In 2014, Ilya Ponomarev was the sole parliamentarian of the 450 members of the Russian Duma to vote against the annexation of Crimea.
He paid a high price for this: he was branded a traitor to the nation, threatened, and had his bank accounts frozen. That is why, at the time, in an opinion piece in a leading Dutch newspaper, I called on Members of European Parliament to support their Russian colleague by awarding him the European Parliament’s annual Sakharov Prize. To no avail: none of the 47 Dutch and Belgian MEPs to whom I sent the piece responded.
Eventually, Ponomarev fled to Ukraine, where he obtained citizenship and, following the full-scale invasion, joined the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces. Recently, I spoke with him in a restaurant in Kyiv, under the watchful eye of his bodyguard.
Rogier Ormeling: What gave you the courage to vote against the Crimea annexation?
Ilya Ponomarev: The foundation was laid by my parental upbringing, but the final decision was made with my ex-wife. She clearly understood my internal struggle, since a no-vote would lead to retaliation, which would affect not only me but also my family. Thus, when she said, “If you don’t vote against it, don’t come home,” she lifted that responsibility off my shoulders.
Do you miss Russia?
Obviously, I would like to go back. Russia is deeply ill, and when a relative is deeply ill, both physically and morally, you need to attend and fight for the patient’s life in the hope that it will recover and return to normality. And in many cases, you need to inflict pain on the patient, intervene surgically, spill blood. So that’s my emotion towards Russia.
Spilling blood, does that also entail blowing up [Darya] Dugina? Obviously, the car bomb that killed her was meant for her father, ultranationalist ideologue and cheerleader for the war Aleksandr Dugin [though his daughter was a fierce war propagandist too], who encouraged Russians to kill as many Ukrainians as possible.
Yes.
The Kremlin narrative that Russia’s war against Ukraine was provoked by NATO expansion has been taken for granted by quite a few people in the West too.
The West’s fundamental mistake with regard to Russia was not NATO-expansion, but when it applauded when [Boris] Yeltsin in 1993 ordered tanks to shell parliament. When you say, “We care about principles and democracy, we want to help you to normalize Russia,” and then support a violent, non-democratic coup, then your words and deeds are not aligned.
Another mistake was Western support for the way privatization was done, which many people considered to be very unfair. On top of that came Yeltsin’s 1996 fraudulent presidential election victory over Communist candidate [Gennady] Zyuganov.
Compare this to the 1995 Polish elections, which incumbent president [Lech] Walesa lost to former communist [Aleksander] Kwasniewski. That signaled to the people that they could choose, whereupon Poland became a normal democratic country. It was obvious to me that, if in 1996 there had been no Western-backed electoral fraud, Zyuganov would have won. And since he was not a deep red, but rather a pink communist, the next president would have been Boris Nemtsov, the prime candidate on the liberal flank, and Russia would have developed democratically, like Poland.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US was reluctant to expand NATO, but Czech and Polish presidents [Vaclav] Havel and Walesa banged hard on NATO’s door. Not only the Duma shelling, but also the first Chechen war and the fact that Yeltsin did not dismantle the KGB reinforced their fear of Russian revisionism.
All of this played a role; mistakes were deep-rooted, and NATO expansion was a consequence of that, rather than the original mistake. It still boils down to a girl being raped because she wears a miniskirt. Yes, there were mistakes: if I had been this girl, I would not have gone out in the dark wearing a miniskirt, because I would have thought about the hazards. Still, it would not be her fault but that of the rapist, in this case, the Russian aggressor.
With the treaties of Paris in 1990 and Istanbul in 1999, the Soviet Union and later Russia declared that every nation has the right to choose its own military alliance.
How can one nation decide for another nation? If Russia and Ukraine had signed an agreement whereby Kyiv, in exchange for cheap gas, promised to refrain from participating in certain military alliances, that would have been a different matter. Since there was no such agreement, why is it an issue?
In April 2022, [Vladimir] Putin’s former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, said on CNN that “All these statements that NATO poses a threat are absolutely artificial reasons that Mr. Putin has developed.” And indeed in his infamous 2021 essay, Putin already seemed to have presented the real cause of the war: that he does not accept that Russians and Ukrainians are different peoples and denies the latter the right to exist as a sovereign nation.
For me, that was not the reason. I don’t consider Putin a long-term strategic thinker. The 2014 Crimean annexation was not the result of a long-term imperialist plan, but a spontaneous decision to counter the Ukrainian revolution, which represented a colossal failure of his policies. Putin’s power in Russia hinges on one thing: projecting an aura of victorious omnipotent power. As soon as he shows signs of weakness and appears to be losing, trouble is coming. That’s why in 2022 he acted likewise. When [Volodymyr] Zelensky became president, Putin believed that he was ready to surrender, or at least willing to make a major compromise. When that wasn’t the case, he got mad and sought retaliation. Moreover, he was brainwashed into believing that the Ukrainian people were waiting for Russian liberation. So he made a wrong move, and it wasn’t a long-term strategic calculation, but an opportunistic decision.
