Rogue Brits: Fighting for Putin

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The Observer.

Hello, I'm Alexey Monstress, the host of the Sloan newscast from The Observer.

Welcome to this week's show. The news this week is dominated by one story.

President Trump's decision to bomb Iran. It's a story that's unfolding in real time,

and who knows where it's going to end. In many ways, the Iran attack is a battle of ideologies,

a 40-plus year dispute over how the world should look. The top decisions are being made by men

in their 50s or older. But when it comes to ideology, especially in war, it's the young people

who really count. They're the ones on the front lines. If you look at the Ukraine conflict,

thousands of young volunteers from countries like Britain and America have volunteered to fight

in the war against Russia. But what happens when an ideology is subverted? What happens when someone

from a country that supposedly stands for One World View goes to fight for the other side?

This is what our brilliant reporter Francisco Garcia is looking at. How is it that a young man

from a stable family with a good friendship group can end up in Donesk, unloading shells of the

back of a van, not for President Zelensky, but for President Putin? And once you've made that

decision, is there any way back? This is Rogue Brits fighting for Putin. I hope you enjoy the show.

When Jay was here, were there any alarm bells? Did you ever think, oh,

this got something changed in him or was it just a case of it? It was a sudden shock.

There were slight changes, I would say. He sort of got interested in Russian culture and

started taking Russian lessons. I remember the one day.

Early in the summer of 2024, Pete and his friend Jay were taking some time out of the daily

lives. They'd been close for a while. Their tight-knit friendship group headed to the Lake District

from central Scotland. They'd embark on this kind of lads trip every six months or so.

It was pretty tame, almost wholesome, really. They drink beers and chat philosophy and religion

until the early hours, with increasingly slack coherence. But this particular trip has stuck in

Pete's mind. Imagine it probably will for quite some time. I remember all sitting around having

drinks and he said, look guys, I'm leaving. I'm going to go find Russia. I thought he was joking,

like we were all like a little bit drunk and I was like, oh, whatever man. And then things

around two, three weeks later, he left. So yeah, it was a shock to all of us.

Honestly, he just thought, obviously him being a joker. We thought, yeah, he's just pulling

our eggs. But yeah, he did. He left. And I think he was a little bit depressed towards the end.

For the last few months, I've been trying to work something out. How does someone from

small town Scotland end up on the front line of a war thousands of miles away, fighting for Russia?

I know Dunblane well. It's a genteel commuter town about an hours drive from Glasgow and Edinburgh.

I lived there for several years as a child. Last summer, I found myself there again. I met a friend

and his wife at a pub tucked just off the high street. And after a few pints, he asked me if I'd heard

of Jay Fraser. I hadn't. Fraser was a young man in his early 20s from an unremarkable middle class

family. Though quiet and chronically online, he wasn't exactly a loner. He had friends and a

solid, stable job. It felt simultaneously horrifying and, in fact, me ludicrous that this guy could end

up there. As a week's drifted past, I couldn't shake the story. Fraser was out in a British tabloid

at the end of 2024. This initial flurry of coverage offered scant details about his upbringing

and motivations. Elsewhere, Fraser occasionally pops up in the British press, usually when he said

something particularly offensive on X, where he's been a prolific and aggressive poster. He can

be deeply unpleasant. He's marked dead Ukrainian soldiers and given voice to a number of far-right

talking points, including some pretty pungent racism. All of this, while in the middle were

fighting the deadliest war in Europe since the end of World War II. But Jay Fraser is not the only

British citizen to take up arms from Russia. And it turns out, their motivations are just as

opaque and difficult to understand. At least, until now.

Hey, man. Jay, how you doing? Often in these types of investigations, the difficulty I'm up

against is not being able to speak to the person at the heart of the story. That's not the case

with Jay. We've been in contact over the past few months, sending regular messages back and forth

on an almost daily basis. I'm in the office, or my living room. Jay's a few meters from a distant

front line. I'm currently in Donazk, as far as the PNC with Russian armed forces. He works on

rotation, roughly 10 days on the front, followed by 10 days off. That was fade. There's just

10 shells. That's sticking in the back of a van. He arrived in 2024 when he was 23.

