“A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That was how Winston Churchill famously described Russia (the Soviet Union as it then was), back in 1939.
To this day, I can’t think of a better way to describe the complications when trying to decipher Russia, its leadership and its motives. A conundrum reinforced to me yet again this past week during my first conversation with a senior Russian official since the country’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Before Russia’s Crimean invasion and annexation in 2014, I had been a fairly frequent visitor to Russia and had witnessed its post-Soviet integration into the global system.
From G8 meetings in St Petersburg, to G20s in Moscow; from multiple St Petersburg Economic Forum attendances, to sitting in the palatial Kremlin with oil industry chiefs and the powerful Igor Sechin as my host; I had seen how Russia appeared to be on a Western economic trajectory.
And yet all that eroded swiftly after the Crimean invasion, which I witnessed firsthand from Kyiv, where I was reporting from in early 2014.
