I’ve always dreamed of crossing the Russian border on a Ukrainian tank – now I’ve done it

Last weekend, when I was taken into Russia’s Kursk region by the Ukrainian army, I remembered how, as a foreign correspondent, I had rued all the bureaucratic hurdles in travelling to and from Moscow.

When I was posted to Moscow, years ago, as a British newspaper’s correspondent for the region, I was messed around by malicious Russian authorities for months before I was granted a Russian press visa. Even after that, Russian airport officials had a knack of making entry to or exit from their country unpleasant.

It was always a joy to board a western plane flying out of Russia. The air crew said they recognised “that look” of relief on the faces of those taking their seats and, sometimes, would immediately offer a celebratory drink to passengers – even if they were flying economy.

So I smiled as the armoured personnel carrier I was in sped past the wreckage of the Russian passport control building at the border with Ukraine, and I entered – visa-free – the country that in 2022 launched Europe’s largest conflict since the Second World War.

I describe what I saw elsewhere in The Independent, but here I want to describe some of the emotions I felt on an assignment that was very different from most journeys I’ve ever written about.

I was born in London to Ukrainian refugees who left their country during the Second World War, and arrived in Britain where they met in 1948. There had been no Ukrainian organised community in Britain before the war, and my parents helped build the small and vigorous diaspora that helped keep alive the notion of an independent Ukraine that the Soviets – and now Vladimir Putin’s murderous kleptocracy – has persistently attempted to crush.

My first language was Ukrainian, and I was brought up in an environment where I learned about Ukrainian history and culture, and about relatives who had fought throughout the 20th century for Ukrainian independence.

I was proud of my Ukrainian heritage, but also proud of Britain, the country I was born in. I was proud of its values of freedom, democracy and human rights, which harmonised with those of the people striving for Ukrainian independence, whose principles guided those transforming a former captive Soviet colony into a modern, Western state.

I am also an American citizen, and it is the shared principles of both these countries that Ukrainian soldiers are fighting for, as Moscow continues to try to erase their country from the world map.

I have been reporting on Russia grabbing Ukrainian territory since 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and occupied a large swathe of the country’s east, called Donbas, triggering an eight-year bloody but relatively low-level conflict.

On 24 February 2022, when Kremlin leader Putin launched a full-blown invasion of Ukraine as the key part of his feverish dream to restore the Russian empire, I was in the east Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk – one of many since completely levelled – and have been chronicling Moscow’s aggression ever since.

In recent months, Russian forces have been conducting relentless, suicidal human wave attacks backed by armoured units against key Ukrainian positions in eastern Ukraine. They seem to have no regard to their own massive losses – routinely over 1,000 dead and wounded daily – and today seem on the verge of taking some key Ukrainian positions in the Donetsk region.

So, after seeing so much Ukrainian territory taken by Russians, and witnessing the horrific evidence of the executions, rapes, torture and looting perpetrated by Moscow’s soldiers and secret police, it made a pleasant change to see Ukrainian soldiers on some 500 square miles of Russia’s land.

I don’t usually post photos of myself on Facebook, but I wanted my friends to see me smiling in the centre of the Russian town of Sudzha with a headless statue of Lenin – still a precious symbol of power and imperialism in Putin’s Russia – behind me.

I’ve been doing this job for a long time. In the 1980s I accompanied Afghan Mujahideen to report on their fight against the Soviet invasion, and was I was vilified by the Soviet press as an agent of MI6, Margaret Thatcher and the CIA. Later, it emerged that a unit of Soviet soldiers had been sent to hunt me down, but their information was wrong and I was nowhere near the part of Afghanistan where they were searching for me.

So although the barbarity Moscow’s troops displayed in Ukraine was shocking, it was certainly no surprise. They have been doing this throughout their history.

When I worked and lived in Moscow, I learned, in their unguarded moments, what many Russians thought about Ukraine. Their views were basically identical to the views expounded by Putin – that Ukrainians were just an inferior breed of Russians who did not deserve their own country, and whose language, culture and identity should be exterminated.

So it also wasn’t a surprise when, as described in my article, the Russian civilians I and other journalists spoke to, while praising Ukrainian soldiers for not mistreating anyone and providing food, water and medicines, dodged saying what they thought about their occupation forces’ atrocities in Ukraine.

In a mealy-mouthed way, they all said they couldn’t comment because, through lack of information, they had been unaware – for two-and-a-half years – of what their soldiers had been doing in Ukraine.

I know Moscow’s goons scan everything Russian civilians say to the Western press, and will try to punish those who stray from the Kremlin line. But I would have respected them more if they had at least said something along the lines of “you understand why the situation dictates I can’t say anything”, instead of pretending they had no way of finding out.

This is not the Stalin era, when it was possible for Moscow to suppress nearly all information from the outside world. Despite Putin’s control of the Russian media, Russians have access to technology which enables them to find alternative information – the internet, for example.

I’m sure many of them embrace Putin’s propaganda not because they believe it, but because it chimes with their own prejudices about Ukraine and the “hedonistic, nasty” Western world.

I freely admit that I want Russia to lose this war, not just because of my Ukrainian background, but so that Putin and dictators in China, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere don’t move in like hyenas to tear apart the values of democracy that, despite their flaws, are enshrined and protected by Britain and the US.

I take pride in having been a journalist for more than four decades and writing about what I see truthfully and accurately. I try to be objective, but I don’t claim to be dispassionate.

I don’t think I need to try to tell “both sides of the story” when it’s obvious who invaded whom, and who has committed atrocities most thought would never happen in the 21st century.

And besides, it’s impossible to tell “both sides of the story” when Russia refuses to allow journalists or international bodies to see what it’s doing, and imprisons or kills people who try to report what it’s up to.

I believe that the more Russian territory Ukraine takes, the better it is for everywhere that is or wants to be a democracy.

And forgive me if there’s a hint of gloating in my writing, but I approve of the simple, visa-free system Ukraine has implemented for entering Russia.