In the three and a half years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip on Russia’s elite. Dozens of businesspeople and officials have died under mysterious circumstances, and many more have been arrested. Yet few among the elite have dared stand up to Putin. In May 2022, Boris Bondarev became the first Russian diplomat to publicly resign over the invasion. Later that year, he wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs recounting the decisions that led to his fleeing his post.
On February 24, 2022, Bondarev woke to reports that the Russian air force was bombing Ukraine. He told his wife, “That is the beginning of the end.” In his view, the invasion “made it impossible to deny just how brutal and repressive Russia had become.” But it took time for Bondarev, who first joined the Russian foreign ministry in 2002, to reach that conclusion. He described his initial disbelief, for example, that Russia had carried out the near-fatal poisoning in 2018 of the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. “Many Russians still deny that Moscow was responsible,” he wrote. “It can be hard to process that your country is run by criminals who will kill for revenge.”
Even when Putin seemed to be preparing to invade Ukraine, Bondarev doubted that the president would launch a full-fledged war. He knew that Russia did not have the military capability to overrun Ukraine, and he assumed that Putin “must have known this, too—despite all the yes men who shielded him from the truth.” The start of Putin’s “special military operation” made Bondarev’s decision to leave the government “ethically straightforward.” Once he could do so safely, he wrote, he handed in his resignation: “At last, I was no longer complicit in a system that believed it had a divine right to subjugate its neighbor.”
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