, break news on something, thanks to having been in the airport day after day. I don't think it was worth it, but I walked around Terminal D, I think it was, of Sheremetyevo, just looking for him because it was such a phenomenon at the time and everybody wanted to get the first interview with Snowden. But we never did.
[00:48:39] Peter Slezkine: Well, but then he moved out of the terminal into Moscow, got an apartment. Were people trying to figure out where he lived, get his number, stake him out in his grocery store?
[00:48:52] Andrew Roth: He didn't live in Moscow. I mean, we don't think he lived in Moscow. So, the Russians were trying to create the sense that, like, Edward Snowden's just, you know, living in an apartment somewhere and, like, you might see him on, like, a ferry, you might see him on the metro. But I think it's pretty clear that, like, Edward Snowden was not living in Moscow, he was living outside of Moscow at a dacha. People talk about the, kind of, FSB dacha or something like that. Like, it has direct connections to the state. But I think the truth of the matter is that we don't know exactly what those living arrangements are.
[00:49:19] Peter Slezkine: So, full-scale invasion breaks out. You remain in Russia for a while. You take a trip with Evan Gershkovich to report on something shady, go to Istanbul on a vacation. Evan gets caught. You fly to London.
[00:49:42] Andrew Roth: Yeah.
[00:49:43] Peter Slezkine: That's more or less the outline?
[00:49:44] Andrew Roth: Yeah. So, Evan is a good friend of mine. We worked together in Russia for a very long time. So, I left Russia for a few months after the war started because we were afraid we would be arrested immediately. There was a ban on criticizing the Russian military, which was pretty much what we did every day. So, we had to take a break. But in June or July of that year, we saw that nobody had been arrested and we saw that some journalists were still working in the country. So, I went back.
So, I was working in Russia from June or July of ‘22 until April of ‘23 and did have some, for me, what for me were really important stories, I think, while I was there. I think it was worth being in the country and working there during that time to see the mood amongst Russians. I had a story with, I guess, the Russian soldier, the first one who wrote a, kind of, tell-all about the invasion, about being a part of it. I met him in secret, kind of, he was moving from house to house, and I met him near Belorusskiy Vokzal. And we went to a restaurant or a cafe a few blocks away, and we had this, kind of, five-hour discussion about the war, about his life, about, you know, how he justified what he did, et cetera, et cetera, about what was wrong with the war. And it was… yeah, I mean, we were just expecting to be arrested at any moment. It was a pretty incredible experience reporting that.
And then in September of that year, me and Evan went down to Belgrade. And we were… this is the border area with Ukraine. And so, we were all scared enough to go that we, me, him, and Valerie Hopkins from The New York Times, all decided to travel together because we were just, we were concerned we would be arrested while we were there. And once again, we were meeting Ukrainians who had supported the Russians who had fled the counteroffensive of that year. And they were furious. The Russians had basically told them, “We're here for good, you can support us.” They'd come out and done that. And then the Ukrainians had driven the Russians out. And so, they had to go with them because they were afraid that they were going to be arrested for treason.
[00:51:42] Peter Slezkine: They were furious that the Russians who had taken these Ukrainian towns and whom they had welcomed had retreated.
[00:51:51] Andrew Roth: Exactly.
[00:51:52] Peter Slezkine: And it left them exposed to, now, the Ukrainian forces who might seek retribution.
[00:51:56] Andrew Roth: Exactly. Either retribution or would prosecute them. So, once again, you know, incredible story. And we all went back and we kept working like this, and things seemed to be going that it was still possible to work in the country. And that was all true until I was in Turkey, I was on vacation, and I woke up one morning. I was supposed to fly back that night and I had, I'm going to say conservatively, 80 missed calls on my telephone. And what happened was Evan Gershkovich had been arrested that day in Yekaterinburg and had disappeared. And nobody could find me or could figure out where I was because they didn't know I was on vacation. And so, people thought that they might have just arrested all the American journalists who were in the country.
And it took a couple of hours for the news to sink in. But I think, by that afternoon, I was like, “That's it. I'm not going back.” Never went back to get my things. I didn't go back to pack or anything like that. Because we just didn't know, you know, am I a party to Evan's case? Could I be accessory? Could I be arrested when I get there? And so, it just felt like, at that moment, at least, for me, I made the decision that I couldn't go back and that I wouldn't work in Russia anymore.
So, I moved to London to do what a lot of other people have been doing since the beginning of the war, which is to report on Russia remotely. We go online. You go on Russian social networks, like Vkontakte or Odnoklassniki. And you try to find sources by approaching people through the Internet or anonymously or things like that.
To be honest, we should give due to the reporters who've been doing that because I think that we actually do get a pretty good sense of many things that are happening in Russia through that reporting. I think we have a good sense of the issues in the Russian army. People who've talked about those experiences, I think that you find pretty incredible stories by talking to people online about daily life. And to do that day after day without having any access to the country, it takes a lot of determination.
[00:53:48] Peter Slezkine: Well, so, let's briefly finish the Evan arc, which you were, sort of, a part of. So, he's arrested, you leave, he is freed, and you meet him on the tarmac with Biden at your side.
