After Four Years of War, Russia and the West Drift Further Apart  

Having lived with the conflict in Ukraine for eight years, the escalation in 2022 was devastating for those of us who believed that peace would finally win out in Russia’s neighbour.

The voice was hurried. “Don’t reply or send the list of students. Understand?” I had been awake until after 2am recording a podcast with a brilliant Irish peace activist, in which we both rejected conflict escalation in Ukraine. We agreed that despite the increased bombing of the wantaway Donbass regions and the massing of Ukrainian troops on the borders of them and Crimea, nobody wanted war. We were wrong.

The 6.30am call, which woke me on February 24, 2022, came from an attaché at the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow. Petr, a Donbass native, called as he was being evacuated from Russia, knowing that I was deeply connected with the heads of other university international offices in the country. He didn’t want the details of Ukrainian students studying in Russia sent to Kyiv. When I asked why, Petr simply said: “Let kids be kids.” I told him to stay safe, went to the kitchen and turned on the kettle to make tea. I had over 3,500 kids to take care of, as well as our students on exchanges in Europe and 20+ French, German, Hungarian and Finnish students doing the same with us.

Week Without Sleep

I messaged my colleagues to be in my office at 8.30am. All were in place by 8.15am and I laid out the plan. We put out a united message to our thousands of international students by 9am, instructing them to make bank transfers right away and to stay away from any public protests or gatherings. And not to ‘doom scroll’. My immediate boss hid; nobody wanted to take responsibility for these kids from India, Zambia, Venezuela and Italy. In our Russian heads-of-offices chat, I put in the MISIS plan and it was adopted by the majority, shortly after forming the basis for the Russian Ministry of Higher Education and Science’s protocol.

There was panic and confusion that first week. From family in Ireland, to friends in Europe, to parents of my students, to the media, my days began with calls at 5am and wrapped near midnight the same way. But it wasn’t my first rodeo. In late 2001 and March 2003 I was in Saudi Arabia when the US and NATO went on wars of adventure in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nineteen years on, I refused to collapse under gossip in a fog of war. I had jobs to do.

That Sunday, I had to produce and host a live radio sports show, with top journalists from France, Ireland and the UK appearing. All came on, but how I would address the elephant in the room was my main task.

“We know what’s happening just down the road from us,” I said to open the show. “We all, our team at Capital Sports, to a person, want it to stop. War is never the solution and people need to start speaking. And for the next hour, we’re going to speak about sport, because if matters were settled in the sports arena, the world would be a better place.”

“Peace is bad for business, buddy. You’re a marked man,” a good friend, then in Berlin, messaged me after the show, advising me to “get the hell out of Europe as the place will go insane.” The first time I slept for more than an hour at a time after February 24 was on March 3.

Hate, Lies, Threats and Resignation

Nothing prepared me for the flood of hate-filled emails and messages that began after that first week. Ukraine ‘supporters’ or bots filled my work inbox with death and rape threats, insults, abuse and worse. Capital Sports, likewise, suffered the same.

Breaking my own rules, I began to watch, listen to and read news from Ireland. It was as if a switch had been flipped and everyone was on message. I went from RTE to BBC to CNN to Euronews, and every single report amped up mistruths and anti-Russian sentiment. Those of us who ‘stuck it out’ in Russia had to explain to loved ones at home that: ‘We have food in shops,’ ‘No, we’re not being mobilised,’ ‘I’ve not heard of the Ghost of Kyiv’ — and many other claims being spread by ‘responsible’ Western media.

In group chats with news journalists, many of them from major agencies like Reuters, AP, AFP and PTI, I saw raw footage from Ukraine, Russia, Poland and other countries immediately impacted by the conflict. On March 9, I made a bad mistake by looking at unedited videos from an explosion at a hospital in Mariupol. The videos, from an AP stringer, showed military present before and after the event.

Reactions in the chat were immediate:
“Why are they using it for shelter?”
“If Russia were bombing me, I’d hide where I could.”
“Poor people, that’s horrible.”
“They say it was a bomber [plane] that did it, but people dispute it.”
“Bombs don’t differentiate between soldiers and doctors — f..king idiots, all of them.”

When the story ‘broke’, a highly edited version was published and one young woman from the Donbass became the painful face of the tragedy. Marianna Vyshemirskaya, wrapped in a blanket, was ambushed by an AP Ukrainian stringer attached to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Gone was how she berated the man for pushing a camera in her face, questioned why the military were there, and said she heard no aircraft.

I made the mistake of taking to Twitter and pointing out that the madness had gone on too long, and of being sarcastic. Marianna had said to the stringer: “I came here to be shot?” She also referenced a wrongheaded Russian response that she was paid to be there. I followed up with a post saying: “This has to be the worst time to want to believe in news reporting.”