We're near a state of, in a more sort of industrial sector. It's not just very abandoned,

shut down. There's blows everywhere because the war is being going on here for 11 years,

almost 12. It's not trying to retain stability, almost trying to just not disrupt

the civilian sector as much as possible, so even here where you're so close to where the actual

war is going on, you wouldn't really know. It's a long way from Damblan, where all of this started.

I think Damblan is an interesting place. In many ways, it shouldn't be. It's affluent.

It's got good schools. It's a popular commuter town. It's quiet, often pretty dull.

I never really had many issues with it when I was growing up. I think it was a new place to go up.

I had a very good upbringing, is what I would say. My parents always did the best.

But there's one remarkable thing about this place, that 30 years after the fact

continues to shape its identity. There's the obvious history to the school of shooting

side of things, which always hides over the time.

Search Damblan in Google, and this is the first result you'll get, the Damblan massacre.

In 1996, a 43-year-old man walked into the primary school and killed 16 young children

and their teacher. It's the worst mass shooting in British history.

On the whole, Jay's childhood is uneventful. He's bright, but sometimes struggles at school.

There are pointless arguments with teachers, and a few tame bursts of adolescent rebellion.

He heads off to University in Glasgow to study chemical engineering. It doesn't work out.

He drops out after a term.

We just waste a lot of time playing games. That's the main thing I'll remember.

I think I was just very fed up with those situations. When it came down to the end,

they said, you know, here's how bad your attendance is. It's a waste of both their time being here.

Either you can improve it, or we can just go our different ways here. That was like,

yeah, you know what? I agree.

If you're drinking in Scotland, you'll likely find tenants on draft a pretty much any pub

you venture into. The Larger is an institution, brewed in the east end of Glasgow,

and in 2019, be hiring their first ever apprentice brewer.

There's also a lot of nerds, I'm going to say, no one ever saw something that was

still compared to doing about that age, and not really having that much confidence in myself

He's selected from over 2,000 applicants, so it's a pretty big deal for him,

and it seems like the world of graph actually suits him more than academia.

There's a really good group of guys in the brewery, and they spend a lot of time together.

They get close and bond over football, but Jay is still bored.

I had a lot of spare time on patchy levels too that much.

It was starting to push in buttons more to the table.

Yeah, it was really easy going in time.

And then the pandemic hits. In the summer of 2020, Jay, like everyone else,

has a lot of time alone to think a feeling starts to take root.

I want to just feel and not dissatisfaction with my work life necessarily,

but dissatisfaction, a wider scale where I was just sort of lacking any real near purpose.

He'd do his eight hours of work, come home, stare at a screen, then more screens, sleep, repeat.

You only give him one chance at it.

You won't be so much time on this planet.

And I wasn't really contributing at it, so I didn't feel not doing anything else.

You know, the science supply, you know, Glasgow's pumps,

and it started to grow over a bit at a time more and more just a dissatisfaction

with the direction of my life and sort of thinking, you know,

this is just what I want by my legacy to be in my head through on the world.

And then I somehow channeled that into the direction,

so intersting to that greater meaning came to the orthodox church.

A 20 year old trapped in a search for meaning.

So he turns to religion. It's a well-trodden path.

It is a place that I sort of felt I fit in for some reason from like day one.

I was able to collect the folk in some way and get along with them very well.

And I think I'd have to have a coin of almost wearing a mask with people.

I don't often like to be myself.

Jaybegin's attending the small Greek orthodox church in Dunblane.

He's not alone. Lots of young men in the west are converting to orthodoxy,

drawn by its apparently overt masculinity in opposition to what they see as the increasingly

feminized societies around them. They even have a pithy nickname.

Authorbrows.

Alexander Gray doesn't quite fit this mold. He's in his late 20s at the beginning of the pandemic.

He's in a small town in Maryland in the US. He has a good job as an engineer at Cisco Systems.

Gray met his Russian wife in 2017. He was baptized in the States a couple of years later.

