{"id":11216,"date":"2026-04-26T05:07:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T05:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/11216\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T05:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T05:07:11","slug":"i-was-playing-jenga-with-my-young-son-in-dublin-when-i-received-a-threat-from-moscow-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/11216\/","title":{"rendered":"I was playing Jenga with my young son in Dublin when I received a threat from Moscow \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was January 2023, almost a year after Russia\u2019s invasion<\/a> of Ukraine. I was sitting on the floor of my home in Dublin with my four-year-old son, Farid, setting up a game of Jenga. <\/p>\n

My phone buzzed on the couch beside me as I topped off the tower of blocks. It was a message from an anonymous account on Telegram<\/a>, the encrypted messaging app widely used in Russia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHi Jason, are you in Moscow at the moment? \u201d<\/p>\n

The account had no name, no photograph. Just a blank avatar. It had to be someone who knew me as a journalist in Russia, where I had lived and worked for 14 years before the war.<\/p>\n

I guessed it might be Denis, a contact I had been trying to reach for a story about the impact of newly imposed anti-Kremlin sanctions. I replied that I wasn\u2019t in Moscow and asked if it was Denis. <\/p>\n

\u201cNo, it\u2019s not Denis,\u201d came the answer. <\/p>\n

Farid tugged at my sleeve, impatient for me to return to the game. I set the phone down and pulled a block from the middle of the tower. It wobbled but held.<\/p>\n

My phone buzzed again. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are genuinely dissatisfied with the tone of your reporting, Jason.\u201d<\/p>\n

Farid, emboldened, yanked a piece from the base. The tower collapsed in a clatter across the wooden floor.<\/p>\n

Another message followed almost immediately: \u201cYou are having security problems of a personal kind now.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a moment, I just stared at the screen. Who was this? A crank? A Kremlin troll tasked with clipping the wings of western journalists critical of Vladimir Putin<\/a>\u2019s \u201cspecial military operation\u201d. It was impossible to say. <\/p>\n

Eventually, I replied, half in jest, whether by \u201cwe\u201d they meant Russia\u2019s last tsar, Nikolai II. <\/p>\n

There was no answer. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018Russia is a threat to everyone\u2019: Moldovan president on election interference and EU aspirationsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The warning arrived out of the blue, shortly after several of my articles on the catastrophic fallout from Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine were published in the UK, Irish and the US national media. I had spent years writing about corruption and human-rights abuses in Russia for western outlets. The message could have been linked to any number of stories, any number of people with reason to be unhappy.<\/p>\n

A well-placed security contact in Moscow told me to take the warning seriously and to stay away from Russia. \u201cWhy risk 10 years in some godforsaken gulag?\u201d he said. \u201cThese are dangerous times.\u201d<\/p>\n

My Russian wife, Alsu, was sufficiently spooked to cancel plans to return home. Around the same time, in March 2023, the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia and charged with espionage, the first foreign journalist to face such accusations since the cold war. <\/p>\n

I had known him slightly from the Moscow press corps, a loose fraternity sometimes referred to as the \u201chack pack\u201d. The allegation that he was spying was widely regarded as absurd. His detention felt like a message.<\/p>\n

\"JasonJason Corcoran in Red Square, Moscow, with his wife, Alsu, and their son, Farid <\/p>\n

I started tweeting about my warning in light of Evan\u2019s arrest. Producers from RT\u00c9 and BBC Global News were quick to get in touch. I was live on TV and radio talking about the threats against me and why I believed Evan had effectively been taken hostage by the Russian authorities. <\/p>\n

The episode was enough to convince me that I wouldn\u2019t be returning to Moscow in a hurry after a third of my life working there. The various Kremlin security apparatuses had typically left foreign journalists alone, focusing on intimidating and persecuting domestic media outlets, resigned to the expectation they would always get a bad rap from the foreign press corps, regardless of their actions. <\/p>\n

Many of us assumed that our phones were being tapped and took precautions, but we were mainly left alone unless we strayed into sensitive territory, such as reporting on the restive South Caucasus region. On the other hand, I had seen the pressure the authorities had always exerted on my Russian colleagues. <\/p>\n

Working for certain independent Russian newspapers had put journalists in the crosshairs. Novaya Gazeta, which has been lauded for its corruption and human rights probes, has seen six of its journalists and contributors killed since Putin became president. <\/p>\n

I had endured a few scrapes over the years, dodging baton charges at opposition rallies and being bundled into a paddy wagon, but Russian journalist colleagues had frequently been beaten and poisoned for just doing their job. That distinction collapsed after the full-scale invasion. Foreign journalists were suddenly legitimate targets as the western world reacted to Putin\u2019s rashness with a tsunami of sanctions and unconditional support for Kyiv. <\/p>\n

I had flown out of Moscow on February 22nd, 2022, after Putin declared he was recognising the independence of two breakaway regions of Ukraine, a move that preceded the full-scale invasion. Like so many other Russia experts, I was completely blindsided by Russia\u2019s decision to go to war with its neighbour. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, my mother, friends and relatives frequently messaged me, asking if Putin was really going to invade, and if I was safe.<\/p>\n

\"AA Russian woman sits on a bus stop in front of poster advertising military conscription showing Russian soldiers in Moscow, Russia. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov\/EPA <\/p>\n

