Vitaliy Portnykov

In the life of Vitalii Portnykov, 24 February could have been called “almost normal”.

Several days before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vitalii came to Lviv. He was sure that Putin had a plan for a great offensive, but he had no intention of leaving Ukraine: he just wanted to check whether it would be possible to work between the two cities of Lviv and Kyiv. The studio of Espresso TV had already relocated to Lviv by that time, and Vitalii’s colleagues from RFERL had moved there too.

On Tuesday, he had recorded a program for the Russian service of RFERL. On Thursday the 24th, Vitalii had to go to Kyiv early in the morning, despite having a premonition that his ticket would probably be invalid.

“I didn’t think that the reassuring statements from the Ukrainian authorities were very convincing”, says Vitalii, “because I have a habit of calculating everything mathematically. And according to my calculations, an advance on the Donbas and a big strike on Kyiv were to be expected. I realized it with my mind but not with my heart. I drove all my conclusions away, as often happens with people who are anticipating war.”

Vitalii recalls a conversation with his father on this issue. He was arguing that any attempt to seize Kyiv would be disastrous with the amount of the armed forces which the Western media had reported. “Stop fooling yourself,” his father told him. “They will definitely advance upon Kyiv.”

On February 23, Vitalii got a call from “a very well-informed Western acquaintance” who told him that the invasion was most likely to start next day. Newsweek had also published a prediction referring to this very source. With no more doubts left, Vitalii chose to act as usual: he updated his blog, wrote an article, read the news, and had a cup of tea. At 5:30 am he woke up to the phone, and the dozens of calls he had missed on silent mode told him everything eloquently. Nevertheless, Vitalii decided to spend a normal morning. Thus, he went for breakfast to the only café which remained open in the city, looked through the news and started planning the program for the TV channel.

His only unusual personal business that day was spending some time by himself in the empty synagogue.

“Journalism can be compared to medicine”, Vitalii ponders. “A surgeon in the operating room sees your problem, but they must do their job. The same goes for us. I’ve rarely felt fine during these two months, but I have had only one breakdown. It happened when I was worrying about my relatives who had stayed in Kyiv.”

During the next few weeks, it was hard for Vitalii to write. Nor was his idea to keep a war diary successful. At first, he could do nothing except blogging and going on air. Writing returned later, specifically for his Patreon.

In one of these texts, Vitalii has written that despite the most sober and realistic assessments of the situation, his forecasts often resembled those of a lunatic. It seemed very similar to his work in Russia in the 1990s.

It was then when he believed that Russia would never tolerate independent Ukraine, which it considered its own lost territory. Since the 1990s, the concept of a new state replacing the former USSR has been developed in the offices in Moscow. In 1992, Russia encroached on the territorial integrity of Moldova, and later on that of Georgia.

“For some reason, a strong conviction was circulating in Ukraine that, as a country close to Russia, we would never face anything like this”, Vitalii says. “But this was actually the problem: Russians considered us so close a nation that they had never, in fact, seen us as a separate nation. To them, Ukraine seemed something like Bryansk oblast which must be brought back.”

Once, Vitalii recalls, Russians called him a Nazi for such an opinion.

“Putin thinks in categories of special operations”, Vitalii explains. “This descent into war does not correspond to Putin’s plan: it means his mistake. Everything had to be plain and simple: Putin’s army appears at the borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions; the issue of their territory joining Russia goes to a referendum; in the meantime, Yanukovych returns to Kyiv as the ‘legitimate president, overthrown by a coup d’état’; elections are held, and Medvedchuk begins to rule Ukraine. Nothing has changed in the Kremlin’s project in the end: they are ready to invest as much time and resources in it as it takes. And we will keep making the same mistake if we can’t look at the situation through the enemy’s eyes.”

Vitalii is inclined to believe that Ukrainians are so severely shocked by what they have seen in Bucha, Borodyanka, and Irpin because for the first time since the Pereyaslav Agreement they have ended up on the wrong side of the evil empire. As an example, he refers to the Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan and during WWII.
“Millions of Ukrainians served in the Soviet army then”, he says. “Did they just stand by while their neighbors from Russia were raping, looting, and slaughtering? We must remember how it really was. Today, it’s of the utmost importance for everyone to come to terms with the history of Ukraine and of their own family, to understand what their relatives were doing during the Russians and Ukrainians’ shared history. Of course, Ukrainians had undergone occupation, but Russia also involved them in their misanthropic empire and made them complicit in their crimes.”

