“A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That was how Winston Churchill famously described Russia (the Soviet Union as it then was), back in 1939.
To this day, I can’t think of a better way to describe the complications when trying to decipher Russia, its leadership and its motives. A conundrum reinforced to me yet again this past week during my first conversation with a senior Russian official since the country’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Before Russia’s Crimean invasion and annexation in 2014, I had been a fairly frequent visitor to Russia and had witnessed its post-Soviet integration into the global system.
From G8 meetings in St Petersburg, to G20s in Moscow; from multiple St Petersburg Economic Forum attendances, to sitting in the palatial Kremlin with oil industry chiefs and the powerful Igor Sechin as my host; I had seen how Russia appeared to be on a Western economic trajectory.
And yet all that eroded swiftly after the Crimean invasion, which I witnessed firsthand from Kyiv, where I was reporting from in early 2014.
Spring forward 12 years and all that cooperation was gone. Russia, heavily sanctioned and ostracized by the West, was still at bloody loggerheads with the West in Ukraine and the distrust was as great as at any point in the Cold War that followed World War II.
So, my first conversation with a top Russian official in many years was always going to be a strange moment for me, having had the privilege of speaking to so many top Russian and Ukrainian leaders in my career.
My trip to the embassy
In fact, there was something quite surreal about the whole experience of my visit to the Russian Embassy in London to speak to Ambassador Andrey Kelin.
There were times when it felt like I was in some form of parallel reality, some kind of multiverse detached from the terrifying reality as I’ve understood it to date, of the current twin geopolitical crises engulfing Europe, the Middle East and potentially the world.
For a start, there was the setting for our conversation. My team and I were invited to the official residency of the Russian ambassador at 13 Kensington Palace Gardens, also known as Harrington House — without doubt, one of the most beautiful houses in one of the most beautiful streets in the most beautiful part of London.
Inside, I walked through a stunning wood-paneled atrium into an equally stunning main reception room known as the Golden Room. It was in this room that my team, mirrored by Russian Embassy counterparts, were setting up for our interview. Our four cameras were matched by the Russian team’s, creating an ‘eight camera shoot’ — a record for me by at least four cameras.
The Golden Room was adorned with stunning art by several Russian artists, with two beautiful seascapes by Ivan Aivazovsky front and center.
From the Golden Room, I was shown the adjoining Green Room and then the Winter Garden, an orangery where former British Prime Ministers Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan had all been entertained, images of whom adorned the room.
Looking out to the rear garden, a pleasant young diplomat pointed to a small grassy mound. “That is the old World War II bomb shelter where legend has it Ambassador Fedor Gusev and Churchill scrambled to one night during a raid and tucked into a well-stocked emergency cellar. Although it may just be a legend,” he said with a smile.
The setting, the faultlessly polite young diplomats attending to our every whim — in all, the Russians were being perfect hosts, and yet I had to remind myself that these were representatives of the very government being ostracized and sanctioned by the West for inflicting the greatest conflict on European territory since World War Two.
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the government via a video link in Moscow, Russia, March 4, 2026.
Gavriil Grigorov | Via Reuters
Representatives of President Vladimir Putin, who appears to be on a mission to rebuild a Soviet-era sphere of influence for Russia that has so far claimed hundreds of thousands of deaths, and possibly millions injured, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Minutes later, I sat down for my interview with Ambassador Kelin, a 68-year-old career diplomat who has been Moscow’s man in London since late 2019.
Like his attentive team, Kelin was polite and articulate. He answered every question I posed directly and yet, I realized very soon into our 40-minute interview, that every bigger-picture viewpoint he gave I had heard before in one way or other from Putin, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and others, as to the roots of the conflict and how Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his European backers were the barriers to some form of peace deal.
I pushed back and pointed out to him that it was Russia that invaded Crimea, that it was Russia that broke the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty, and that it was Russia’s maximalist demands that were the biggest barrier to a peace deal.
On every point, Kelin refuted my version of the facts and stuck to the well-rehearsed lines blaming the EU, the West more generally and NATO for moving into Russia’s sphere of influence and creating the ingredients for the ensuing 12 years of conflict.
On Iran too, Kelin refused to countenance that Iran’s quest for highly enriched uranium (to possibly build some form of nuclear weapon) was the root cause of the current conflict.
On the subject of whether Russia was actively supporting Iran — former Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov once said Russia would not be “indifferent to its fate” — Kelin refused to confirm any support, claiming that as a “civilian” he had no knowledge of the matter.
I cannot fault the ambassador for not answering any of my questions. He was a generous host and yet, I left our long interview with very mixed feelings. From a journalistic point of view, it was a good day. I think both journalist and interviewee had a robust, direct, and, I hope, respectful conversation about the most important topics of the day.
However, my hopes for common understanding, for progress on ending the bloody European conflict, were not raised after our meeting. I felt like little had changed after 12 bloody years. The lack of understanding and commonalities that could end the war did not appear to be in place at all, despite the ambassador’s stated hopes, too, that the war would end this year.
Once again, Russia and the West were talking — but in completely different languages. For both, the other’s motives appeared to be mysteries, enigmas and puzzles.
