There is a peculiar instruction I receive almost daily, and it always arrives in the same imperative tone. Do not interfere in American affairs. Do not interfere in European affairs. And, since I no longer live there, do not interfere in Russian affairs either. The logic, such as it is, runs like this: a person who lives abroad has forfeited the right to an opinion about the countries he watches from a distance, and any judgment he offers is an impertinence at best and a hostile intrusion at worst. I want to take this demand seriously, because beneath its surface lies a genuine question about who is entitled to speak, and about what honesty requires of anyone who does. My answer comes in two parts that may at first seem to pull against each other. The first is that the demand for silence is not modesty but censorship. The second is that the freedom to speak does not license one to say anything at all; it comes attached to duties that are easy to evade and important to honor.
Distance Does Not Disqualify
Let me begin with the claim that location is decisive — that the man who has lived his whole life in a country necessarily understands it better than the one who left, or who is merely looking in from outside. This sounds like common sense, and it is false. I could, of course, restrict myself to writing only about the four walls of the room I am sitting in. I can see those walls perfectly well; no one could accuse me of overreach. But that would not be very interesting, and more to the point, it rests on a confusion. Proximity is not the same as understanding. Plenty of self-styled experts grasp almost nothing about their own countries, while a person armed with scholarship, with statistics, with the sober reading of crime data and sociology and the competing assessments of serious analysts, can arrive at a genuine judgment from thousands of kilometers away. What gives a person the right to judge is not a passport or a postal code. It is the capacity to analyze — to read the articles, to weigh the figures, to listen to the people who know more, and to think.
I am not, when I do this, interfering in anyone’s internal affairs. I am judging them. There is a difference, and it matters: I do not presume to govern, to vote in their elections, or to set their policy. I express an assessment. And expressing an assessment of any country’s conduct is not a transgression. It is the most ordinary exercise of free speech imaginable, no different in kind from a citizen of one country having opinions about the wars and crimes and follies of another. To forbid it — to insist that a person fall silent because of where he happens to sleep — is censorship, plain and simple. I have had quite enough of that particular instruction, and I intend to go on judging American affairs, European affairs, Russian affairs, and if it should come to it, Australian affairs too. So when someone orders me to stay in my lane, I decline, and I think the refusal is principled rather than merely stubborn.
Taking a Side Without Going Blind
Here, though, a sharper objection arrives, and it deserves a real answer rather than a brush-off. If I plainly support one side in this war — and I do, without the slightest embarrassment — then have I not surrendered the very objectivity that would make my judgment worth anything? Am I an analyst, the objection runs, or merely a partisan with a microphone?
I reject the premise that these are mutually exclusive. No one performs a lobotomy on a person to remove the part of the brain responsible for analysis the moment he takes a political position. A human being is perfectly capable of holding a conviction and still describing reality as it is. It takes effort, yes; it is not automatic; but it is entirely possible. I support Ukraine in this war beyond any doubt — and that support does not require me to pretend that Ukrainian forces are advancing where they are in fact withdrawing, or that a retreat from the Kursk region did not happen when it plainly did. Sympathy for one side does not oblige a person to lie for it. The propagandist is not someone who has chosen a side; the propagandist is someone who has agreed to falsify on its behalf. Those are different acts. One can stand firmly with the victim of an aggression and still refuse, absolutely refuse, to convert that sympathy into untruth.
And the division between the two sides, let me add, is not some artificial construct imposed on an innocent public to herd them into camps. It is the most natural division there could be. There is a war. One country attacked another. To support the aggressor or to support the victim is simply to face that fact and respond to it. No one forced this choice on me from outside; I made it by looking at what is in front of me. Those who complain that the world has been cruelly split into “for” and “against” are really complaining that a war is being fought, and a war does not leave much room for a comfortable third position above it all.
