“For years, Russian diplomats were made to confront Washington and defend the country’s meddling abroad with lies and non sequiturs. We were taught to embrace bombastic rhetoric and to uncritically parrot to other states what the Kremlin said to us. But eventually, the target audience for this propaganda was not just foreign countries; it was our own leadership.”
From 2002 to 2022, Boris Bondarev worked as a diplomat in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a new essay, he chronicles his decades-long process of grappling with the Kremlin’s increasingly belligerent foreign policy, culminating in his resignation in May in protest of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Read more from Foreign Affairs on Putin’s Russia:
“The World Putin Wants” by Fiona Hill and Angela Stent
“How Putin’s Repression at Home Presaged His Belligerence Abroad” by Daniel Treisman
“Can Putin Survive?” by Vladislav Zubok
“What Mobilization Means for Russia” by Michael Kimmage and Maria Lipman
“Putin’s Roulette” by Andrei Kolesnikov
