Once so pro-Russia I was accused of being a spy, now I’m on receiving end of Putin’s missiles

With the demise of the Russia that Nigel Osborne once loved and Trump’s America trying to force Kyiv into signing a minerals deal, the EU and UK must work together to help secure a lasting peace in Ukraine

I have loved Russian culture. In the past, I defended Russia against what I saw as ill-judged Western attitudes and policies. I worked hard to promote adventurous Soviet art in the West. My former colleagues in Russia need to know that this support came at a personal price – ranging from character assassinations in media influential in my field of work to tittle tattle and innuendo about being a “naive” Soviet toady or a “Russian spy”.

I was neither. In fact, I worked hard for justice and human rights in both the Communist and post-Communist worlds. Of course, I pressed on in spite of the brickbats.

I did not demonise Putin. I criticised the West for not grasping opportunities for rapprochement when they came. But as events unfolded in the Balkans, Caucasus, Syria and Ukraine, and as Putin crossed over from ostensible reasonableness to the dark side, I found myself crossing over too: from defender of Russia to defender of its victims.

Ukrainian army medics provide first aid to a man at the scene of a Russian Iskander missile attack on a residential building in Kharkiv, Ukraine on Friday (Picture: Diego Fedele) | Getty Images

Drones like deadly flying motorbikes

I have spent much of the last three years in Ukraine, training teams in universities, and working in rehabilitation in children’s shelters and soldiers’ hospitals. I now find myself on the receiving end of Russia’s violent folly – hypersonic missiles launched against civilians and Iranian Shahed drones like deadly flying motorbikes, the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary rabble, North Korean troops and undisciplined Russian soldiers with ethics that would make Alexander Nevsky and Georgy Zhukov turn in their graves.

The folly works at several levels. One is mythology. Russia has invaded and occupied Ukraine many times, but Ukraine does not belong to Russia. Muscovite princes and scribes appropriated the term “Russia” from the Kyiv “Rus”, the Varangian-Slav people of Ukraine. The Ukrainians are not the “brothers” of the Russians. Their language is much closer to Belarusian and Polish.

They are, if anything, Russia’s great-grandparents: proto-Slavic languages and cultures probably first emerged in Ukraine. And if Putin really believes they are brothers, why is he setting fire to his brother’s house?

Donbas’s UK links

Then there is the ugly economic truth. Putin wants the Donbas’s coal, iron ore, oil, gas and rare minerals. The area has never had a majority Russian population. This land does not belong to Putin. The economic infrastructure of Donbas was mostly built by the British, many Scots and Welsh. Indeed, as Putin’s endgame in Donbas got underway in 2014, there was even a fanciful “re-join Britain” movement.

It’s shameful the US is now playing the same avaricious game as Putin. Both appear to want to turn Ukraine into a cash cow. The family of Ukraine is bleeding and exhausted, but Donald Trump has chosen the moment to try to pick their pockets and treat their president, Volodymyr Zelensky with churlish disrespect. He insists on ‘gratitude’ from those who have shed blood to protect his back.

Russia’s massive missile attacks on Ukraine are not, as Trump claims, what “anyone would do”. I can only hope that, if the US minerals deal does not come with adequate security guarantees, the Ukrainian Parliament will not ratify it and these resources will be an asset to Ukraine and Europe in building mutual capacity in an ecologically friendly way.

Trump’s erratic behaviour could, by chance, open random doors. I’m reminded of Nixon and Mao, but then Nixon had the brilliant Kissinger, who famously said “it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal”.

A second Pearl Harbor?

Here the Trump administration is behaving true to form. An isolationist America left its loyal allies in the lurch at the outset of both World Wars and, as a result, lost many American lives. If, as Trump claims, others are “gambling with World War Three”, do we have to wait for another Lusitania or Pearl Harbor? Or is the alliance now defunct anyway?

Russia and the US are broken. My fear is that populist narcissists and ex-KGB oligarchs are incapable of making an enduring peace in Ukraine. I expect there will be mutually advantageous deals – indeed some may already be done.

I also expect attempted interference in Ukraine’s democratic processes and demands for illegal territorial concessions with potentially disastrous consequences. There may be a flimsy quick peace – and peace is welcome in any form – but it’s likely to be short-lived and far more advantageous to Russia than to Ukraine.

UK and EU most stick together

There is an urgent need for firm, consistent, moral leadership to achieve an enduring peace. Only Europe and Britain together can offer this now. Brexit, and its sponsors here and abroad, dangerously divided Western Europe’s two nuclear powers, Britain and France, both politically and economically.

It’s now essential for Britain and Europe to pull together. This should include rapidly increasing and coordinating defence capacity and the immediate fast-tracking of the whole of Ukraine into the European Union.

Keir Starmer has made a good start, and he is, of course, right to try to get sense out of America. But John Swinney is even more right to be sceptical. Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly against Brexit and enjoys trust and respect throughout Europe, has potentially an important role to play in future developments in Ukraine, particularly in the cultural and humanitarian domains.

Dostoyevsky’s warning goes unheard

Previously it was possible to love Russia, even at the darkest of political hours. There was always the warmth and courage of normal people, samizdat, and the brilliant imagination and free-spiritedness of many Russian artists and intellectuals.

But Putin has made Russia unloveable. The free spirits are mostly gone or silent. Far too many are ready to regurgitate the imperialist lies they have been force-fed: “a limited military operation” or “Ukraine is ours”

As Zosima the Elder warns in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie… loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

Nigel Osborne, a former Edinburgh University professor, is a musician and aid worker from the Scottish Borders