INTERVIEW Jana Bakunina reveals what pro-Putin friends and family told her when she visited her home city of Yekaterinburg – and how opponents are burying their heads in the sand to survive
From: inews.co.uk by Rob Hastings – Special Projects Editor
How do Russians genuinely feel about their President? Of his regime? Of his war? Vladimir Putin has ensured it’s very hard to tell.
Citizens can be jailed for up to 15 years for calling his “special military operation” what it actually is: an invasion. Leading political opponents have been poisoned, exiled or assassinated. Few independent journalists remain in the country. And when opinion polls are carried out, they suggest most Russians approve of their government.
That was what drove Jana Bakunina to travel back to the country where she was born and grew up but hasn’t lived for a quarter of a century. “We don’t really hear what ordinary people think,” she says. “What is it that, in their heart of hearts, is driving them to support the regime?”
Jana moved to the UK in 1999 to study. Putin became President the following year. While Russia tried to recover from a decade of economic hardship which followed the fall of communism, she was building a new life in the UK.
“I wasn’t really focusing on the ins and out of Russian politics,” she says. “I was finishing my degree, I was getting my first job, second job.” Her first from Oxford led to a successful career in finance.
It was Putin’s annexation of Crimea and partial invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 that made Jana wake up to what her country had become, and how many of her own friends and family supported the regime.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, she was “ashamed” and trusted that pro-Putin Russians would finally “see the truth, that the war would be the absolute boundary you cannot cross… That did not happen. In fact, people just doubled down.”
Struggling to comprehend how people could really feel this way, she went back to Russia for a month to interview relatives and old schoolmates, while witnessing for herself what the country had become. Her book The Good Russian, an emotive account of her insights from this rare venture, is being published this week.
Her trip was in autumn 2023, but she remains in touch with those she met. “Two years on, nothing has changed,” she tells me.
Voice of Ukraine 