A slightly different episode this week — no Shadi Hamid this time. I recorded this interview with my friend (and Wall Street Journal correspondent) Bojan Pancevski in Vienna about a month ago. The topic was his excellent new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy — a “geopolitical thriller” as Bojan calls it.
I then proceeded to travel to Ukraine, got back to the States, got sick, and got overwhelmed by work, so it’s regrettably taken me a while to put this out.
The book is nonfiction, but it reads like a novel. Bojan, who has been reporting on (and from) Ukraine since 2014, saw the news of the attack on Sept. 24, 2022 and immediately started calling his contacts in the Ukrainian military and intelligence communities. Pretty quickly, one of the confessed that they were the masterminds behind the explosion. And Bojan got to reporting.
The book traces the unlikely development of the plot, its execution, and the subsequent investigation by German authorities. It’s full of very colorful characters, tales of jaw-dropping daring, and plenty of intrigue. (Yes, it looks like the United States knew about the plot, and tried to put a stop to it.)
But more than that, the book is about what it is about Ukraine that made this kind of thing possible in the first place. This is the topic Bojan and I discuss in depth. Ukraine’s frontier self-help spirit is the product of a badly governed society, where corruption is rife and where citizens simply don’t expect much from authorities. Ukraine’s anarchic chaos is, paradoxically, the source of its greatest strength.
I’ll be writing more about this soon. But in the meantime, give this a listen.
And do buy Bojan’s book. It’s really a terrific read.
