– Just before Christmas in 2021, I was on the border with Belarus in Poland. It was bitterly cold, but an incredible amount of strange things happened there, says Roger Sevrin Bruland to Ukrainapodden, a podcast from Nettavisen.
The former Europe correspondent is today a small farmer on the family farm in Stryn and communications manager at Norec, Norway’s competence center for international cooperation.
During his period as Europe correspondent from 2019 to 2023 based in Berlin, Bruland covered four of the toughest years for Europe since the Second World War.
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Hybrid war on the Belarus border and the invasion of Ukraine
Table of Contents
First, the continent was hit by a pandemic, and just as the pandemic subsided, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Bruland takes us back to the border area between Belarus and Poland when he is asked how he himself experienced the prelude to the full-scale invasion from his orchestra place as NRK’s eyes and ears in Europe.
You can listen to the entire episode with Roger Sevrin Bruland here:
– There was a whole bunch of Syrian asylum seekers on the other side of the border, most of them had health problems. We saw children with Down’s syndrome, children with physical and mental disabilities and elderly people with diabetes and other chronic diseases, says Bruland.
The difference was big from the refugee crisis in 2015. Then it was mostly young and healthy men who crossed the border into Europe, thousands of them came via Norway’s border with Russia.
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Putin and Lukashenko’s hybrid war
– In 2021, there were suddenly disabled people from Syria there. They were bussed to the border, given amphetamines and threatened with weapons by the Belarusian authorities, Bruland explains.
The order from Aleksandr Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, and his regime was clear: Go to Poland, then you will go on to Berlin.
– A kind of travel agency business was set up to create a political crisis in Europe, i.e. a destabilization operation, says the former correspondent.
Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko also got many of the answers they wanted.
– German neo-Nazis mobilized on the German border. There was a lot of writing in European newspapers. Now we know that this was a hybrid war, says Bruland.
In the book, Bruland writes about when he received an SMS, sent en masse from the Polish authorities: The Polish border is closed. Belarusian authorities lied to you. Go back to Minsk! Don’t take any pills from Belarusian soldiers.
“It turned out that the asylum seekers were forced to take amphetamines before they set off across the border. Damn those bastards, may they burn in hell, I thought,” he writes in the book.
Continuous border crisis between Poland and Belarus
Jakub Godzimirski, a researcher on Russia at Nupi, is Polish himself. He tells Nettavisen that there is a continuous crisis on the border between Belarus and Poland.
– It is difficult to imagine that the refugees will come so close to the border without receiving support from the Belarusian authorities, we are talking about an authoritarian regime that has full control over its own border areas, he tells Nettavisen.
However, he has not heard of the refugees having been given amphetamine.
– But you absolutely cannot rule out that they have received things that make it easier for them to cross the border, emphasizes Godzimirski.
He says it is well documented that Belarusian border guards are close to where the refugees try to cross the border.
– A number of tunnels from Belarus have also been discovered, so one must assume that those who engage in such activities have the support of the authorities in the country. There is no doubt that Belarus is helping to make it more difficult for the Polish authorities to keep control of the border, says Godzimirski.
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Team Berlin became a book
Two years after he quit his job at NRK, he has written a book about the four years as NRK’s man in Berlin. One of the questions he has asked himself along the way is when he should have realized that Russia was not what we in the West wanted to believe.
– Should we have realized that in 2014, when Russia took the Krym peninsula? Should we have realized that when the FSB started shooting people in broad daylight in the center of Berlin? We didn’t even realize it the day before the full-scale invasion, says Bruland.
The book, which has been named “Team Berlin”, mainly deals with Bruland’s experience of the two biggest crises Europe has faced after the Second World War: Corona and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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“Nobody” thought Russia would invade
Bruland describes the days before 24 February 2022, when Russia attacked, as a kind of mass psychosis. Despite clear warnings from the United States in particular that Russia would attack, many refused to believe that Russia could come up with such a thing.
This despite the fact that the war in Ukraine started already in 2014 and had cost at least 14,000 human lives.
– It was a kind of mass psychosis where we didn’t want to believe that something like this could happen. I understand it well, it is an unimaginable tragedy and a shock, says Bruland to Ukrainapodden.
Bruland says he wonders how he will look back on the run-up to the full-scale invasion when he gets “old and grey”.
Bruland also told about terrified Russian soldiers, who took a major detour around a Ukrainian village for fear of losing their potency:
Trump surprises: – Look at this
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Vladmir Putin’s ace up his sleeve
When asked what advice he would give today’s journalists about how to deal with hybrid warfare, he says that it is complicated.
– It is incredibly difficult, because as journalists we have certain rules of the game to deal with, which those who engage in hybrid warfare do not need. They can pump out content on social media and bombard people with propaganda, while we sit in Dagsrevyen where only people over 45 watch. It is a tragedy, you who are journalists today are really fighting against superior power, says Bruland.
The popular correspondent believes that the privatization of influence operations makes them more difficult to crack down on.
Today, it is difficult to know whether the sender of messages that can be interpreted to be, for example, pro-Russian, actually means this, or is being paid by Russia to spread their propaganda.
– During the Cold War, before we unleashed market forces, it was often the public sector that dealt with intelligence, says the author.
Today, countries such as Russia, Iran, China and North Korea can pay private individuals to carry out missions that were previously mostly reserved for their own intelligence agents.
– And it can be tempting if, for example, you need that holiday in Tuscany every single year.
The entire episode with Roger Sevrin Bruland is available on your favorite podcast player, and on YouTube.