During the pandemic, he developed some pretty strong anti-vax views.

It leads him to being let go at work. The couple eventually moved to Russia.

In 2024, he joins the Russian military. He says it aligns with his values and he's still there

on the front line. After his contract ends, he wants to build a normal life in Russia, he says,

working in IT. He certainly doesn't want to be known as he adds,

a foreign fighter personality.

For Jay, his faith offers a new and previously unknown sense of belonging.

The place strikes a chord with him. He becomes particularly close to the young Latvian priest

who baptizes him and his friends. A few months later,

War kicked off. It's all over the news constantly.

In February 2022, Russia invades Ukraine.

When it was always hard to make sure that the church was

wasn't as far as the Greek Orthodox license, but had previously been Russian.

So it was like the, you know, hot topic there as well as in the media and everywhere,

non-social media. I can be a contrarian sometimes, it's just a way to woke up.

And I am not from this trust of the media. I don't know where that comes from.

Just being a bit rebellious, I think. That sort of led me into this obsession with it.

He'd spend his days constantly refreshing social media and scrolling through Telegram,

a messaging app which is particularly popular in Eastern Europe.

I'd have my like on and off with sessions of Russia for a long time.

Early in my teens, I was, I was a bit of communist and loved the USSR.

Then there was like the college U.K. games, the bad guys were always the Russians,

or you're playing the World War II stuff, and you're the Russians.

That has led to this little bit of an interest there as well.

Thanks for that.

Spending so much pain sitting on Telegram channels or refreshing things,

Washington folk died, you're ever standing.

And obviously as much as everybody likes to think they're not propagandaized,

everybody is to some extent.

And every piece of media that you reach, there's no such thing as an unbiased author really.

Whether it's conscious or unconscious, there's always a bias in waffle, right?

So maybe I became a bit too enraptured with it and believed things to easily a little bit.

It started into this obsession with Russia being the mighty kids guys crushing the evil.

That's the grand interpretation.

Every so often, Jay lets a different one slip.

It's finally pushed him to a lot closer to, yeah sure I'll go and get myself killed,

in a war halfway across the continent.

Jay Fraser had a death wish.

His best friend John was also going to the church, and together they started

spitballing ideas. For a while, they were on a similar page.

Yeah, I think it was a slow kind of change.

I mean, originally we had planned to go to Russia together to do like

like homesteading, like by land and like do homesteading and stuff,

and be like in an orthodox community in Russia.

But thankfully we didn't do it because that would have ended horribly.

And I didn't know what we're doing at all.

It would have been like dumbest idea ever, but yeah, he got more interested in joining the military

basically, and then I became less interested and you know, I just sort of diverged a bit.

To be honest, adventure often seems more important to the boys and spirituality.

They embark on a tour of orthodox countries that isn't exactly defined by its piety.

In Kosovo, they drive north for hours to attend the Serbian protest,

only to find they're a day late when they get there.

So it was like, oh we'll go in, we'll join this protest.

It'll be a bit of fun.

And we never actually, when we were there, we were there for a few days.

And we missed it.

There's one city where it's got like a bridge and it's pretty much divided into the Kosovo side

and the like Serbian side.

And we left from the Serbian side to Kosovo side and then some guys started following us.

And then we were trying to avoid them and then the group getting bigger of guys.

So we went to go get a taxi.

These guys surrounded us and started speaking to us in Albanian.

And then we were like, what was going on?

And started questioning us.

And then they found out we weren't Serbs.

So they're like, oh it's okay to have a good trip.

And the Serbian countryside, they paid to attend a three-day military training camp.

Then Bulgaria, they woke up to a shooting range.

They found on TripAdvisor.

It's run by an experienced serviceman who has a sideline and training foreign volunteers

who want to fight for Ukraine.

Jay makes use of that too, though he doesn't let his true allegiance slip.

His mind is increasingly made up.

He wants to join the Russian War effort.

But when Jay brings it up over beers in the late district,

his friend Pete can't shake the sense he's winding them up.

It fitted with Jay's well-honed contrarian streak.

But John had known Jay a lot longer.

