BBC: the voice of the viscerally anti-Russian British Government

The ‘free market’ British media, despite their anti-Russian predisposition, have of late joined U.S. print and electronic mainstream in accepting the inevitable and, likely, soon to come defeat of Ukraine in its war with Russia. The non-state British press, which also includes the stiff-upper-lip Financial Times reporting, by the way, is now often giving useful and truthful accounts day by day on how the war is proceeding.

However, do not look for ‘useful and truthful accounts’ from the BBC. They are serving another agenda which is to maintain hostility to Russia whatever happens next in the war and the peace that follows.

I was prompted to write this brief essay by the remarkably tendentious and mendacious half hour BBC One television program on the Russia-Ukraine war that John Simpson presented within his weekly series entitled, no irony intended, ‘Unspun World.’  Though Simpson may have spoiled my breakfast, I was prompted to return to the crime scene. And so I sat myself down before my computer and looked up the program on the BBC’s website to have another go at it. There I found the following link to the Sound version of the broadcast, which served my purposes adequately for what follows. I salute those of you who can locate the video version.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct5yc9

I compare this latest BBC work of fiction with the most recent article on the war by Luke Harding writing in The Guardian. For those who do not know Harding, he has long been notorious for his anti-Putin,  anti-Russian writings. By his own admission, he was ‘the first foreign journalist to be expelled from Russia since the end of the Cold War.” That was back in 2011. He has not changed his stripes, but, judging by the article below, he has gotten better prescription glasses.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/31/tired-mood-changed-ukrainian-army-desertion-crisis

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At the very start of today’s ‘Unspun World,’ which he recorded in Riga, Latvia, outside of Russia, Simpson sets out his overarching themes:

1. How the war has affected Russian society: “Disturbingly, the war is turning entire groups within Russian society into enemies of the state.”
2. Who is winning?:  “President Putin…took the decision to invade back in February 2022 on the basis of some really bad advice and some totally false assumptions. He was lucky to survive an attempted coup by the Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023. And he’s had to recruit prisoners, North Koreans and Iran’s drone technicians just in order to keep going. But has the war now turned decisively in Putin’s favor?”

He begins his reportage by interviewing Sergei Goryashko, whom the BBC website describes as a member of their news team in Riga where he was transferred with other staff at the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022. However, whatever salary he gets, it would be accurate to call him a ‘stringer.’  His name turns up as a contributor to numerous online media and he has authored many articles for Politico, especially on the death of Alexei Navalny and on the continuation of his cause by Navalny’s widow. He also could be called a turncoat. He is a Russian, a graduate in journalism of Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics, and with his journalistic work for the BBC crossing all the red lines for enemies of the state, he will not be heading back to Mother Russia.

Note that Riga is an offshore nest for British news agencies covering Russia. That is the present home base of the Financial Times’ own genuine Briton,  Max Seddon, who wears the nominal title of FT Moscow bureau chief though I have not seen any articles of his with byline Moscow. Note, too, that Simpson did not take testimony for today’s program from the BBC’s bureau chief, Steve Rosenberg, who returned to his offices in Moscow more than a year ago after being reassured that it was safe to do so. Rosenberg can be aggressive in his questioning of Vladimir Putin at press conferences, but is careful with what he says on air otherwise to maintain his privileged position inside Russia. Simpson faces no such constraints reporting from abroad.

It is interesting that Simpson’s chat with Goryashko assumes that Putin will win his war and turns our attention to whether the peace which follows will allow the Russians to attack the West thereafter.  Goryashko obliges, saying “I cannot rule out the possibility that Putin will try to invade the Baltics, for instance….What is scary here is not that he would try to invade but that if the Alliance would not stand up….That would make him realize that the Alliance as everyone thought it exists actually does not exist and nothing can stop him to redraw the borders in Europe.”

Well said, Goryashko!

Simpson then moved on to his second issue, the impact of the war on Russian society. As he notes, “Wars tend to have a brutalizing effect on the societies that launch them. It has been particularly true in Putin’s Russia, where thousands upon thousands of murderers and violent criminals have been taken out of jail and put into uniform.”

He explores this with Nina Nazarova, another Russian ‘exile’ working for BBC Russian in Riga. She describes the case of a young man who murdered his girlfriend somewhere in the Russian Far East, was sentenced to 17 years in prison but a year later accepted recruitment by the Wagner mercenary group and was released from prison by Putin to go fight in Ukraine. From this she concludes that some kind of major social experiment was started in a country of 140 million people, telling us that the very idea of justice was cancelled there. And so “people have to adapt to this new society without any rules.”