When Putin denied in 2014 that Russian troops were in Ukraine, former Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov collected a lot of evidence about their presence there. Which, following Nemtsov’s assassination in 2015, was published in a report titled “Putin’s War.” Since then, a lot of people, including Gary Kasparov, insist on calling it ‘Russia’s war.’ Would you agree with that?
I would say that the Russian people did not start this war; it was Putin who started it, but the Russian people preferred not to fight against the war.
Numerous Russians even actively participate in it and commit war crimes: genocide, urbicide...
Yes, that was happening in Chechnya as well. Unfortunately, that is the nature of many people in the Russian Army, and they have been given the green light to commit violence, rape, and pillage, and they do it very openly and eagerly.
Military analyst Dara Massicot warned in Foreign Affairs’ latest issue that the Russian military has become a learning organization that relentlessly analyzes and disseminates combat experience, for instance, by rewriting military manuals.
I have been saying from the start that we should not underestimate the enemy; indeed, they are learning. Right now, Russia outnumbers Ukraine in regards to the number of drones and soldiers at the front line, that’s why they are making small but steady advances. Strategically, however, this leads nowhere; throughout the year of very bitter fighting, Ukraine lost less than 1% of its territory while the Russians lost several hundreds of thousands of troops. So okay: another year, another 1% of the territory, and Ukraine would probably lose Prokrovsk. But how does that change the strategic equilibrium?
According to the Kiel Institute Ukraine Support Tracker, the US hardly supplied any aid since Trump’s return to office. Which means that Europe has to fill the gap, in other words, a lot depends now on Germany.
Germany, however, is not the bottleneck. To point out some simple facts: 80% of Russian casualties are caused by Ukrainian-produced weapons. And the annual production budget of all this stuff, drones and arms, lies somewhere in the proximity of $5 billion. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of foreign arms, which contribute to less than 20% of Russian casualties. International unity is important, but instead of talking about hundreds of billions of supplies, we would better receive another $5 billion in cash so we can double our drone production. That would be a way more efficient investment than Tauruses and Tomahawks. As to the Ukrainians, I always urge them to focus more on politically impactful activities inside Russia. Yes, we can burn all their refineries, and they are good targets. But since they lie at the outskirts of large cities, their residents can observe it from their comfortable couches, as if it were merely a football match. Moscovites, government bureaucrats, and leaders of this regime who are actually organizing the fighting live as if there is no war. As if they are totally immune and don’t even need personal security because no one is targeting them.
Are you actually advocating assassinations?
One should not use the word assassination. If a soldier shoots another soldier in a war, you would not call it an assassination, but use a different word. To me, there is a very clear line between combatants and civilians. I am definitely against targeting civilians, which would be an act of terror. But the people who are organizing the war, government ministers, regional governors and their ministers, law enforcement people, war propagandists etc are combatants and therefore a legitimate target.
Since Feb. 24, 2022, 56 members of the Russian elite have died under strange circumstances, according to Novaya Gazeta. Many of them have fallen out of windows. It has been suggested that Putin thus attempts to enforce more loyalty to the war effort as well as prevent clique formation.
Putin is being blamed for everything; that’s just hype. This is not how the system works. He is way above such cases. In 99% of them, Putin or the FSB had nothing to do with it. Firstly, there were some natural causes because I knew a couple of these guys. Obviously, the majority of cases were murders, people who were in charge of money laundering, illegal financial transfers from large enterprises into Western assets. As soon as they were hit by sanctions, their work became redundant, and they became a liability. But of course, there are political figures who are on Putin’s radar; [Alexei] Navalny’s assassination could not have happened without his knowledge.
What about Nemtsov’s assassination, did Putin know?
There are many indications that he did not know; several credible sources told me that he was mad about it. And at the end of the day, five Chechens, though they merely pulled the trigger, were sentenced to jail. That would not have happened without Putin’s consent. Nobody was punished for the [Alexander] Litvinenko and Navalny murders or the [Sergei] Skripal poisoning. A clear sign these were authorized.
Anna Politkovskaya [who reported on Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya] was murdered on Putin’s birthday. Birthday present?
No, it had nothing to do with Putin; he did not care about her. [Ramzan] Kadyrov was behind it, and it was part of the arrangement. In order to keep Chechnya stable, he got the license to kill whoever he needs to kill.
For years, Western politicians seem to have blinded themselves to the fact that Putin’s Russia is a Mafia state, a term coined by former FSB officer Litvinenko, who fled to the West and accused Russian Secret Services of staging the Russian apartment bombings in 1999 in an effort to bring Putin to power.
Initially, I did not believe it. But when I weighed the arguments, talked a lot to Sasha [Litvinenko], who was my good friend, and other investigators, I came to the realization that it is true. Yet hardly anyone believes it because it is too horrible to accept. But there is a good chance that the truth will be publicly disclosed after the regime change. Because then some FSB people who were in charge would trade the truth in exchange for saving their ass.
