A Dangerous Russian Adventure - Charlie Walker

They were accusing me of being a journalist, asking provocative questions about Ukraine, and photographing military sites. But you put all those together and you've essentially got, through the Russian state's perspective, a foreign journalist getting ready to spread stories about the Russian military that run counter to the state's official narrative. And they introduced in early March, about a week after the invasion of Ukraine, a new law with a sentence of up to 15 years for just that. (wind blows)

Talk to me about what drives somebody to do the things that you have chosen to do as pursuits.

Uh, there's been a lot of different drivers at different points, I guess, over the course of my career. To start off with, I was ... I mean, I, I, I don't think it's too ... I don't think I'm too ashamed to say that at the beginning I was kind of quite keen to try and sort of, I don't know, stamp my mark on the world. A phrase I've used once before is, uh, "A young man wanting to slay dragons," but I kind of grew up in the post-dragon era. Um, and I, you know, I wanted to sort of get out there and see the world, but there was definitely quite a dose of, uh, I guess ego wound in, wrapped up in that. And I quite liked the sort of self-image of the, I guess, the kind of thoughtful, grizzled explorer plodding through the icy wastes, you know, with only his mad mind for company. But thankfully, as the, uh, as the last sort of, you know, 13 or so years have, have, have gone by, I've become a little bit more considered. And it's nowadays, uh, I would say roughly 50/50 between wanting to get out and sort of challenge myself, uh, physically, in wild places, you know, to be in the wilderness or lesser-known little, you know, seldom-visited people and get some insight into, into their lives and their worlds. Um, and I guess the thing that draws all that together is just a strong sense of curiosity, which, uh, has never waned.

It's interesting to think about what can drive people to do the things that they want to do when, in the beginning, some of it might have been recognition or status, or a desire for acclaim or respect from the people that you admire. Can take you a hell of a long way.

Yeah. Well, I don't ... I, I think to be fair, my, my, my sort of, my world or my sphere that how I imagined things going didn't quite stretch to acclaim or recognition. It was, uh ... I mean, I wrote in my first book about going off during ... I, I studied up in, in Newcastle where I think you are from-

Correct.

... or have studied. Yeah. And in the summer holidays, I would scrape together the few pennies I had, and, you know, I'd work in bars or putting up marquees or whatever all summer. And then at the end, I would have a few weeks where I could go off to somewhere obscure. And I quite liked when I came back that everyone had been, you know, partying all summer, and I'd been this just sort of (laughs) absence. And, uh, coming back and suddenly having a story to tell and something interesting to say. I don't think I ever imagined that I would make a career out of any of this. And a career is, is a sort of, you know, in inverted commas type term when you do something like this because it's scraping together all sorts of different things. There's no kind of one single thing that I do. Um, so I, I guess it was (laughs) perhaps more vanity than a desire for recognition or anything else that, that sort of drove me to go out and, and sort of, you know, explore.