The Self-Imposed Silence on One Subject
There is one place, however, where I do hold my tongue, and I want to be precise about what it is and what it is not. I do not, at present, train my critical attention on the internal failings of the Ukrainian government and its military and political leadership. This is sometimes read as a claim of total objectivity — as if I were pretending no such problems exist — and that reading is wrong. Of course there are problems there; I have never denied it. My silence is not a verdict that all is well. It is a deliberate, deliberate ethical choice made by a particular person in particular circumstances: a citizen of the aggressor country, who does not consider it his place, at this moment, to busy himself cataloguing the shortcomings of the people his own country is bombing.
Two things follow from understanding it as a choice. First, it is not a pose of impartiality, so it cannot be unmasked as hypocrisy; I am not claiming to be the impartial register of all things. Second, it is not eternal. I do not rule out lifting this self-imposed taboo at some later point. I simply judge that right now the central problems demanding analysis lie elsewhere — in the conduct of Russia, in the vacillations of Washington, in the slow awakening of Europe — and that turning my attention to internal Ukrainian disputes is not what the present moment calls for. And for anyone who wants that other register, who wants relentless criticism of the Ukrainian leadership delivered daily, there is no shortage of voices supplying it. I claim no monopoly. I have simply chosen my proportions, and I think they fit the situation.
Knowing Where Competence Ends
If honesty forbids me to lie for the side I favor, it equally forbids me to pretend to knowledge I do not have. This is the other face of the same coin, and it is the part that the loudest demanders of opinions tend to forget. People sometimes grow impatient with my habit of deferring to experts — why, they ask, must we always defer to specialists, whose vision supposedly gets blurred inside their closed professional worlds? Why can’t an ordinary person with a clear head simply pronounce on how to destroy a bridge, or how to solve the catastrophe in Gaza, or what weapon will turn the war?
Because, quite simply, I do not know. When the conversation turns to military affairs, to engineering, to the technical question of whether a particular munition can substitute for artillery, I am not equipped to reason about it, and I refuse to perform a competence I lack. There is an asymmetry in these exchanges that is worth naming honestly: anyone can look up what I know and do not know, while I often have no idea of the questioner’s background. What I can say with certainty is what falls outside my own expertise — and on those matters I will wait for the people who have actually studied them. This is not false modesty and it is not evasion. It is the precondition of being trustworthy on anything. A person who claims to know everything is reliable on nothing. So I defer to the military expert and the engineer not because expertise is sacred, but because honest analysis requires an honest accounting of one’s own limits, and I would rather say “I don’t know, let me ask someone who does” than fill the air with confident noise.
A Dangerous Privilege, Not a Comfortable One
There remains a final charge, and it is the most cutting, because it accuses the observer of cowardice dressed as virtue. You enjoy, it is said, the privilege of the outside observer and the moralist — a convenient little niche from which to display your moral superiority and your stylistic distaste, risking nothing, while the people you judge bear the real weight of events. I want to answer this directly, because the word “convenient” deserves examination.
It is true that the journalist, the analyst, is by the nature of his work an outside observer and a moralist. That is the job; I will not apologize for it. But the notion that it is a comfortable perch is a fantasy. This role has a price, and it is paid in a hard currency. When I held a post counting the colleagues of mine who had been killed — killed precisely for performing this so-called privilege of observing and judging — the number ran into the hundreds. Several hundred journalists, dead for the crime of standing outside and saying what they saw. Others are branded foreign agents, declared enemies of the people, driven from their homes, thrown into prisons. I am, for now, relatively safe, and I do not pretend otherwise. But I pay for this position too: I have lost my home, I have lost direct contact with my family, I live in exile. So when I am told that I have chosen a cozy and superior niche, I can only say: yes, very convenient. Do not envy it.
This, finally, is why the two halves of my answer belong together. The right to judge from a distance and the duty to judge honestly are not in tension; they are the same commitment seen from two sides. The freedom to speak about any country, regardless of where one lives, is a basic liberty that no one may revoke by ordering me to be quiet. And precisely because it is a freedom and not a license, it carries obligations: to take a side without surrendering my eyes, to defer where I am ignorant, to refuse to turn sympathy into a lie. The distant observer who honors those duties is not hiding in a comfortable corner. He is doing a necessary and dangerous thing, and he is doing it as honestly as he can. That, and not silence, is what the moment asks of him.