You also live in the US now and are in contact with American politicians. In Taiwan and Japan, people very much fear that Putin will win. But in the Trump administration, there are still people who refuse to see that the European and Pacific theaters are inextricably linked.
The Trump administration is starting to realize that a Putin victory would greenlight China vis-à-vis Taiwan, and I actually prefer them to the Biden administration. Though that had a lot of nice people, I hate it when people are saying all the right words and then do nothing. Trump, on the other hand, is a pretty authentic personality who delivers on his campaign promises. Though unpredictable in the short term, he is extremely predictable in the long run, and also extremely transactional. While not many people know how to deal with such an unusual political creature, Zelensky seems to have learned it by now. They started at a low point, since Trump generally disliked him, but their relationship has improved considerably over the past six months. By the way, I agree with Trump that if he had been in power in 2022, there would have been no large-scale invasion, as Trump’s unpredictability would have been a serious deterrent for a coward like Putin. Biden, on the other hand, behaved as Putin expected, but the key thing was that Zelensky and the Ukrainian people behaved differently than he expected. Zelensky is undoubtedly a hero, though there is much to criticize about the current authorities. But even if we disagree, we are in a war mode, and the Ukrainian people entrusted him to be commander-in-chief. He makes a lot of mistakes, but nobody is perfect, and he actually listened when people took to the streets.
You consider yourself a democrat and prefer Trump to Biden. Don’t you think Trump is destroying American democracy? He seems intent on replacing the rule of law with the law of the ruler and being part of Autocracy Inc, as Anne Applebaum calls it.
Anne is my good friend, and she has very valid concerns about American democracy. But I need to work in the interest of Ukraine and Russia, and to me, Trump’s administration is way better. Whether it is better or worse for Americans, I will keep to myself, because it could affect our cause. I am very disappointed in the way the West performed, being too afraid of escalation. Probably the key mistake of this war was that the Biden administration tied everybody’s hands, prevented Ukrainians from defending themselves more decisively.
When Newsweek revealed that CIA Director Bill Burns and his counterpart [Sergey] Naryshkin had made a covert deal [the US would not seek regime change in Moscow and prohibit Ukraine from carrying out strikes on Russian territory while Russia in return would limit its assault on Ukraine and not attack NATO-members] I told Burns whom i know very well: “I understand that you made a deal and I am not asking you to be involved in regime change, but I ask you to stand back and not tie the hands of Ukrainians because for them it is a survival issue. And the only way one can end the war is to make sure that there is regime change in Russia.” Nevertheless, there was this explicit order from Washington: if you are doing anything within Russia, you will not receive weapons.
So how could regime change be achieved?
Of course, there are beneficiaries of the war who have an interest in the regime’s survival: criminals for whom it means a social lift, people who acquire Western businesses that are leaving Russia, and people involved in the military-industrial complex. But there lingers great discontent within the elites, among the majority of businessmen, and even government officials. They are sanctioned and cannot travel to the places they like. There are no cross-border transactions; their capital is held hostage in Russia. At any moment, a security person or police officer can come and say: Now it’s all mine. This is all very uncomfortable, so they feel as if they are living during a plague. They wine and dine and try to enjoy life in Moscow, but they really are in a besieged fortress. They long to escape, which is a very fertile soil for actually doing things. But one needs to work with those circles, from the outside, like in Russia’s past, in 1905, 1917, 1991.
Would a future Russian government ever tell its people that Ukrainians are not Russians and pay reparations?
Our government would do it. There is actually a simple solution to these reparations. They can be simply paid by selling Russian gas to Europe via Ukraine, by letting Ukraine resell it to Europe at a higher price; the premium would be used to rebuild Ukraine’s economy. It would be a win-win for everyone: the Russians would regain the market, Ukrainians would have the budget, and Europeans would have cheaper oil and gas.
Putin claims that Ukraine and Russia are one country. The irony is that to you, it is, in a sense, also one country, because their fate is intertwined; without an independent Ukraine, no democratic Russia.
To me, the collapse of the Soviet Union was also a big human tragedy since there were a lot of families who got separated. But if people want to live separately, who are we to force them to stay together? If someone who is married wants to get divorced, you need to respect that decision. The right of nations to self-determination should be unconditionally granted, though we should not get stuck on this issue, as it is not the main one. What matters is the nature of the regime, the democratic system, and the right of the people to self-govern. And the right to self-determination is just a subset of the overarching principle of letting people self-govern.
After the interview:
When I later contacted Ponomarev to ask him about recent reports that the situation on several other fronts, such as in the Zaporizhea and the Dnipro regions, is worsening, he stuck to his statement that there is a strategic equilibrium.
“Of course, the problems at the front do exist, but as I said, these are not particular gamechangers,” he told me.
Regarding the 28-point peace plan, which has been widely and fiercely criticized as Ukraine’s capitulation to Russia, he preferred to refrain from commenting:
“Because, momentarily, I am in Washington speaking to many participants in this story. Moreover, everyone has an opinion now. Trump is interested in making noise, as is the current Ukrainian administration because of the recent scandals, and of course, Putin is interested in creating noise,” he said.