And he knew his old friend was serious.

Yeah, I knew he was serious and he was going to do it.

And he was very like, he was just so convinced on it.

And he's kind of, somebody who's quite hard to, he's very like single-minded.

He can't really, it's hard to disagree with him and like,

convince him when he's like set his mind on something.

Jay didn't let on to many people outside of a small friendship group.

And the thing is, Jay isn't the only Brit to have traveled to fight for Russia.

I can firmly say I've never killed anybody in the, for a fact, I've never killed anybody.

I've been a soldier, I've done my job, I've followed my orders.

Ben Stimpson is originally from Oldham, great Manchester.

These are taken from voice notes they've sent you on telegram over the past few months.

Growing up, the 50-year-old antique stealer was a committed socialist and environmental activist.

His dad was a trade unionist, his mother, a CND activist.

In his 20s, Stimpson was actually arrested during 1996,

Newbury bypass protest, the largest anti-road demonstrations in British history.

He was reminded for a day or so before being let out.

Fast forward to the 2010s, and Stimpson's life is in freefall.

He's drinking too much, and out partying pretty much every weekend.

Much of the existing UK press coverage about him has mentioned a serious drug problem,

though he strongly refutes that when we speak.

What is certain is that his business was in trouble, and his girlfriend at the time was on his

case, trying to get him to curb the relentless hedonism. He starts concocting a plan.

It's pretty out there, he wants to travel to Syria to fight for the Kurds against ISIS.

Until at least a trip to London where he meets a man called Benius Ajo, a Latvian-born political

activist better known by his alias, Black linen. Syria, he tells Stimpson, is passé.

The real fight against Nazism is going on in the Don Bass, after 2014,

Maiden Revolution, for the Russian separatists, against the Ukrainian state.

Stimpson arrives in August 2015. By that November, he decided to come back to the UK,

where he was immediately arrested at Manchester Airport and charged under section 5 of the 2006

terrorism act. At trial in the summer of 2017, he pleaded guilty and was jailed for more than

five years. On leaving prison in 2022, Stimpson was subject to strict restrictions on his movement

and finances. He says, these were the catalysts that surround return to Russia in 2024,

where he spent a stint as a military training instructor, among other jobs.

I worked the third line, that was dangerous here. I've been attacked by drones. We used to do the

fuel deliveries to the front line. That was bloody dangerous. I've been attacked by FPV drones twice.

I saw someone killed one of my regiment killed. That was horrible thing to take in.

I mean, the last winter I did in the special military operation zone was awful. It was tough,

even though we were about 20 kilometres back from the front line. We were still at risk of

long-range artillery and long-range drones, and we were living in more than ice. It's tough.

It's a tough life. It's now it's a young man's game. Stimpson now lives in Moscow, where he

works as an English teacher. Most of the Brits who have left this country to fight in the war

have chosen the other side. Somewhere between 2 and 3,000 Brits have signed up for Ukraine's

international legion, since Russia's full-scale invasion. It's the biggest volunteer mobilisation

of its type since the Spanish Civil War. Several dozen have been killed, including the former

sales manager from Bristol and a psychology undergraduate from Birmingham, as well as British

Army veterans who had served in Kosovo and Iraq. The motivations of the ones who have gone to fight

for Russia are often hard to discern, complex, and sometimes plain confused, as with Jay Fraser.

War is a way of attracting the lonely and marginal, as well as straightforward adventurers and bad

actors. This is nothing new. What is marked is the sheer diversity of Russia's British recruits.

It seems that Putin's war is a magnet for all manner of resemblance.

Ben Stimpson arrived in 2015. Aiden Minnes, however, is fairly certain he was the first

Brit to arrive after the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. I began talking with

a 39-year-old last December. Truthfully, I wasn't actually sure what to expect, but Minnes is

courteous and forthcoming. He wants to be understood. As with Jay Fraser, it's difficult to square this

with a bombast of his public pronouncements. Late last year, Minnes, who is now a Russian citizen,

was filmed burning his British passport. Consider my passport revered as I'm still

rescinded and consider it. I do not want it anymore. You can kiss my ass.