Vitalii himself knows about complicity and revenge from his family history. His father went to school in Buchenwald where Vitalii’s grandfather was serving in the military. They lived in the house of a German woman who had lost her children at the front. One day, Vitalii’s grandfather asked her for some cheese, and the landlady gave him a lump stuffed with ground glass. The family managed to spot it in time. Still, Vitalii’s grandfather refused to denounce the landlady. He simply decided to move to another place. He said that they had to understand the feelings of a mother whose children had been killed in war.

Vitalii thinks that we must not appeal to horror in the 21st century when speaking about Russian war crimes. It’s not the century that matters. The point is that Russians don’t have ― and have never had ― either self-restraint or any limitations on their acts from the state. Religion could probably have served as a safety valve against impunity, but religious principles have been eradicated in Russia from imperial times until the epoch of Bolshevism. Otherwise, culture could also serve as an interior basis of humanity which could help them to distinguish good from evil.

“Still, everything that occurred during 1917-1921 has totally erased the layer of culture from the Russian face”, Vitalii summarizes. “The population was mostly illiterate: Bolsheviks taught people to read and to write, but not to think. There was no culture to protect them from ignorance because only a few hundred people were able to read thick books and magazines. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were better known in Paris rather than Moscow. This is how the savage Russian mass, which remained invisible behind the backs of the educated people from Moscow or Saint Petersburg, originated. Now it has revealed itself.”

In Ukraine, the circumstances were always different. Ukraine was not a country where the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand after the civil war. Ukraine was an occupied country where many people considered themselves Ukrainians. They were defeated and forced to conform to the regime ― but they were not eliminated.

“That is why in 1991, when we drew a borderline between ourselves and Russia, it has proved to be easier to build a morally based society here than in Russian Federation.”

Despite his long-time work for the Russian audience, Vitalii admits its narrowness. His program in the Russian language is aimed at Russian-speaking viewers rather than Russians themselves. His target audience consists of people in the post-Soviet countries which very well may constitute Putin’s next goal, alongside the Russian-speaking diaspora in other parts of the world who may be susceptible to Russian propaganda.

“My blogs in the Ukrainian language are of more scope”, says Vitalii. “It happens so because I don’t have to assume a particular tone of speech for the Russian audience. I’m speaking to my supporters, not to those whom I would like to deceive. I’m not overestimating the possibility of convincing Russians, and I’m not doing so: I’m just giving moral support to those who don’t want to obey. There are very few such people in Russia, but I think that I should be there for them. I’m not an adherent of chastising everyone for their passport. People must be judged by their deeds and political views.”

As for the future, Vitalii doesn’t want to think of it now, when no one knows what the world will look like after the Russo-Ukrainian war. Its ending is impossible to calculate. The modifications to our information environment and information policy are impossible to imagine because nobody can tell the future of the Ukrainian economy, of the media holdings and their owners, or how the Western world will react.

“It’s just tendencies that can be calculated”, Vitalii says. “I definitely know that Russia is bound to lose the war against the civilized world. No one can predict the duration of this conflict or its territorial coverage, or the people’s fate, or the inevitability of nuclear war. Our world is changing daily. Our discussions make no sense, as any talks between potentially dead people do. I don’t want anybody to die, but I also don’t want to make any plans as if I’m living in peacetime.”

Nowadays life and work differ from those of peacetime not just globally, but in the details as well. Vitalii still writes very quickly and still maintains his YouTube channel. He is still working on TV ― two hours a day, three times a week. It’s only stress that mobilizes him to write more quickly in an air-raid shelter than in a café.

“I have always read a lot of foreign press”, Vitalii says, “and I feel in trouble now that everyone writes about Ukraine only. I have got used to living on the political periphery; that’s why this situation feels uneasy for me psychologically. I never expected the epicenter of events to look like this. I’ve always thought that I was living in historical times ― but now I realize that it was just an introduction to history. Perestroika had begun when I was 22-25 years old, and I thought there would be plenty of time ahead to witness the result. Now that I’m 55, I’m not so sure that I will witness the result. My only hope is for history to move rapidly. The dynamic has grown incredibly. Thus, I hope to see the result of these affairs too.”

Vitalii considers that now is the time when we can detect the true beginning of the 21st century. It happened on February 24, 2022 ― just as the 20th century really began on the day WWI was declared.