LAUREN FRAYER, HOST:
Over the past year, President Trump has frequently highlighted his personal connection with the president of Russia.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I spoke with President Putin. I got along with him very well, despite the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax, which was a total hoax.
FRAYER: His emphasis on personal diplomacy and his accommodating tone radically changed the message from the White House about how the U.S. sees Russia and in turn how Russia sees the U.S.
CHARLES MAYNES, BYLINE: The U.S. was the main adversary of Russia. Now it's the arrival of the Trump administration. Suddenly, the U.S. is seen as really sympathetic to Russian views.
FRAYER: NPR's Charles Maynes lives in Moscow and has been reporting on Russia and the former Soviet Union for more than a decade.
MAYNES: I was actually a student in Russia in the '90s in Moscow, part of this generation that was really drawn to these changes, just wanted to see what was happening after the fall of the Soviet Union. And it was remarkable because - I used to tell friends at the time, and I still think so - it's like opera. It's full of heroes, and it's full of villains.
FRAYER: For this week's Reporter's Notebook, I spoke with Charles about what it's been like to cover one of the biggest pivots in U.S.-Russian relations and a rapidly changing wartime Russia.
MAYNES: Hopes, I think, were really high initially that Trump could really end this war as he'd promised in 24 hours - famously promised - precisely because he seemed to be offering Putin so much, if not most, of what he wanted in Ukraine, for example, an end to NATO's expansion, a recognition of some of these Russian land grabs. And yet, I think, you know, those hopes are really fading at this point.
FRAYER: You first went to Russia in the '90s. I mean, how do Russians view the U.S. now versus then?
MAYNES: Well, there was a lot of excitement about the relationship with America. Back in the '90s, Russia was definitely hard on its luck at that point. The economy was a mess. The politics were very unstable. And this has become sort of the Putin myth, of course, that he arrived and suddenly Russia kind of ushered in this new era of stability. But, you know, what you've seen, essentially, is that attitudes towards Americans I find actually are quite good on a personal level. I don't feel any animosity towards me in particular when I talk to people. In fact, they seem more kind of curious that I'm here, but I do think that there's frustration with the American government in particular.
FRAYER: So do you actually have Russians telling you that they're frustrated with the American government and their own?
MAYNES: Yes, yes, definitely.
FRAYER: And do you have to worry about protecting your sources in that way? They could get in trouble for talking to you?
MAYNES: Well, I'm very sensitive to the fact that they can say things that could land them in prison. At the same time at NPR, we've made some allowances in our editorial rules. Often, we allow just the first name to be provided if they explain why, and the answer is usually this fear of government reprisals. That, for example, was the case while covering the funeral of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison in Russia in February of 2024. Certainly his supporters would say he was murdered. Like a lot of things in Russia today, Navalny's movement is banned, but his supporters - many of them younger Russians - seemed really relieved to get their message out to a Western reporter on a day that I came to see Navalny's grave. Here's a bit from a conversation I had with a young woman named Sofia that I met outside the graveyard where he's buried.
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SOFIA: I was smiling because I saw this is the feeling of you're not alone - finally being able to speak out because I think you understand that it's impossible to give such an interview to local journalists because it might get you in jail pretty quickly.
FRAYER: Wow. I mean, I remember where I was on the street in London when my phone lit up with that alert that Navalny had died. Is it like JFK's assassination? I mean, is it that seminal a moment for Russians?
MAYNES: Well, it's a huge moment in the history of modern Russia, I think. I mean, it was a tragedy on so many levels. Of course, Navalny was a father, a husband. He has two children, and he was only 45 years old. So it was a big moment in terms of just the politics of this country and also a little bit of the road not taken.
FRAYER: Can you describe, like, a day in the life of Charles Maynes? How do you know what's safe for you?
