Harrogate-born BBC foreign correspondent Sarah Rainsford on being expelled from Moscow and her new book Goodbye to Russia

“I've covered wars before so I've been in lots of war zones, unfortunately, as part of my career,” says Harrogate-born Sarah, the BBC’s Eastern Europe correspondent.

"In this case it was weird – it wasn't that there were bombs exploding, it wasn't that it was dangerous, it was that it was so totally pointless. In a lot of cases war is terrible and in many cases it seems avoidable but in this case it was just the sense that this was a war of one man's creation. (Putin) had lied so much about the reasons for the war and why he was planning to do it,” she tells The Yorkshire Post.

Furthermore, it was a country she had devoted decades to trying to understand and learning its language. “And that country, which I'd called home, was now executing this pointless and deadly, brutal war. So it did feel very personal, it felt different to me than than any other conflict I’d ever covered.”

After living in Knaresborough briefly as a child, Sarah’s family moved to Worcester and her school had a Russian teacher, which sparked her initial interest in the country. She would spend almost a third of her life there, on and off, but Sarah, now 51, first set foot in the newly independent Russian Federation just two weeks after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In January 1992, as a student aged 18, she flew to Moscow to teach English, having applied while it was still the USSR, and met up with Anna, a native who previously visited Sarah in the Midlands.

"Anna’s city was suddenly the capital of a brand-new country and her husband was speeding us towards their flat in his Lada,” writes Sarah in her new book, Goodbye to Russia, which she will discuss at Waterstones in Leeds city centre on Wednesday evening.

"Every so often he would reach across to scrape tiny view-holes in the ice that ha d formed on the inside of the windows to give me my first glimpse of the broad avenues flashing past outside. It was –23°C degrees and I’d never experienced anything like it.”

While seemingly becoming more democratic, and a time of hope, Sarah stresses that Russia in the 1990s was still “extremely violent” with “a huge amount of criminality”, as well as conclicts such as the First Russo-Chechen War between 1994 and 1996.

She says: “There were lots of bad things happening, even under Boris Yeltsin, but I think still the trajectory was towards warmer relations with the West, towards democracy. It was still a multi-party democracy at that time and that was still the the ambition and the hope, I think, for Russia.”

After studying the language she joined the BBC’s Russian service, becoming a producer. Her first stint in Moscow for the BBC was between 2000 and 2005, and she eventually moved over to the reporting side.

She has also been posted to Istanbul, Madrid and Havana, and is now based in Warsaw, Poland, with husband Kester Aspden, who is the author of The Hounding of David Oluwale, a tragic tale police racism in Leeds in the late 1960s. Sarah and Kester married at St Robert’s Church in Harrogate in 2008.

Her last period in Russia for the BBC was from 2014, a t ime when it was “becoming a really dark place”. The illegal annexation of Crimea early that year was a turning point – and considered by many the start of the war – but also the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a politican and Putin critic who was shot dead on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge next to the Kremlin in February 2015. While five Chechen men were found guilty of the contract killing, whoever hired them is not known. Still, for Sarah, it was more about the “symbolism of his body lying on the bridge by the Kremlin,” she says.

"It felt like he represented the 1990s – his political roots went all the way back to the beginning of democracy in Russia – and his body lying there was really the starkest possible symbol that things had changed enormously, and that there was probably no way back under Vladimir Putin.”

Then, in August 2021, Sarah became the story. When trying to get back into the country, a border guard at Sheremetyevo airport, reading from a single sheet of paper, told her “‘you are banned from entering Russia as a threat to national security’”, she writes in the book. Briefly allowed back in, at a meeting with the Foreign Ministry she was told to leave the country as part of “mirror measures for the actions of the British government”, such as sanctions. Also, a Russian journalist in Britain previously hadving his visa renewal refused, so the Federation had done the same to Sarah, it was claimed. BBC director-general Tim Davie called Sarah’s expulsion “a direct assault on media freedom”. While a shocked Sarah felt like she had been singled out, she realised it was “just part of a much broader picture of the collapse in relations with the West and ultimately the way to war in Ukraine, because free speech was was being stamped out and that was part of what was happening to me”.

She has since reported within Ukraine from the weeks before the war began and during the conflict.

Putin’s willingness to sacrifice civilians and his cavalier attitude to truth or freedom of speech can be seen from the start of his leadership, believes Sarah, whether it be his handling of Beslan school siege in 2004 or “lying over the sinking of the Kursk submarine” four years earlier. Meanwhile, some in the West naively thought they could “do business” with the country.

"There were a lot of mistakes made. I think people thought that they could change Russia through engaging with it. But ultimately, I think Vladimir Putin, his path was chosen and set a long time ago,” she says.

How does she think the war will play out?

In one sense, Russia has already failed because Putin thought it would be “a clean and tidy war finished in a few days,” she says.

Meanwhile, “he's ended up with Ukrainian troops occupying part of Russia itself in the Kursk region, which =is something that's never happened since the Second World War”.

However, she adds that “there's still this horrible sense that there's a long way to go in all of this and that Russian troops are still fighting, and they still occupy a huge amount more of Ukraine than they did before the beginning of this war. So I fear it's certainly got a long way to run and my feeling from Ukraine is that they're paying a very, very heavy price to defend their territory.

"And there is a big degree of exhaustion in Ukraine that they're having to keep fighting off the Russian army two and a half years on from when it started. It is terrible to see the cost that it's taking, the toll that it's taking on the country and on so many young men and older men and, of course, all their families. So it is depressing, frankly."

Originally, Sarah’s book was supposed to be a warning about where all the sinister signs in Russia during her time there might lead – but that became a reality sooner than she had imagined.

“The war had started and I guess I ended up documenting how Russia got to that point, from my perspective, of seeing a place of hope and opportunity and opening up in the 1990s, to a place that was waging war on its nearest neighbour.

"And it was pretty devastating to watch.”

An Evening with Sarah Rainsford takes place at Waterstones on Albion Street, Leeds, at 6.30pm on Wednesday. For ticket options, visit: www.waterstones.com/events/an-evening-with-sarah-rainsford/leeds