Back to the Front - An Introduction
A veteran war correspondent and old Russia hand, who spent the last 15 years in the Canadian wilderness watching grizzly bears, returns to offer perspective, insights and original reporting.
It was the death of 186 children that finally forced me from journalism.
On Sept 3rd, 2004, I watched as Spetsnaz, Russia's special forces, stormed a school in the south of the country bringing to a bloody end a three-day stand-off with jihadi terrorists.
As thick volleys of gunfire cut through the warm afternoon air, the roof of the school gym where more than a thousand hostages were being held began to burn. Then it collapsed.
Some of the children died in the fire, others were killed by explosions and bullets as the security forces and the terrorists duked it out.
As I walked away from the burning school in the town of Beslan that day, past lines of small, inert bodies, I knew that something had irrevocably changed for me.
It was as if a ligament, held unnaturally tight for a long period of time, had finally snapped.
I had been a war correspondent for more than a dozen years, working for a major British newspaper. I reported from the frontlines in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya. I had witnessed half a dozen revolutions, uprisings and coups.
I had found rotting corpses strewn across a hillside outside the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, cared for a five-year-old Albanian boy whose extended family had been knifed to death by paramilitaries and, in northern Iraq, stared at the burned body of a Kurdish woman who had been doused in petrol and set on fire by Saddam Hussein's enforcers. She was still alive.
By the time I arrived in Beslan, death, like fear, had become a frequent, if unwanted, companion. I had seen it in so many guises, learned to recognise its different smells, and even knew the taste of it in my mouth. But nothing prepares you for the slaughter of nearly two hundred children.
For the previous three years I had been based in Moscow, travelling to Iraq, Chechnya and the Russian hinterland. In between times I was tasked with describing and deciphering the early years of Vladimir Putin's rule.
And then, only a few weeks before Beslan, I had met Kristin in her native Estonia and we had fallen in love. I already sensed that she was a woman I wanted to grow old with. The thought flashed through my mind again as a bullet hit the masonry not four feet from me outside the school.
Returning to Moscow after Beslan, I continued working for a few more months. But the architecture of my mental equilibrium was now compromised. Sometimes I found it hard to walk down the street, at other times just to breathe.
And so I quit the only job I had ever imagined myself doing. And with Kristin we set off for the New World.
A month later we drove across the Canadian Rockies in a thousand dollar camper van and chanced upon a remote off-grid ranch. It was also, though we didn't know it at the time, an illicit marijuana-growing operation. We slapped down a deposit to buy.
Now, nearly two decades later, I am preparing to return to the fray. My aim is to try and make sense of my old patch even as dark clouds gather and fierce winds pick up.
This newsletter will draw on my insights from years spent in the region, occasional reporting from forays into the storm, and tales of past encounters that illuminate the present.
I once spent an afternoon drinking champagne with Putin's chief propagandist in his villa in Crimea.
Another time I rode into Grozny on the top of a Russian armoured personal carrier in a Spetsnaz major's uniform, part of an illicit 10-days spent with the units fighting in Chechnya.
That very same Spetsnaz is now lurking in the shadows around, and probably inside, Ukraine.
Each experience came with valuable insights into what is happening on the east front today.
My aim is not to follow the headlines and certainly not join the media bubble, but offer original material and thought.
I hope to throw light on some of the quieter but more persistent truths. And document incidents of human courage, hubris and frailty.
Wars and conflicts are, after all, written in the blood of real people, something that is sometimes lost in the clamour of vociferous and adversarial opinion.
I promise not to write about things I don't know about, and do not aim to be overly polemical. In my experience the world is too complex, layered and nuanced to support any one overarching ideology.
As I take my readers on this journey through a fractured landscape, both past and present, I will invite engagement and questions.
So did my new life in Canada with Kristin, then, fail to work out?
Far from it.