MAYNES: I don't think they are hard rules in Russia. You have a sense of what's probably allowed. You can certainly mitigate some of the risks. For example, smaller towns these days are a little bit more suspect. But that said, you know, the moments I have been able to get out and visit smaller places around Russia, that's been really illuminating because this is where the soldiers, the recruits for the war in Ukraine are coming from. For example, I made a trip out to a town called Yefremov - this is a small town about five hours to the south of Moscow - to report on a court case there, and here's a little bit of tape from that story.
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MAYNES: About a mile from the courthouse, a group of Russian tricolor flags in a far corner of the local cemetery guide my suspicion through the spring mud to a group of fresh graves.
Five, six, seven, eight, maybe more.
Official counts of Russia's war dead remain incredibly low, but the toll of the conflict is evident if you look for it.
Alexander Boltachev, born in 1996, died December 2, 2022.
FRAYER: It's so valuable to have you there. It's, I imagine, the equivalent of covering the U.S. and never leaving New York or Washington. It would be inadequate, right?
MAYNES: Exactly. And it is frustrating that we don't have more access. But I do think that at least my approach has been to look at it more as a kaleidoscope. I try and find different stories that tackle different aspects of the war and of what's happening to society, whether it's through culture, talking to soldiers, talking to nationalists, talking to the opposition or the underground opposition at this point. You know, all these provide more and more of a sense of what's happening in Russia.
FRAYER: And where do Russians get their information?
MAYNES: Well, you know, at the outset of the war, independent media was either forced into exile or shut down. There are new criminal penalties introduced. So you'd have these moments where you'd meet people who would just espouse kind of Kremlin propaganda talking points. One example might be a gentleman I met on Red Square early on in the war when he argued that World War II, the war against fascism in Europe, had never ended.
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MAYNES: Andrei Nikolaevich, an older Muscovite I met there, told me the Nazis have returned.
ANDREI NIKOLAEVICH: And we expect peace, but peace should be with victory over the Nazis, new Nazis who occupied all the country of Ukraine.
MAYNES: Do you worry about Russian forces killing other people, though, like innocent civilians, too?
NIKOLAEVICH: No, it's all fake because we don't kill human beings that are peaceful. We kill only the soldiers.
MAYNES: You know, and then again, Lauren, you know, in Russia, it's a criminal offense to suggest otherwise. But there are ways to get information from a variety of sources. The problem here is that it's increasingly difficult. You know, websites are blocked, sharing content on social media is criminalized, Western social media channels and services like YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp - they're either blocked or throttled to the point where they're basically unusable. And that's really a source of growing frustration to many Russians. The walls are closing in, and increasingly, people exist in this curated Kremlin information bubble, that's for sure.
FRAYER: So how do you break through that? I mean, it's just so difficult to do your journalism.
MAYNES: Well, I spend a lot of time turning a VPN on and off. I can tell you that much. You have to turn it off to read the Kremlin sites and turn it on to read the Russian independent media, which is all in exile and all blocked here.
FRAYER: You're like, toggling between two different worlds.
MAYNES: This sort of digital cage, it's shrinking. You can feel it. I feel it.
FRAYER: Is there, like, one memory or story that sticks out with you?
MAYNES: In the first year that they held Victory Day ceremonies on Red Square - this is on May 9. Most people know it as, you know, when the Russians parade the tanks and the soldiers and all the rest of it. You know, the war in Ukraine had started. People are dying. People are coming back with missing limbs. And as the ceremony finished, and of course, I'm in this kind of nest of loyalists - I mean, these are all people that are clearly supporters of the president and his policies - but it still really struck me to watch him walk off the square surrounded by his bodyguards. He's about, I don't know, 20 feet from me, and people behind me just start clapping and saying, thank you, thank you. And I just - yeah, after all that had happened over the previous few months, that still struck me as just mind-blowing.
FRAYER: That's NPR's Moscow correspondent Charles Maynes speaking with us from the Russian capital. Thanks.
MAYNES: Thanks, Lauren. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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