Boris Bondarev, a former member of Russia’s delegation to the United Nations in Geneva, said in an interview published Thursday in The Moscow Times, an independent online newspaper based in Amsterdam, that there were some mixed reactions among his colleagues when Russia launched its invasion last February 24. While some celebrated the attack, many appeared concerned but did not publicly voice criticism over fears that they could lose their diplomatic jobs, according to Bondarev.
Bondarev said that up to 30 diplomats ultimately resigned from Russia’s Foreign Ministry in Moscow in light of the attack against Ukraine.
“There are rational people in the Foreign Ministry as well,” he said.
The claim appears to go against a speech that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov delivered in May when he said that “traitors among the diplomats could not be found.”
Newsweek was not able to independently verify Bondarev’s claims about the diplomat resignations and contacted the Kremlin and Russian Foreign Ministry for confirmation and comment.
When Bondarev resigned from his diplomatic role in May, his scathing resignation letter was publicly shared on Twitter. In the letter, he wrote that in the 20 years of his diplomatic career, he had never been “so ashamed of my country as on February 24 of this year.
“Those who conceived this war want only one thing—to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity,” Bondarev wrote. “To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died just for this.”
Following this high-profile resignation, Bondarev told the Moscow Times that he is now living in Switzerland with his wife and their cat. While he left his diplomatic role following the outbreak of war, he said that he had “long been dissatisfied with the way the Russian government functioned, with the corruption, with the repressions and the lack of transparent decision-making.”
“[The war in Ukraine] was the impetus for action,” Bondarev said.
Bondarev’s resignation was a high-profile rebuke against Russia as it cracked down on criticism against the war. In another instance that attracted considerable attention, a Russian journalist protested the war during a live state television broadcast by storming the set with a sign with messages such as “Stop the war” and “They are lying to you here.”
The journalist, Marina Ovsyannikova, reportedly fled Russia in October as she was under house arrest for a separate protest in July.