[00:54:03] Andrew Roth: Yeah. So, long story short is I get a job in the U.S. as global affairs correspondent. So, I cover U.S. foreign policy and national security. And I, sometime, basically, a little bit in late July, the word comes down and it's starting to filter out that Evan Gershkovich is going to get out. And so, the story moves really quickly. We get the word that this is really going to happen. And then it starts to leak out. I think there is an actual leak. And somebody publishes a story about it and is punished for that. But it's massive news. And all of a sudden, I'm covering this from the other side.
It was just funny to be on the U.S. side and to see all these people who were watching this story because they had to do it professionally. And I was in these briefings and sitting there, being like, “This really matters to me. This is, like, my friend and the reason I had left Russia and somebody that we've just been, like, wishing is going to get out of prison, basically, for the last year and a half.” And the excitement was just exploding out of me. I actually had a very bad day reporting the day that he got out. I couldn't get into briefings. I was very new in this job. I'd been there for about a month. And so, people didn't know me. So, I wasn't on the briefing with the National Security Council where they said this was going to happen.
And I got home and I was just in a terrible mood. We knew that Evan had gotten out at this point, but I hadn't had any part in, kind of, the story. And a photographer friend of mine, Pete Keyhart, says, like, “Dude, let's just go to the airport.” So, get our stuff, we go down to Andrews Air Force Base. We don't even think that we're going to be able to see Evan. They say the plane is going to park over there. We don't know what kind of condition these people are in. And they're probably just going to get, see their families, and drive off.
And the plane lands. You know, Biden is there. Kamala Harris is there, presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. And the plane lands, and they each walk down, the first one is a different guy, Paul Whelan, and then nobody's looking at the plane, and Evan steps down. And I just remember Kamala Harris turning around and being, like, throwing her arms out, like, “Hey,” you know. And Evan's like, “Hey.” And you could see this all happening at a distance.
And then he came over. And the first person he thanked was his publisher whom had spearheaded the effort, from the paper, at least, to get him out. And then, he said, “Listen, I just got to hug my friend right now.” And so, yeah, I just had this moment on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, where, like, this guy, really good friend, had just gotten out of prison, and just giving him a massive hug, and not really believing that he was home, not really believing that he had gotten out and that this whole thing had happened.
It feels like it's one of those moments, like, when you really feel like you're living through history, that I've been really lucky to be able to do in this job, like, running into so many of these events, like Snowden or being in Ukraine or doing other stuff in Russia. And this was just like it's never felt so personal and it's never been such a close moment in my reporting where it felt like it was just something that you would remember for the rest of your life.
This is really emotional, really important moment for me. And I'm really happy that he's free now. And I'm waiting for his book to come out because I want to hear about everything that happened while he was in jail and about everything that went through his mind and everything he read. So, yeah, it was a really special moment.
[00:57:16] Peter Slezkine: Well, maybe, I can get him on here afterwards to talk about his book.
[00:57:22] Andrew Roth: Pass along the message. You could call his agent, maybe. And he'll see if he has time for it.
[00:57:27] Peter Slezkine: We drank in Moscow a couple of times. I didn't know he was going to turn into a massive historical figure. So, wait, so that hug at your namesake airbase, in some sense, I guess, puts an end to your Russia-focused career. You had already assumed a different job. But maybe, symbolically, that was the end of the Russian arc. Now, you are a global affairs correspondent based in D.C. with Russia as one of many parts of the world that you focus on. So, how does the world look like from Washington as global affairs correspondent? Is it true that nobody talks about anything but China?
[00:58:08] Andrew Roth: I mean, with the Russia part, I'm just going to say that, like, I'm a part of all that I've been. You know what I mean? I think that you never really end Russia entirely and you can never really quit it. And so, I think that that experience very much frames the way that I look at the world from here now as global affairs correspondent for The Guardian.
Everybody does talk about China as much as you think. It's funny because it's a, kind of, a very 30,000-foot kind of look at geopolitics. You know, this is a city with a lot of, kind of, experts in global politics, who seem to be across everything that's happening in the world. But they're thinking about the, kind of, big trends that are going to come down the pipeline over years and years.
I guess, working on the reporting side, you're always thinking about, like, “Well, how do I turn this into a story or how do I bring somebody closer to the action of what's going on?” But the answer, basically, is that you have to look at the people who are forming the policy and the ways that they influence what's going to happen next, especially in this kind of administration.
And I think, in that sense, like, my 30,000-foot expectation is that everybody does talk about China as much as you said. It is such a focus on all elements of the kind of the foreign policy spectrum here in D.C., that it feels like, occasionally, everything else could fit in to the ways that, you know, which side are you on in terms of, like, the China issue at the moment.
I was just down in Panama, just after the inauguration. And obviously, the canal is a big issue and migration is a big issue, but the one that's really going to drive this Western hemisphere theory of Donald Trump's, kind of, foreign policy is, kind of, competition with China as well. And that's the way that it's being rationalized in the party at the moment. It's not just about the idea that we're going to, you know, return to William McKinley's, kind of, like, foreign policy or Teddy Roosevelt's, but also, the idea that it’s basically a fight for hegemony with China at the moment. And that's the lens that… and the prism that I feel like everything is driven through right now.
