Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian drift, his continued invasion of Ukraine, and even the West’s response have already been predicted, in the main, in a broad plea honed over several years by Chrystia Freeland over the course of of his journalistic career.
“If Russian troops go further than Crimea, we must be prepared to respond aggressively. The appeal was launched by Chrystia Freeland, in March 2014, in an almost prescient article published in the FinancialTimes. The election of the journalist to the Commons, the previous year, had obviously not made him abandon the militant pen on his favorite subject.
The former Moscow bureau chief for the British daily, whose signature passed through the pages of the New York Times or Globe and Mail, has followed Mr. Putin’s career very closely for more than 15 years. She has already interviewed him and reported all about his sinking into authoritarianism during the 2000s.
The duty has dissected about sixty of his newspaper articles which relate entirely or in part to the Russian president, as well as his two books. In a style that mixes reportage, analysis, portrait and opinion, she describes Vladimir Putin as the architect of a regime that has proven to be “neo-authoritarian”, maintained thanks to oil revenues. He would have the intention of “dismembering Ukraine”, in particular with the aim of diverting Russia from its own path towards liberal democracy.
Now Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Ms.me Freeland is among the world leaders deciding the response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. She accomplishes this mission in much the way she had suggested as a journalist, that is, by providing aid to rehabilitate the Ukrainian army and by relying on the Russian superrich to put pressure on the regime.
From “cooler” to authoritative
The readers of FinancialTimes were able to read the name of Vladimir Putin for the very first time on July 27, 1998. The appointment of the new head of the Russian FSB spy service is reported there as a detail in an article mainly devoted to something else. The text is signed from Moscow by Chrystia Freeland, who was then 30 years old.
Once the new leader was installed, she described him as a “shadow apparatchik”, “more cool, better controlled” than his predecessor, who was an alcoholic, “with few apparent ideological convictions”. The ex-secret agent “surprised Russia and the world” by being chosen by President Boris Yeltsin to succeed him on the eve of New Year’s Day 2000, in circumstances which gave the journalist a glimpse of the end of the promise of democracy in Russia. She was right.
In his first book, Sale of the Century (2000), which focuses on nascent Russian capitalism, describes the support Vladimir Putin garners from young liberal reformers eager for privatization. The rich oligarchs also helped him by not broadcasting his terrible war in Chechnya on television. Putin, she already wrote, “is a man driven by power, not ideology.”
Chrystia Freeland reports in 2003 the agreement concluded between the president and a dozen billionaires: they can keep their fortune, but must give up politics. Her source is Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with whom she shared a vodka in a St. Petersburg park before he was thrown in jail… for his political ambitions.
Ukrainian ambitions
“This is not a civil war. It’s a fascist coup,” Chrystia Freeland said in 2014, when the Russian army came to the aid of separatists in eastern Ukraine. The politician was banned from entering Russia that year.
The Harvard graduate in Russian literature has documented, over the years, the end of Russian press freedom, the incarceration of political opponents and the transformation of Russia into a “full-fledged dictatorship”. However, nothing seems as indicative of the tone used in 2022 as his coverage of Ukraine, his mother’s country of origin.
Putin made “a mistake”, she wrote during the capture of Crimea, denouncing his intention to “subjugate Ukraine into a vassal state”. She invites the West to “stop its procrastination” on Vladimir Putin’s regime, since it “could go further”. As proof, he would have boasted of being able to take kyiv in two weeks.
Michel Roche remembers having read the texts of Mr.me Freeland while writing his doctoral thesis. The number two of the Trudeau government is the person best placed to understand the motivations of the Russian president in Ukraine, agrees the professor of political science at the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi.
She should perhaps have seen the dissatisfaction of Russia come “as NATO progressed towards the Russian borders”, he raises, stressing that he wanted to explain, and not justify, the invasion. After an interview with President Putin, Mr.me Freeland had herself reported the president’s fierce opposition to the expansion of the political and military alliance.
“Chrystia Freeland understands the oligarchs,” said Bill Browder, an investment fund manager who was one of her sources, in an interview from London. According to him, the ex-journalist is in the best position to impose effective sanctions on the rich Russians, of whom she is the specialist.
The Deputy Prime Minister dodged the question when The duty asked her in March if she believed President Putin was still rational. She said, however, that she had given Russian leaders good warning of the sanctions that awaited them. A caveat they might have seen coming from reading his articles.