On October 14, a Russian engineer named Gleb Karakulov boarded a flight from Kazakhstan to Turkey with his wife and daughter. Know more:
LONDON—On October 14, a Russian engineer named Gleb Karakulov boarded a flight from Kazakhstan to Turkey with his wife and daughter. He switched off his phone to shut out the crescendo of urgent, enraged messages, said goodbye to his life in Russia and tried to calm his fast-beating heart.
Karakulov’s account generally conforms with others that paint the Russian president as a once charismatic but increasingly isolated leader, who doesn’t use a cellphone or the Internet and insists on access to Russian state television wherever he goes. He also offered new details about how Putin’s paranoia appears to have deepened since his decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022.
Karakulov, his wife and his child have gone underground, and it was impossible to speak with them directly due to security constraints. Unlike the prime minister, Putin does not require secure Internet access on his trips, Karakulov said. Putin has set up identical offices in multiple locations, with matching details down to the desk and wall hangings, and official reports sometimes say he’s one place when he is actually in another, according to Karakulov and prior reporting by a Russian media outlet. When Putin was in Sochi, security officials would deliberately pretend he was leaving, bringing in a plane and sending off a motorcade, when he was in fact staying, Karakulov said.
Karakulov’s job introduced him to a world beyond his family. Even as his father and brother marched in patriotic military parades, his own doubts deepened. He’s horrified to think that he might also be rallying around the letter Z in support of the war in Ukraine if his job hadn’t taught him to see through the lies of Russian state television.He also began to question the conspicuous spending of Russia’s top leaders.
The only conversations he had were with colleagues who seemed to relish the war. He imagined others must share his views, but he had no way to find them.Karakulov said he couldn’t tell his parents about his disillusionment either, because their minds had been molded by years of watching Russian state television.
When they finally cleared passport control in Turkey, Karakulov said it was like a great stone had fallen from his soul.“Patriotism is when you love your country,” he said. “In this case, our homeland needs to be saved, because something crazy and terrible is happening in our country. We need to fix this.”What the future holds for Karakulov—and anyone who might dare to follow in his footsteps—is far from clear.
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