James Meek is a contributing editor at the LRB. His most recent novel is To Calais, in Ordinary Time.
In the morning it was grey and windy and although I couldn’t see any snow as I walked along there was the faintest rattling on the shoulders of my coat, as if tiny snow particles were hitting it. Last night Joe Biden repeated his belief that the Russians intend to attack not only eastern Ukraine but Kyiv itself. Perhaps it would be better to take the grey skies as a blessing, since it would make it harder for aircraft to strike.
It’s got to the point where people are passing on the wildest rumours to cheer themselves up. Alexander said he’d heard that Britain was going to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine to protect it from Russian air strikes. When I told him the Royal Air Force didn’t have the capability to enforce such a zone against Russia by itself, he looked sad. I think I misunderstood the point of a rumour like that: it isn’t about whether it’s true.
The central Kyiv metro is deep. The old escalators take an age to clank down to platform level. I want to say that the great depth of the metro is reassuring, vis à vis air attack, but that possibility still seems fantastical. ‘How,’ my evidently flawed subconscious logic seems to go, ‘could Russia launch missiles against a city with so many nice coffee shops?’
The Ryanair cabin crew weren’t supposed to wonder if they might find themselves flying into the war universe of Kyiv Beta. I asked if they were volunteers. They weren’t: unless they were told otherwise, Kyiv was just another Euro-destination, like Malaga or Berlin. I had the luxury of preparing for both. I thought I’d better have a helmet and a flak jacket, and a satellite phone.
It’s striking how many times, in the past few months, Putin has been accused of being behind the transport of migrants from the Middle East to the borders of the EU through Belarus, and, separately, of being about to invade Ukraine, and, separately, of manipulating gas supplies to Europe; it’s also striking how few times the commentators consider what it would mean for all these accusations to be true. It’s quite possible they are, but this implies a greater degree of uncertainty and contradiction within the Kremlin than we’ve been comfortable imagining in the late Putin era. Let’s suppose Putin did help enable, or green-lighted, the cruel wheeze by Lukashenko to lure migrants to Belarus with the promise of transit over the border to Poland. Perhaps the cash-strapped, sanctioned Lukashenko had hopes of getting leverage over Berlin, but what would have been in it for Russia? If Putin and Lukashenko meant to turn the peoples of the EU against their leaders, it was a weak as well as a vicious way to go about it.
James Meek talks to Tom about the events leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the fall of Yanukovych to the wars in the Donbas and Nagorno-Karabakh, and considers what may happen next.
James Meek reports from Mykolaiv and the area of southern Ukraine that has become a crucial battleground in the war, as Russian forces seek to maintain control of the land they’ve occupied west of the...
James Meek, recently returned from Mykolaiv, talks to Tom about the area of southern Ukraine that has become a crucial battleground in the war, as Russian forces seek to maintain control of the land they’ve...
James Meek reads from his piece on the British army’s eight years in Afghanistan.
James Meek argues that the Robin Hood myth has been turned on its head by the wealthiest and most powerful, so that those who were previously considered 'poor' are now accused of wallowing in luxury.
James Meek talks to Chris Bickerton about his new book, Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, which features writing published originally in the LRB.
Tony Wood talks to James Meek about his book Russia with Putin, which looks at, among other things, the legacy of Soviet infrastructure and the extent of political opposition in today’s Russia.
David Runciman talks to James Meek about what the Covid crisis has revealed about how we understand healthcare and how we think about the organisations tasked with delivering it. Their conversation covers...
James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and...
James Meek’s early fiction is alert, acrid and funny, and only slightly too insistent on its own quirkiness – as if it were hoping reviewers would call it surreal (they did) and...
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