Boris Bondarev: Why more Russians aren’t defecting

Boris Bondarev’s Twitter profile sums up his past, present and future in three short phrases: ‘Russian diplomat in exile. Stop the war. The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ – a quote from Wilfred Owen’s 1918 denunciation of patriotic hypocrisy.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 42-year-old Bondarev quit his job as an arms control expert at Russia’s diplomatic mission to Geneva in protest. None of his colleagues in Geneva, or anywhere else, followed suit (at least not publicly). Does that make Bondarev the only Russian diplomat with a conscience?

‘It’s not about conscience,’ Bondarev tells me by Zoom from an undisclosed Swiss location where he now lives with his wife and cat. ‘It’s about courage. Not so much courage to defy political repression, because while there is repression in Russia it’s pretty limited. It’s about the fear of going against the mainstream… nobody wants to be a white crow.