Simpson throws out the idea that with Donald Trump coming to power there is the possibility that the war will be over fairly soon ‘in some form or another.’  And so, he continues: “how difficult will it be to get back into some form of normal life again?”    Nazarova’s answer: “There have been changes in Russian society that are irrevocable… The war has scarred Russian society for a long time.” Nazarova closes her remarks by saying that she has no intention of returning to Russia.

Simpson turns to his next witness, an investigator into social trends in Russia for BBC Russian, Aleksandra Golubeva, to discuss what he calls ‘a particularly ugly process which governments with their back to the wall are often tempted to encourage – the isolation and persecution of minorities and return to older, supposedly better values.” The minorities in question are….LGBT.  The government with its back to the wall must be Putin’s.

However, their discussion starts first on a different topic –  what Golubeva calls Putin’s obsession with historical truth.

Golubeva:  “They [Putin and his men] see historical truth as an information weapon or information tool and they want…to set history straight as they see fit.”

Simpson: “In the interests of Stalin and the Stalin dictatorship?”

Golubeva: “Those who write and try to speak about Soviet repressions and nowadays repressions, they are simply viewed as enemies.”

It is curious that ‘historical truth’ is so dangerous and can be ‘weaponized.’  This stands in stark contrast to the Kremlin’s denunciation of Western amnesia over the Nazi past and present in its own midst during the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz and the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad 10 days ago.

Simpson next moved on to the question of how LGBT people are treated today in Russia.

Golubeva: “In every aspect of life [the Kremlin] is dividing people into enemies and friends. Black and white. Good and bad. LGBT people and the LGBT movement are considered extremists in Russia, alongside with Navalny, and some horrible terrorist organizations in the world.”

With that, Simpson seems to have run out of dirt on Putin’s Russia and the last third of the program consists of his own personal reminiscences on how Russia has changed since his periodic visits there starting in the 1970s and running through the Yeltsin years. To show whereof he speaks, Simpson includes an excerpt from a televised report he made from Moscow during the attempted coup to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1981.

He says this about the Yeltsin years:

“The economic horrors of the 1990s explain a great deal about how older Russians support Putin even now.”

Turning to the Putin years: “You could make a good case saying all of this, the social problems, the brutality, Putin’s sense of insecurity and his need to even the score all come from the way the old Soviet Union ground to a halt”

And this is what resulted: “Although [Putin] at first seemed friendly to the West and Western ideas, he soon showed signs of resentment and hostility. In 2014, ignoring a treaty which Yeltsin had signed to respect the borders of an independent Ukraine, I watched as Putin used mercenaries in Crimea to cut it off from Ukraine and turn it into a Russian possession. This is the new reality, today’s reality….When in 2022 he finally invaded Ukraine, apparently believing the people there wanted to join up with Russia again, the Cold War turned uncomfortably warm. Volodymyr Zelensky staged an extraordinarily strong resistance to the Russian invasion. I went to Kiev soon afterwards to interview him for ‘Unspun World.”

This narrative takes us swiftly to Simpson’s key learnings from the past three years of war: “Over the three years since then, the Russians have upped their game. With the help of China, Iran and North Korea. Now the question is how President Trump, who has often expressed his admiration for Vladimir Putin will achieve his intended aim of bringing the war to an end fast.  In all of this the key factor has been the way the old Soviet Union collapsed. The humiliations, the economic devastation, the resentment. Everything now depends on the way Putin emerges from a Trump organized peace negotiation over Ukraine.  If he is seen as the winner, or at least not the loser, he’ll be free to continue challenging the West.”

Simpson concludes his report with a look at the other side of the coin:  what happens if Putin fails to recapture one part of the old Soviet Union, Ukraine. He tells us that in Latvia, from where he is reporting, a lot of people are afraid that then he will turn his attention to the Baltic States. Thinking aloud, Simpson asks whether President Trump, with his concern to put America First, really cares very much if Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia are taken.  And will Trump care if Putin starts up his invasion of Ukraine again.

There you have it. Avuncular as he may wish to sound, Simpson is saying what the British Deep State would like you to hear: Russia as a threat if it wins…and also if it loses in Ukraine. Russia is an ugly, distorted society that deserves to remain a pariah, kept away by a high wall of sanctions. The only positive note that I flag in this report is Simpson’s understanding that the game is up and Ukraine is losing the war.

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I recommend Luke Harding’s article entitled “Everybody is tired. The mood has changed: the Ukrainian Army’s desertion crisis.”  It is an easy read and I will not take your time to summarize its contents other than to say that Harding has done something admirable and unexpected given his long record as a Russia hater: while in Kiev he interviewed a number of army deserters and he tells their stories with considerable empathy, maybe even sympathy.  This tells us that the game is up for the Kiev regime. At least Harding does not dabble in what Russia, as winner, may do to us all.