Podcast: Russia's War

New book interview with Jade McGlynn

Listen to my interview with Jade McGlynn for New Books in European Politics about her Russia's War (Polity Press, 2023) on Apple or Spotify.

More than a year since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and nine years since it annexed Crimea and occupied eastern Donbas, why are so many Russians still behind this brutal and disastrous project? Where are the mass protests in their diaspora - never mind in Moscow?

In her new book - the fruit of a decade of research into Russia's politics of memory and propaganda and close to 60 post-invasion interviews with prominent Russians - Jade McGlynn explores a toxic mixture of fear, “historical nationalism”, “social racism”, and apathy that makes this Russia’s - and not just Vladimir Putin’s - war.

“Increased learning, and honesty, about the realities of Russian society requires empathy but not sympathy,” she writes. “Western countries should not focus their efforts on shaping Putin’s calculations; they cannot be confident the Kremlin would interpret any action in the intended way. Nor should they seek to target messages at the Russian people. They should expand their energies on what they can control. In other words, they should not try to defeat Putin but to make sure Ukraine wins, and the West wins”.

Jade McGlynn is a research fellow at the Department of War Studies at Kings College London. A frequent contributor to the BBC, Deutsche Welle, The Telegraph and The Spectator, her next book - Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia – will be published by Bloomsbury Press in June.

For my Writer's Writers reading list, she chose The Naked Year by Boris Pilnyak (Ardis, 2013 – translated by Alexander Tulloch) and The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past by Shaun Walker (OUP, 2018).