[01:00:04] Peter Slezkine: Does this make sense to you? You were in Russia all this time. You were covering Russia. Now, you come to Washington and the focus is entirely on China. Have these national security types, the think tank ecosystem, convinced you that their logic is coherent? Or as somebody who comes in from the outside, are you a bit baffled by the constant focus on China?
[01:00:29] Andrew Roth: No. I think, it's a bit dogmatic, I think, is the answer. It's like a belief, basically, that you build the rest of your system around. So, have I been convinced by it? No, not necessarily. I think that, you know, the fact is that people have… they have feelings about other things as well, you know. They'll have views on Russia. They'll have views on the Middle East. But the, kind of, China token and currency can be used as a way to promote those interests as well. So, if you will have a certain policy that you like and you want to convince somebody to do that, you know, adding in a, kind of, China element to it makes it more saleable, for whatever we're talking about.
I think, with Russia, for instance, you're going to see an argument come out that we need Russia on our side in order to, like, create a, kind of, bulwark against China or an ally, like, in our longer term competition against China, which, to a certain degree, I'm sure the Russians could also get on board with eventually. They've always been talking about the single economic space from Vladivostok, all the way to, where was it, Lisbon? So, the Western most point on the continent. So, the idea is that, all of us, Europeans and Americans, should stick together, basically, against threat from China, is something that will have some kind of currency, I think, when we get into the negotiations on what happens next.
[01:01:39] Peter Slezkine: Do you think that this is just a function of rising Chinese power, or is this some more complicated confluence of factors that has turned China into this currency that can be used to cash in on any issue?
[01:01:56] Andrew Roth: So, I have a theory, but to be fair, I haven't actually reported this out. So, this is my view.
[01:01:39] Peter Slezkine: Well, it's a podcast. We have absolutely no fantastic principles.
[01:01:56] Andrew Roth: So, I guess my view is that the issue with China is not necessarily the threat that it provokes on a foreign policy basis, but the fact is that China has to be our competitor because of our, kind of… our economic and trade issues that, kind of, Trump has been focusing on so much. And that dictates a foreign policy that has to reflect that as well. China is the biggest threat in terms of our market or imports or anything else like that. We want to make America great again. We want the American worker and factories to be producing more. We want more employment there. Therefore, we must also have a foreign policy that reflects that as well.
China has to be bad in the foreign policy sense, too. And so, it dovetails very nicely together. It makes it so that you can have a foreign policy that reflects a, kind of, Trump presidency, which is really not really focused on foreign policy. People didn't vote for Donald Trump because China's a threat or because they want to cut off funding to Ukraine. They voted for Donald Trump because they're angry about the price of things. They voted for Donald Trump because they're angry that they don't, you know, feel like there's enough American manufacturing base or good manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
So, my view is that, that's the basis for it. And then it reflects itself in a foreign policy that is made for the time of Trump. And I think that's very much where we are now. Both sides, Democrats and Republicans, are very much on board with the idea that China is the pacing threat for the coming century. And it doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, by the way. But it is, I guess, important just to think that each of these conflicts in each of these places deserves attention in its own right. Russia is a very, very complicated country and requires nuance. And it should be smarter than just, you know, what does this country mean for me in terms of China? The same with Ukraine, the same with India, the same with every country around the world. So, it's important to focus on that.
The only other thing I would say is just that, there is a lot of focus on other issues. Middle East is its own thing. The last couple of days, just watching, I mean, getting here and being global affairs correspondent and watching Donald Trump say that the Pales-… like, we're going to do a real job with Gaza and the Palestinian shouldn't live there anymore because it's been bombed so much, we're not going to say by whom, but because it's been bombed so much, it's very difficult to understand what global affairs means in that moment. Like, how do you cover a president who's just saying things without really thinking them through?
There's no policy around it. There's no Gaza task force budget. There's no expectation or cost estimates or anything else that would reflect a real policy around this. It's literally just a guy freelancing foreign policy every moment.
[01:04:44] Peter Slezkine: Freelancing foreign policy has been a pretty major factor in world history. I know that there's a great man versus structure argument in more academic circles. But I guess we've been in the age of structure for quite a while. And now, we're in the world of charismatic chaos.
[01:05:02] Andrew Roth: It feels like, when you say the great man versus structure kind of moment, it feels like when you were playing a video game when you were little. And, like, you could choose the height and weight of your character, and you're like, “I'm going to set the height to, like, 10 inches, and I'm going to set the weight to, like, 800 pounds.” It's like, it's, we're going to do all great man, no structure, and just, like, see what happens with this foreign policy.
[01:05:21] Peter Slezkine: I think that's actually a good place to end, on an extremely tortured analogy with video game avatar creation.
[01:05:29] Andrew Roth: Yes. Thank you very much, Peter. This was a lot of fun.
[01:05:35] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to the Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show, so you don’t miss out on any episodes.
The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.