So, fuck you, great Britain.

Minnes is originally from Wiltshire and spent time in the care system growing up.

He also struggled with drugs and alcohol. In 2008, he was convicted of an unprovoked racist

assault, as well as playing a part in a string of robberies. His own defence lawyer told the

court his client was in the national front, something that Minnes strongly denied to me,

calling them two-bit scumbags. Minnes contains multitudes. He's an Irish Republican

leaning Orthodox Christian Convert, who considers Vladimir Putin the greatest politician in the world.

He left the Russia in 2023 via Belgrade. It was the first time he had ever left the UK.

It's a high stress environment, like very high stress environment. I mean, as war, especially

the death and destruction, on both sides.

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I don't think the Russians are particularly bothered about trying to recruit people from the

West or anything. Jay first visits Russia at the end of 2023. He travels on a tourist visa via

Istanbul, and for now, it really is just as a tourist. The journey was straightforward.

Flying into Russia, coming from the UK, I wasn't expecting to and was detained by the security

services at the border. I got pulled in, had a lot of interrogation about some of my views.

Why was I coming to Russia? That sort of thing. They'll probably understand the least suspicious.

He's free to enter Russia. The moment he's dreamed of, but Moscow is disarmingly ordinary.

There's even Brudog being served in the bars, he visits.

His second trip is in late spring 2024. This time, he's determined to make the most of it.

He visits the beaches of Sochi on the Black Sea, and travels to Siberia.

This time, it isn't just a jolly. This time, Jay is determined to join the Russian armed forces,

but there's vanishingly little information available online. He wants to be sent to a storm

infantry unit right into the worst and bitterest of the fighting, where life expectancy can

often be measured in days, rather than weeks. My intention was literally just to keep turning up

military and Muslim offices in Moscow, and then different cities until somebody would take me

or be able to tell me what I was supposed to do when I came over. I thought I would be able to

be able to be able to, I would say, in a counter-hike to be sent to the storm, and I had no illusions

about how long I would last, so I was expecting to make you particularly far or have any sort of

glorious actions. I knew the reality of things, but it was what I was expecting.

But it's proving difficult. It doesn't actually seem like the Russians are that

bothered about getting Brits to fight for them. He's knocked back from several recruitment centers.

If the Russian war effort needs foreign mercenaries, often drawn from Africa and Latin America,

inexperienced Brits are not really of much military value. They're worth instead

lies in their propaganda potential. But Jay gets lucky.

On Telegram, he begins speaking with Alexander Gray, the young American, an Orthodox convert,

who's also in Russia, in the process of signing up. He points Jay in the direction of the

Pete Nashgoo Brigade, the international volunteer unit that started life in the Netsk in 2015.

He sends him some information about his military experience, which is basically zero,

and is Russian, which isn't much better.

He just told me to get on a train to Kursk, because the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk was

hardly about time. He was just like, yeah, down a train to Kursk. I'd give you a call when you

don't have the train station, and you'll feel something out. Yeah, I just took my suitcase,

everything I owned essentially got on a train to Kursk, gave these guys a call when I arrived.

He's picked up from the station and taken to base, to give him a couple of base to think,

and think hard. Well, as he signed the contract, it's not going back, so like,

talk to people here, make sure this is what you want to do, make sure this is what you want to do,

with your life, you're willing to risk your life for this. He signs the contract.

I think at the time I had a wall, an idea that I made up in my own head,

to justify my actions. I think the reality of the situation was that I was very depressed and

quite suicidal, and therefore I would sort of build this ideology in my head to disguise it from

myself, and that was how I really felt, and to justify getting myself killed without

directly taking the action in my own hands.

What has it been like being an artilleryman, and what's the kind of that experience been like?

I suppose the interesting thing is, I've been wearing it to be almost. I have had, I've had my

serial few run-ins with no near-death experiences of being shell, but your day-to-day life is quite dull,

and you spend a lot of times sitting at holes in the ground and hiding it.

