Peter Pomerantsev

This is their story.

Sitting at my kitchen table on East Fourth Street in New York City with the Reckoning Project's co-founder Peter Pomerantsev in the early days of the Ukraine War, we felt determined and compelled to build an organization that could pursue and prosecute war crimes in real time.

We had no idea that our work could lead directly to this.

Today, 17th of March, 2023, the International Criminal Court has issued two warrants of arrest in the Ukraine situation.

Across forthcoming episodes, you'll hear examples of how and why the project has been successful and where, sadly, they sometimes haven't.

The project was formed in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the anti-disinformation expert Peter Pomerantsev and the multi-award-winning war correspondent Janine DiGiovanni.

Janine has reported on the siege of Sarajevo, the Rwandan genocide, the Kosovo War, as well as conflicts in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, and many more.

She's also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs.

And so in that way, I'm okay.

Understood.

After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, you and Peter Pomerantsev decided then to set up the Reckoning Project.

And a key part of that is about educating people on the ground, about gathering testimony.

You know, you don't even have to reach back as far as Orwell to read about these kinds of tactics among autocrats and so on.

You can read Peter Pomerantsev and so on.

So I think this institution, who's given us this hall today, has reacted in one way, I think, with real strength.

Look at what AP does in terms of putting up with this ridiculous lawsuit on the Gulf of Mexico, which I'm sure we'll talk about.

But you're absolutely right that the bigger game from the Kremlin is to see NATO paralyzed or dissolved, and the best way to do that is to create fear, is to interfere in the political system, and it's to be able to, you know, sow disinformation, make people confused.

There's an amazing book by Peter Pomerantsev called, uh, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, which is an old Soviet expression, which people used to say they had no idea what was true anymore.

Uh, they were constantly told multiple narratives, uh, and in the end they just gave up and said, "You know, I have no clue what could be true.

Anything's possible.

Came to Britain and yeah, so I am British Greek Iranian Iraqi.

It was actually my friend Peter Pomerantsev who wrote that, I believe, in the New Statesman when he reviewed a book of mine once.

So thank you, Peter.

[laughing] And I believe you must be one of the few people outside of the diplomatic world to have both an Iranian and an Israeli stamp in your passport.

We do not want a sectarian civil war.

We absolutely do not want this." I thought this was completely insane.

But then I called a couple of, um, of Kurdish friends and I said, "Look, have you heard anything about this, the, in the military?" And they were like, "Yeah, yeah, we think it might happen." And I said, "Are you going to be given air cover?" They said, "We don't think so." And then I knew it was nonsense.

You have to understand, as, as I'm sure you do, um, the Syrian Kurds, for example, um, you know, they defeated ISIS with, with air, with air cover.