I reassured them it was a grand bluff to extract a few concessions from the West. How mistaken I was. I thought it was inconceivable that Putin would rip up a two-decade-long social contract with the Russian people to provide prosperity and domestic stability in exchange for forgoing political freedoms. <\/p>\n

Within days, friends and contacts I knew began leaving Russia as part of an exodus that year of more than a million people: journalists, teachers, tech workers, entrepreneurs and musicians. Some went to Armenia or Georgia, others to the Baltics, Kazakhstan, Serbia or Dubai. Those with the means left quickly. Those without stayed and tried to adapt. <\/p>\n

Leaving was easier for me than for my wife. I was a foreigner who had built a life in Moscow. I never took citizenship or permanent residency because I never fully believed Russia was on the right path, even though I hoped it might be.<\/p>\n

We had met in Moscow in 2006, fallen in love and had married three years later at ZAGS Wedding Palace Number 4 on Butyrskaya Street, the only place in the city where foreigners are allowed to get hitched. <\/p>\n

Russians themselves live in constant, suffocating fear of their phones<\/p>\n

For Alsu, the rupture has been deeper. She has not been back since the invasion and has missed numerous family milestones. Her brother vanished in May 2022 and resurfaced in Turkey with his wife. Timur hadn\u2019t told his parents, or my wife, about their plans, fearing he could be stopped at the border and conscripted into the army.<\/p>\n

His decision to flee proved to be the correct one. As a ranked officer in reserve, he would have been first to be mobilised into Putin\u2019s war in Ukraine. And, sure enough, two draft notices were later found at his Moscow address. <\/p>\n

Our son was born in Moscow in the autumn of 2018. To this day our apartment lies empty with crates of his Duplo Lego, Masha and the Bear stuffed toys and scooters. Farid remembers nothing of his homeland, but he loves to linger over the photos: birthdays, summer holidays at his cousins\u2019 dacha on the Volga, and racing across Red Square on my shoulders in late 2021. <\/p>\n

The invasion unleashed an upheaval that upended all of our lives, though it bears no comparison to the devastation inflicted on Ukraine: the bombs, the occupation, the forced deportations, the killing of civilians and children. But in Russia, the invasion has still detonated a quieter, more insidious kind of destruction. <\/p>\n

Russia was expelled not only from the political order but from the cultural and sporting world as well, kicked out of Eurovision, barred from the Olympics and the World Cup, erased from tournaments, festivals, and international stages that had once signalled belonging.<\/p>\n

People who had been integrated members of the international community suddenly found themselves pariahs. Work dried up for many friends as foreign clients bolted. Passports became little more than reminders of places they could no longer go. Families and friendships fractured over the war, many beyond repair.<\/p>\n

\"JasonJason Corcoran <\/p>\n

When I began working on a memoir, it became a way of reconnecting with people scattered across countries and time zones. I travelled to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the Balkans, the Baltics, the South Caucasus and Germany to meet old friends and contacts to see how they were faring.<\/p>\n

Our conversations returned again and again to the same questions: how to rebuild, whether exile was temporary or permanent, whether there could ever be a way back. Researching and writing the book became a form of therapy, a way of reaching back to people I had lived and worked alongside and sharing a sense of loss. <\/p>\n

The war\u2019s most brutalised victims are the Ukrainians, but the greatest number of casualties are the Russians themselves, including many who don\u2019t even see themselves as victims. They live in constant, suffocating fear of their phones, trapped in a society where even uttering Putin\u2019s name is a risk.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s referred to as \u201cMr No 1\u2033, and when conversations veer towards him, they either point to the ceiling or whisper his name in hushed tones, as if he\u2019s Voldemort \u2013 he who must not be named.<\/p>\n

Since 2022 the Kremlin has launched a relentless campaign to stifle political opposition, flood the domestic landscape with pro-war and anti-western propaganda and carve out vast new classes of Russians who profit directly from the conflict. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Russian journalist who covered Navalny trials jailed on extremism chargesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Many of our Russian friends feel like hostages in their own country, living under a regime that has been dominated by Putin and his inner circle for the past 25 years. This group, often likened to a gang of terrorists, has systematically repressed the population, imprisoning those who dare to dissent and conditioning citizens to believe that resistance is futile.<\/p>\n

Russians now live in a parallel economy where inflation gnaws at savings, western brands remain available but at higher prices and internet blackouts are routine, with sanctions turning basic transactions into a maze.<\/p>\n

Conversations come with unspoken rules: avoid politics or risk losing the relationship entirely. Workarounds have become a way of life, whether it is finding obscure payment systems for online purchases or plotting convoluted multi-country routes just to visit relatives abroad. It is not war in the sense of shelling or air raids, but it is a siege all the same \u2013 one that works from the inside, steadily hollowing out the space where optimism used to be.<\/p>\n

Farid, who is now seven, still loves Jenga, though he is less reckless now about pulling out pieces just to see what happens. He talks of becoming an architect or a footballer. Maybe one day he\u2019ll go back to Russia and help build something sturdier, one block at a time.<\/p>\n

Leaving Russia: How Putin Forced a Nation\u2019s Future to Flee by Jason Corcoran is published by Quartet on April 30th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was January 2023, almost a year after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. I was sitting on the floor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[93,26,5,102,4366,21,2551],"class_list":{"0":"post-11216","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-moscow","8":"tag-kremlin","9":"tag-moscow","10":"tag-russia","11":"tag-telegram","12":"tag-ukraine-crisis","13":"tag-vladimir-putin","14":"tag-weekendreview"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}