This is Popular Front, a podcast focused on the niche details of modern warfare and underreported conflict with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're going to be speaking to journalist

and filmmaker and the Hayward. He's been spending a lot of time inside Russia

over the past two years after Putin launched the full scale

invasion of Ukraine. Now Andy has been basically making a film about

anti-war Russians while still being inside the country. As you can imagine that's

quite a risky thing to do and he has a very unique insight into how the

Russian public is dealing with the fact their country invaded Ukraine is murdering

and massacring people and continues to do so. A lot of them are very happy

that that's happening but that's not the whole story many aren't support us at patreon.com slash popular front

So you've been in Russia on and off for the duration of the current Ukraine war at least the one that started fully when a Russia launched the full-scale invasion.

What have you been doing there?

Why are you in Russia as opposed to Ukraine?

What is it you're making?

Well, basically, it was a bit of an accident that I ended up kind of covering Russia for you know since like you said the start of the in the full scale

invasion what happened was I worked as a sort of general international producer with vice doing various stories in Europe here wherever and we got to a situation where

My accreditation finally came through for Russia. I've been waiting for two years to sort of work with what

at that stage was kind of a full team. We had a correspondent local producer base there locally,

camera up pretty much on staff. And as soon as I basically got my accreditation

then the sort of the war kicked off and then over the year it was you know we

had various situations with staff members, particularly with our Russian staff members,

where the risk to them was just, you know, obviously going up and up kind of as the months passed.

And we kind of ended up in a situation basically where it guess was kind of me as the last person standing with accreditation for various reasons.

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