Six months after we chanced upon the ranch, and at the height of the winter snows, we moved in. And so began an enduring and stubborn attempt by two European townies to forge a living in the Canadian wilderness.
That first year almost everything that could go wrong did. We were raided by the Mounties, who believed we were a cog in the illicit local narcotics trade. The mafia visited. (Being Canadian they were mostly polite.) We were terrorised by a rampaging stallion.
When I confronted the horse's owner, words were exchanged, and as a result I was charged, again by the Mounties, and given a date to appear in court. Kristin, applying for the legal right to remain in the country, looked set to be deported. (The charges against me were later dropped and Kristin got to stay.)
Meanwhile, during the dark hours, I fought off technicolour dreams as my memories chased me through the streets of Baghdad, Kabul or Sarajevo.
Somehow we survived that first year. And, slowly, we began to build a wilderness business based on the slender proposition that guests might want to pay to see wild grizzly bears.
We renovated the rough-hewn cabins that came with the ranch. Kristin cooked and cleaned and occasionally drove to town to stock up on provisions - a four-hour round trip. And I began to take guests deep into the bush, first in vehicles and later on foot.
After a while I even started to leave my gun at home. I came to rely on new bush skills and an increasing ability to read bear body language. With time I qualified as a full bear guide, the highest rank in my new profession.
One magical June day, more in love than ever and with a relationship forged in a shared project and steeled by the near-constant trials and tribulations of wilderness living, Kristin and I married on the banks of our blue-green river.
Even as the seasons passed, the winter snows came and went, and the river swelled during the freshet and ebbed during the autumn, we grew more adept at wilderness living.
I learned to climb up mountains, ski down them, handle quad bikes and trailers, run a kayak, a chainsaw and track animals. Later I bought my own two-seat bush plane which I used to scout for bears in the mountains.
We took on charity and advocacy projects. One, a multi-year effort to try and end grizzly bear hunting in British Columbia, earned us the enmity of some locals, but was eventually, against the odds, successful. (Click here to watch a documentary about our efforts.)
I even built my Estonian a sauna - something I had been promising for years. As we sat in it together quietly one early winter's evening, she turned to me and, in an admission that was deeply moving from a very private woman, she said: "I never dreamed I could be this happy."
But life can take strange and sometimes cruel twists.
Just as our struggles seemed to be behind us and a less bumpy future beckoned, Kristin was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. A month later she died in my arms. Covid closed the ranch. Our business collapsed.
For weeks I sat alone in the wilderness. I fed the birds, watered the flowers, and cut the grass. I tried to work out what was going on in Kristin's much-loved herb garden, but horticulture had never been one of my strengths.
Wise friends told me that time is healing. I didn't really believe them. But of course it is true.
New growth had replaced the dead wood of my war trauma, even if I still could feel the contours of the scars left behind. And now, as time trickled by, time also began to slowly, slowly dull my sense of emptiness and loss.
Eventually I began to live again. I began teaching at a university. I ran a wilderness retreat for wounded and traumatised soldiers at the ranch.
When I left the frontline, nearly 20 years ago, I was brash, pushy and oh-so-certain in my views. The media can be an industry that rewards such attributes.
But thousands of hours around wild bears have taught me patience, attention to detail, and given me a large dose of humility. There's nothing like things going wrong with a grizzly bear up close to teach you not to make assumptions too quickly.
I have also spent thousands of hours, sometimes thousands of days, in the places I will now write about.
And revisiting them will give me a chance to weigh what has changed - and what has stayed the same. I will report what is vivid and pertinent, and try and tread lightly with my conclusions.
I will also, in due course, talk about how - and why - I became a war correspondent, and even offer some tips and insights I learned along the way.
But mostly I will attempt to use my unusual perspective to cast a fresh, honest and penetrating light into what is a clamorous and confusing part of the world.
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Keep going, Julius! You both are inspiring and tough! Watched the show on BBC over again and came to read your article. Sending hugs from the Philippines.