Just after the press conference of Presidents Putin and Trump had ended in the early hours of Saturday morning, I made the mistake of tuning in to MSNBC radio.
“We know how isolated he and Russia is, this being his first meeting with a foreign leader in a decade,” raged the MSNBC anchor, moments after thanking a retired US military man who told the channel’s audience that Ukrainian flags were everywhere in Poland (they’re not). Even at 4 a.m. Moscow time, with my body drained after a long day of celebrating Indian Independence Day, plus work, plus the rush of finally seeing two world leaders meet to talk peace – I wanted to scream out in anger. Turns out, I was not alone.
“Do they know we want an end to this horror?”
Early Saturday morning I went to meet a former colleague whose PhD is in International Relations. In a couple of weeks her maternity leave finishes and she’ll return to lecturing at Moscow State University. When I entered the cafe she was furiously scrolling through X (formerly Twitter) to see what was going on.
“My husband took my phone and told me to sleep. I was so nervous, just hoping in hope that they (Putin and Trump) would be intelligent humans and end this bloody fiasco.” She has family in Ukraine and that is a subject she never touches.
“It’s making me crazy now, BBC and all these media that I love, I love, and they want war. Do they know we want an end to this horror? All those people talking and writing, do they want to go and die?”
I went to get our coffees and a pair of young girls, no older than 20, at the table next to ours were talking to my friend when I returned.
“This beggar, right before the meeting he fires hundreds of drones and rockets to kill our civilians. And then he cries when we hit him back! He has to go, he’s a liar!” One of the girls says, before sipping through a straw from her cup. Her friend, also, is angry at Ukrainian leader Zelensky.
“My grandmother was born in Kiev, my cousins all lived there until after he came to power. Then after COVID-19, those banderites took their shops and told them, ‘Moskali, go home or we come back and slit your throats!’” ‘Moskali’ is a derogatory term used by Ukrainian nationalists to describe Russians or Russian-speakers. Banderites are followers of the 20th century Ukrainian nationalist leader who was allied with Adolf Hitler and the Axis powers.
I sat and listened, speaking little, as the three women discussed the situation – in English. They didn’t hide their disdain for Zelensky, the conflict and even for their own leaders. They believed that more should have been done, and much earlier, to prevent the conflict from reaching where it is today. It was not the start of the day I wanted, listening to anger at western media and political leaders.
“Is Modi not a world leader?”
“How racist is that woman?” My neighbour complained as we walked from the playground where Indian kids were treated to a ‘Treasure Hunt’. My neighbour, a senior diplomat with the Indian mission in Moscow, had stayed up to follow the Alaska summit with other embassy staff. All are as eager as I, plus the vast majority of Russians and Ukrainians, for peace.
“I flicked between MSNBC, CNN and Sky to see what they were saying, because you divide it in half to get the truth,” he said, his colleague from the Indian Cultural Centre agreeing.
“Putin hasn’t met any foreign leaders in years? What about (Narendra) Modi? The King of Malaysia, the Chinese leader. Do they think people of colour don’t count?” I wanted to say he also met Emmanuel Macron in February 2022, but thought better of it.
Reality Check For Russians, Indians and Others
The sad fact is that, no, they don’t. Slavs and people of colour are worth less, in the eyes of many of these people. They don’t bother to hide the fact. Wait, wait! Before you take this as something I’m saying, I’m not. This was from a former German correspondent with ZDF here in Moscow.
Katrin Eigendorf despised how many “for corrs” (as one foreign correspondent termed their rat pack here) looked down on the locals. Katrin, who was then an avowed socialist, railed against the views taken by foreign media about Russia. I asked her in 2017, walking from the same playground I was on with my Indian neighbours today, if her respect for Russians and people of colour affect her work.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I can only say that all lives have equal value. All.”
The bias in western media can be seen in coverage of Israel, there are no “children”, just “people under the age of 18”. These “people” routinely “die”, or are “killed”, but the editors in Dublin, London, New York and elsewhere don’t let us know how they died or who killed them.
The coverage of Russia is identical. At the moment, Ukrainian lives are worth more than Russian, but that’s a temporary glitch in the system. Wait, wait! That’s not me. It’s Jamel Ardhaoui, who was Al Jazeera Bureau Chief in Moscow. He told this to a group of students at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
“It’s not going to end, is it?”
Having lost sleep following the summit, caught in a maelstrom of anger over morning coffee and my pleasant afternoon with Indian neighbours affected by their displeasure at western media, I sat down to look at local media.
There was positivity, lots of it. Many in Russian media breathed sighs of relief at a possibility of peace on the horizon. Even the grizzled political animals who never venture far from the official line were impressed by how human the Trump administration was. One Kremlin pool reporter messaged into a group WhatsApp chat I’m in that he’d “sleep on a camp bed for a year if it meant the killing and dying stopped.” He was referencing the makeshift conditions Russian media found themselves in during their visit.
A few of the Ra-Ra Russians online, who are almost all entirely non-Russian but grifting hard, tried to belittle Americans or stir up discontent. Saying that Putin didn’t go hard enough or that the Americans were disrespectful with the flyover before talks began. Normally these invisible hucksters would get lots of reaction from the pro- and anti-Russian keyboard warriors. On Saturday, less so. Because everyone is tired. Everyone, who has a heart and brain, wants peace. And none moreso than ‘Putin’s brain’, Alexander Dugin.
On Thursday he put up a simple post on X. A picture of his daughter Darya against the background of the Russian flag, with her dates of birth and death written on it. On August 20th, 2022, while driving back from a cultural festival outside of Moscow, the car she was in exploded. Ukrainian intelligence services had meant to kill her father, who was in another car not far behind. I met father and child, the first time, in 2018 at a cultural event at the Svibolovo Estate in northern Moscow. She was pleasant, he was himself.
Her murder shook him to his core, this I know from his closest friends and colleagues. My former colleague, with whom I had coffee on Saturday morning, knows him well and dislikes him immensely. She dislikes him because he was her scientific supervisor and forced her to push herself. She dislikes him because he took time from her baby, husband and gymwork. She loves him because she saw how he loved and loves his daughter. How he desperately wants for an end to the killing.
“Apart from 2014, I can assure you as his student and assistant, he hates seeing our boys killing one another,” she told me at dinner last November. Adding “He’s complicated, but he’s the most empathetic man you’d meet.”
This morning, as we were saying goodbye, I mentioned his post on X. She welled up, wiped her eyes and smiled.
“If a man, whose child was murdered because the killers mistook her car for his, can forgive and want peace, shouldn’t that be the message all media preaches?”
About The Author
Alan Moore is a Europe-based writer/broadcaster who specialises in sports and international business. The former host of the award-winning Capital Sports on Moscow's Capital FM, has contributed to broadcasts and publications including - BBC, Time Magazine, TRT World, ESPN and RTE.
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