Despite going on to elaborate the situation and posting part of the original video where Marianna lashed out at the AP stringer, I was asked to remove the posts by the head of a sports organisation I was volunteering with. I did so immediately. Despite the young woman giving birth and returning to Donbass, giving numerous interviews, and the raw footage being published to show there were military there, I still took stick for “following the Kremlin line.” Which was odd, as I had put my career on the line by publicly calling for peace.

A month later things changed drastically. Personally and professionally my ‘loyalty’ to Russia was questioned by rather devious people. Capital Sports caught flak again, this time from Russian ‘nationalists’ and provocateurs.

At the university I was accused of trying to stir up unrest among foreign students by telling them to keep their heads down and just study or train. My son Tim, then only 12, was abused by a teacher for being an ‘enemy of the state’. He would face such bullying from April onwards. By the middle of the same month, Capital FM, the home of our radio show, switched from English-language to Russian. The move came right as the show celebrated its fifth birthday, and by the end of the year I had left higher education. Calling for peace, truth and dialogue had not really worked out for me.

From There to Here

Four years on, while visiting Italy, I was asked: what has changed? Lots. Lots more dead. Lots more misery. Lots more distance between Russia and Ukraine than can be made up in a century. Lots more ground lost between Russia and ‘Europe’.

As one Russian politician said in May 2022: “You all visited France, Italy, drinking wine, shopping, spending your money and thinking that they accepted you as European or human. Now they call you orcs, mongols, and non-humans. Now you see how they always viewed you.”

Russia has gradually found out who her real friends are. The hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and Europe who got their education for free in Russia (or the USSR) are capable of seeing past disinformation put out in Western media. Many fans who visited Russia for the FIFA World Cup in 2018 are equally reluctant to buy what they are now being told.

Since last December I have been to Russia and been outside the ‘Moscow bubble’ which foreign correspondents fear to leave. I have spoken at length with people in the Ural and Volga regions, Smolensk, Bryansk, Voronezh, Ryazan and Kaliningrad.

The common phrase was: “Please God let it end soon before it gets worse.”

The war is happening, but currently ‘down there’. Being born and raised in Dublin, it sounded eerily familiar. Since childhood, the ‘war’ was happening ‘up there’, and we grew up normalising the abnormal. Bombs, kneecappings, punishment beatings, shootings and violence were happening less than two hours ‘up the road’, yet our lives went on.

There is a definite weariness among Russians. However, that doesn’t mean they want to stop things on the terms being demanded by Zelensky and his European backers. As a sports commentator told me recently in Italy: “When does a winning army surrender to those they’re beating?” I say: to end the killing. However, he is not a Russian amused and confused by Western reporting.

Russia is losing and using “microchips from refrigerators” to keep fighter jets in the air, according to EU chief Ursula von der Leyen. Russia is losing 40,000 men per month, which is the latest ‘news’. And yet the same politicians and media are demanding that Europe militarise because by tomorrow evening Vladimir Putin will personally walk into Buckingham Palace and kick out Charles and Camilla. It’s less Pavlov’s dog than scaremongering populations into war hysteria.

One Russian anti-establishment journalist working in Voronezh told me: “If there is a plan, I don’t see one in Europe. They need this horror.” A regional TV host in Ekaterinburg informed me over a coffee in January: “I fear we are farther from peace than ever. If you lie about us, call us animals, do you really expect us to trust you?”

And that is key: trust.

Russians know there is US and UK involvement in attacks inside Russia. The New York Times and The Times of London have both boasted of the direction given to Ukraine’s intelligence services and military by the CIA and MI6. With these attacks taking the lives of innocent civilians, even Russians who oppose their government are increasingly rallying behind the cause.

They are tired of war, but even more tired of being lied about, betrayed and insulted.

Four years of war have done what I did with our international policy in MISIS in 2020 — pivot to the East, and not just China. I shocked my bosses and the Ministry by building closer relationships with institutes in India, Iran and other Asian powerhouses.

Europe’s elite has been thrown for a loop by how peoples they once ruled are not inclined to take their orders from Berlin, Brussels or London. Moscow, increasingly, reaps the benefit among populations who have also suffered the browbeating of British or American media.

As former Soviet and Russian ambassador to Syria Alexander Zotov told me in 2024: “Russia knows who its friends are. And vice versa.”

Four years on, in another needless conflict, looking at the wide range of products — from Indian whiskey to South Korean cosmetics, from Brazilian candies to Chinese cars — in Russian towns and cities, those friends are finding a ready market in Russia.

That has been the biggest change since 2022. The free education and knowledge that the USSR and Russia shared with the ‘Global South’ for decades is being remembered — and repaid.

Sadly, Western elites still don’t get that.