Luc Lacroix is a reporter at France Télévisions and was a correspondent in Moscow. The journalist covered the war in Ukraine with his team, notably by following the pro-Russian separatists in Mariupol in March 2022. Thursday February 15 in “Envoyé Spécial” on France 2, his exceptional report will be broadcast: “Russia sick of war”. While on February 24, it will be two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, this documentary gives a voice to those who do not have it, the Russian soldiers, voluntary or forced, returning from the front and to their relatives.
franceinfo: We know that Russia is a difficult country to access today, especially for journalists who want to question the population because Vladimir Putin controls everything that is said. How did you obtain filming permissions?
Luc Lacroix: It is the fruit of a long work. I was a correspondent and with the Moscow office, we worked for a very long time, reactivating all the contacts we had made during the years of war already experienced. We asked people we had met, and even those we had not interviewed at the time. So it was this work that paid off. Above all, we worked very quickly, that is to say that as soon as we had a lead, we went there a bit the old-fashioned way, in fact, by car, we collected everything we could, without too much knowing what it was going to look like in the end. That’s how we found these stories.
But were you always monitored, accompanied by men in power?
To my knowledge, we were not followed. In any case, I didn’t realize it. We know very well that in Russia, if they want to know where we are or what we are doing, of course, they can. But I didn’t feel any direct pressure. Afterwards, you have to be careful and pay attention in particular to the people with whom you are going to speak. Afterwards, there were very specific places where we were supported, notably in a rehabilitation center. We had been trying to go film for weeks and there, really, there was someone from the local Ministry of Health who was there, who was waiting for us and who followed us throughout our reporting and who even intervened .
In your documentary, you interview a soldier injured by a shell to the head who explains his difficulty readjusting to civilian life. And there is a person who interrupts the discussion by asking to cut the part where he says that the adaptation is hard for him to avoid the journalists leaving this part in the edit. Why this interruption?
Because they are afraid. They are afraid of projecting a bad image. They are afraid of being slapped on the wrist by I don’t know who, who is above them because someone has let a discordant word slip through. What is interesting is that this soldier begins by saying: “Here, we are well taken care of”he is quite happy, but as soon as he starts saying: “It’s difficult to find my family because there are problems and so on.” They intervene.
“It’s quite typical of today’s Russia. Nothing should really stick out.”
Luc Lacroix, reporter at France Télévisionsat franceinfo
Among Russian soldiers, there are professionals, volunteers and then men who were forced to go to the front. Are everyone defending Vladimir Putin’s position today? Do everyone defend this war?
No, this is not the case. They often say: “It’s like that, it’s destiny. We had to go there”, they often use this term and we don’t always understand very well if it’s because it was a necessity and they believe in what Putin is saying, or if it’s because there is an order and that to desert in Russia is to risk prison. In any case, what is certain is that they had no choice.
You went to a hospital where wounded soldiers are being treated and that is truly exceptional because the Kremlin is hiding its failures. He doesn’t talk about human losses and injuries either.
No, we never see these injured people, especially when we are Western media. Russian television is still there to show that they are fine. They are in uniform, sitting on the bed and it is to tell one of the exploits they have done. We never see them like that. And for example, one of the men we met is 24 years old, someone who lived 3,000 kilometers away. He was so far from this war and he finds himself there, he lost his leg and his life is destroyed because he comes from a very poor region, he was a machine operator. And I have the impression that they spoke to us with a certain frankness. They were mobilized men. Some told us with this formula: “I have no desire to go back.” This is often how they tell us things. That’s how they wanted to tell us.
There are also soldiers’ wives who testify in your report, even though they are not allowed to speak. Are you not putting them in danger by questioning them?
So they already share their actions, their words on social networks, so we don’t put them “no longer in danger”. They also control what they say very well. One of them says: “I support the war, but I want it to be professionals who wage war, not our husbands”so they know the lines very well.
There is also in your documentary, the post-war period, when these men come back for leave or when they can no longer go to the front because they are too injured. Is a return to normal life possible? We see that some people start drinking, become violent, and sometimes even kill.
Yes, almost a year ago, we were in Donetsk, we were trying to report and nothing was working. We spent time at the hotel making phone calls, going to see people, etc. And in this hotel, we saw two men broken by this war. The first had a concussion and had become half deaf, he wanted to talk to us, but he couldn’t hear us. And the second was completely lost. He walked around the halls in his pajamas. He had gone crazy. And then we said to ourselves that something was happening.
“This war has visible and invisible consequences. And that’s what we wanted to tell.”
Luc Lacroix, reporter at France Télévisionsat franceinfo
The worst, if I may say so, are those who fought in Wagner’s militia, right?
The particularity of those who fought in the Wagner militia is that some of them were released from prison. These were criminals that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner militia who has since died, went to find in prison and offered them a deal which was: “You will fight in my militia for six months and in exchange, you will have freedom, you will not serve your sentence”. We know that prison in Russia is very difficult with torture, etc. Then they went to the front. They returned home unaccompanied, crowned with their status as war heroes and some of them committed crimes again, they killed again.
You were a correspondent in Russia when the war broke out, you stayed there for about a year and a half after the start of the conflict. How do we leave this country? What state are we in?
We don’t leave it completely. It’s of course difficult to feel like you’re leaving people there, people you met by chance. We don’t really know what we actually keep. This is for me the real question, I don’t know what I keep from these years.
It should be noted that Russia remains an extremely dangerous country for journalists.
Of course. There is, for example, Evan Gershkovich who is a journalist at Wall Street Journal. For a long time, we foreign correspondents thought that the worst that could happen to us was to be expelled, which is not pleasant, but oh well. On the other hand, going to prison is something much worse and Evan Gershkovich was arrested more than 300 days ago. He is accused of espionage, which is of course not the case since he is a journalist. All the journalists know him in Moscow and he is in prison and we don’t know when he will be released.
Watch this interview on video: