Interview with The Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon

The following is a reprint of Nasha Doroha Editor Oksana Bashuk-Hepburn’s interview with one of Canada’s best journalists Mark MacKinnon and author of The New Cold War.

 Nasha Doroha: How did a young thirty-something man from Ontario become involved in Ukraine and in writing your new book The New Cold War?

 Mark MacKinnon: I became involved in Ukraine after being posted by The Globe and Mail to Moscow in 2002. My first visit to Kyiv later that year entranced me—it was all the best bits of Moscow, without the things that often made Moscow intolerable.

 I remember standing on Khreshchatyk one snowy night after an evening of watching live music at the 44 club and asking my editor why we couldn’t move the bureau to Kyiv.

He said no, but I kept going back as often as I could, which led me to understand the importance of the 2004 Presidential Elections, and to start writing about them, before most of the rest of the international press. I remember other members of the Moscow press corps scoffing at my interest in Ukrainian politics, only to come begging for contact numbers once the tents were on the streets and the Orange Revolution had captured the imagination of the world.

The book flowed out of that interest and experience. I was initially approached by several publishers about the idea of doing a book on Putin’s Russia. That was something that, on its own, didn’t interest me, largely because I thought several such books had already been written. To make it different, and to capitalize on the parts of the story that

I knew better than others, it had to be about how Putin’s Russia was affecting the entire region, with several chapters devoted solely to Ukraine.

ND: What, in your view, is Russia’s geopolitical strategy?

Mark MacKinnon: Russia’s, or at least the current Kremlin’s, main geopolitical goal is simple: to re-establish, using all the means at its disposal, its old dominance over the countries that once made up the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for its neighbours, Russia isn’t content being just another country on the international scene. Putin, like the Communist leaders and Tsars before him, dreams of empire, and thinks it’s Russia’s historical mission to lead one.

What’s different, of course, is that Putin understands the West won’t allow him to use the Red Army anymore. But through economic levers (read Gazprom) and political meddling (candidates like Victor Yanukovych and stirring up troubles in “separatist” parts of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine), the Kremlin has made it clear that it won’t allow the other former republics of the USSR to gracefully go their own ways.

ND: Why are Canadians passive to developments in places like Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and what needs to be done to capture their attention?

Mark MacKinnon: This was one of my great frustrations while I was working in the region—I think many Canadians, and Canadian newspaper editors, thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that the struggle in Eastern Europe was over, that it was time to turn our attention to other places, like my current base, the Middle East.

That’s one of the reasons I gave my book The New Cold War as a title. It resonates with people who remember a time when developments in Moscow threatened us all, and suggests that it’s not wise to stop paying attention.

Of course, part of the problem is also the insularity of Canadians. Whenever I return home, I’m often appalled at how insular and disconnected Canadians are when it comes to what’s happening in the rest of the world.

ND: How are Russians different from Ukrainians and Ukrainians different from Canadians?

Mark MacKinnon: This is a tough one. I don’t really believe that people of one nationality are fundamentally different from people of another, though you could say that their history as the centre of an empire has left Russians with a pride, and perhaps a certain belief in their country’s superiority, that you also find today in Americans.

Ukrainians are more down-to-earth on that count, and thereby more like the average Canadian in their temperament. Perhaps that’s why I always loved my visits to Kyiv.

ND: What awards have you received for journalism?

Mark MacKinnon: I’ve won the National Newspaper Award, Canada’s top reporting prize, twice and been a finalist another time. I also received the 2005 John Syrnick Award for Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko Foundation for my coverage of the Orange Revolution.

ND: Anything else you’d like to mention?

Mark MacKinnon: Only that I hope The Globe and Mail and other Canadian media gets another correspondent established in the region soon so that we don’t let what’s happening there slip back below the radar.

 Mark MacKinnon is author of "The New Cold War", published by Random House Canada and is available in bookstores or www.randomhouse.ca.