The trouble with television gear is that much of it looks like a rocket launcher or a bomb when viewed through a security monitor.
So, getting 13 cases of it through presidential security is trying anywhere, but in Ukraine the degree of difficulty stepped up a tier. But there, for the first time, the tedious routine came with the overpowering sense it was essential because a mortal danger lurked outside.
It was late October and our documentary crew had driven to the same government office in the heart of Kyiv for three days in a row to interview officials and the first lady, Olena Zelenska.
Inside was a shadow world. This once grand building had life and light sucked out of it by war. The darkness built sandbag by sandbag as they piled high against the windows.
The second floor was almost pitch black, with only an essential few lights battling the gloom. On the top floor we set up in front of a sweeping staircase, guarded by two soldiers who had radiation alarms clipped to their belts. Radioactive poison, after all, is a hallmark of their enemy.
When a light on the lift indicated it had been locked off on the ground floor, it signalled our elusive interviewee was on his way.
Volodymyr Zelensky stepped out of the lift alone, wearing a familiar black skivvy, with a subtle touch of blue and gold on the collar and green combat-style pants. He had agreed to speak in English as we wanted him to talk directly to an Australian audience, half a world away. His message was simple: our nations were united by common values.
“You are closer than you think,” the Ukrainian President said. “During the war, there (were) a lot of countries who are closer than you to us but they didn’t come to support (our) people.”
Whether you believe Australia should support Ukraine depends on whether you think this is a regional conflict or a frontline in the battle between tyranny and democracy. If it is a local war then who wins matters little here. But if it is the tip of the spear in a fight over which world view will define the 21st century, then what happens to Ukraine is vital to us.
In Vladimir Putin’s telling, Russia was provoked by the expansion of NATO towards his borders. It is a view that has traction here and in significant parts of the Republican Party in the US. It is an argument I have heard directly from an adviser to former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.
In his words, Russia complied with every US demand in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, including abandoning its key listening post in Cuba, the “crown jewels” of its signals intelligence gathering. That, he said, was done on the understanding that NATO kept its distance from Moscow, and the US and Europe reneged.
Putin laid out his grievance in a 2007 speech in Munich where he described the expansion of NATO as “a serious provocation”. The adviser told me he was in a closed-door meeting at that conference where a furious Putin told EU leaders, “You are forcing me into the arms of China, which is unnatural to me.”
But to accept this line means ignoring Putin’s 5000-word pre-war essay where he argued Ukraine did not exist. To buttress this, he rewound history to the ninth century and the shared heritage of Kievan Rus, an era that predates his grievance with NATO by 1000 years. In it Putin declared: “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”
Putin has described the fall of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century and is bent on rebuilding a tsarist empire. His imperial ambition is embedded in the ideology of Russkii Mir (Russian World) which aims to exert influence over states Moscow deems fall within its remit.
Speak to officials from the Baltic states and they have no doubt Moscow’s ambitions do not end with Ukraine. This week, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas accused Russia of waging a “shadow war” against the West.
So far, Australia and a Western alliance has stood with Ukraine while Iran, North Korea and China stand with Russia. Beijing’s closeness to Moscow was underlined with a recent rare hug from a Chinese leader to a Russian President. So, they are now, quite literally, in each other’s arms.
Putin and Xi Jinping share the same view of the West: that it is decadent, divided and in terminal decline. They believe their era is at hand and they mean to take what they claim is rightfully theirs. That means reordering the world to make it a safe place for tyrants.
Here recall that the Chinese Communist Party claims Taiwan, a country the party has never ruled. Its illegal Anschluss of the South China Sea is based on a false claim that dates back to “ancient times”. It also has a diaspora of 40 million people it refers to as the “Overseas Chinese” and from whom it expects fealty.
Dictators can never rest until they gain a foothold in your mind.
As Xi strives towards his China Dream the first pain falls on his own people, who already live in a surveillance state. It will get worse as the demands from the rising Middle Kingdom ripple outwards. Xi’s dream demands all criticism of him and the party be silenced, at home and abroad. It demands that tribute states such as Australia be separated from old alliances and live in the box that Beijing builds.
There have been countless failures by the US and its allies in the handling of world affairs since the end of the last Cold War. But the deep failure with tyrants such as Putin and Xi is a failure of imagination. A failure to understand that their ambitions for the world cannot be reconciled with the one we would like to live in. Europe could not imagine another war. And war came because it underestimated the ruthless ambitions of one man.
I have been close enough to the frontline of that war to know what it looks like. It looks like Mordor. The loss of life is immaterial to someone such as Putin because in a dictatorship only one life and one opinion counts.
We are closer than we think to that war. A Russian victory will be a body blow to anyone, anywhere, who craves freedom. It would encourage Beijing in its quest to take Taiwan.
But war has clarified what is essential to Zelensky. It is a lesson we should heed.
“What is life?” the President said. “Without any freedom. Any rights. Any democracy. When you can’t (say) what you want. Can’t choose how to live. What is it? It is nothing.”
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