The funny thing is that everybody has Wi-Fi these days because of Starling,

so it's just like everybody's sitting in school, in TikToks, or on gambling, or, you know,

playing battlefields underground in this basement, and nobody can really go outside,

because especially at night, if you've got to say, it's pretty much up.

And yes, since there's a certain mindset you have to have,

because things can be so calm and so boring, but back in, you know,

flipping them out for a second, you can just be, I don't know, wondering outside,

looking to wood, I can see something to burn and to keep warm, and then all of a sudden

you've got a drone shooting, so you have to be able to flip that switch almost.

Because Jay's not Hillaryman, he's actually slightly removed from the worst of the fighting.

The closest I've ever worked to the front line is about five kilometers.

It typically work about 90 kilometers back, like, and so it's a fair distance.

You're relatively safe. You're not just like, oh, I do gunfire, go with all the right and do

anything. Then the second there is one drone splice over, and you've got, you know,

hundreds of people all spread across this line, all start firing, same drone, and then all

help, or it's just a matter of seconds. I need it to be like in adrenaline, and it's a brush,

you'll like a deciding-to-bedding company shell, a deciding-to-bed drone buzzing about.

It does give you that sort of a Russian, and that bit of excitement, and makes you feel more like

you're part of a war, and that was something that I like was changing for a long time, and something

I would enjoy. Over the last 16 months, Jay's been around a bit, in Kursk, until the North

Korean sent thousands of troops to help repel the Ukrainian counteroffensive of summer 2024,

and then ask, where's currently stationed? I served, I think, three rotations there,

and then, you know, the North Koreans came into good jobs. So we are going to go there,

and we're going to send down to the domestic region. The front is so slow that, like, where we are,

we have been, has barely changed that whole. Like, we've always been living in the city,

and so I've used square-coloured areas. I'm for a large part. He says that,

beyond these brief bursts of intensity, his life actually hasn't changed that much.

Something that I have, like, reflected on fairly often, is how, like, similar my lifestyle really is,

like how my literature has really changed. I still spend so much of my time sitting

about and playing games, sitting on social media, asking about, you know, whatever feet are,

or playing battlefields with friends, or walking onto GTA for the sort of thing,

saying reading books, and something like that, I always wake up when you visit the

whole command games and stuff from my childhood, that's how bored I've been.

Except, this isn't entirely true. Jay Fraser has now spent almost a year and a half in the war zone

fighting for an invading force, and he's killed people, or so he says, though it may be

removed, and that distance from it, Ukrainians have died at his hands. But the only mention he

makes of this, during our hours on interview, is almost off-hand. It comes when I ask if he's worried

about the future. I mean, I have two ones left of my contract. It inspires on the fourth and

April, and I won't be renewing it. I will be renewing the end of it. There's not much of a,

I don't know, not much prospects, as opposed to civilian life here. I don't want to do anything to

do with the military ever again. Once I'm out of here, I want to, I don't know, I don't want to

forget this, it happens because I feel disrespectful in some way to let people live killed, and the things

I've done, I think it's important to remember what I've done to bear that in mind. But I do want to

put it behind me in some ways, and to certainly never get back in that sort of light of work,

at any point in the future. Regret never quite tips into remorse.

The blunt truth is even if Fraser wanted to return to the UK, it probably wouldn't go well for him.

But then he knew this before he was going. When Ben Stimpson returned from the Don Bass, he

was sentenced to five years in prison on terrorism charges. Jay knew what signing up to fight for

Russia meant. I still love Britain, I'm still a class myself as a British person, whether the

British government have taken my citizenship away, I don't know, it would be illegal because

I'm one of the few British volunteers here that has not applied for Russian citizenship,

I'm a political refugee here, and I'm happy with that position. Whereas with Jay Fraser,

you don't get the sense you ever quite fought that far ahead. I can teach English, I can deliver

people with Burger King or on a bike in Moscow, you know, there's no sorts of things that are

often known. Like Aiden Minnes, Jay's become a Russian citizen. He was awarded his new passport

at the end of last year. It's an occasion he marked with a celebratory post on X. It gives him a

degree of legal protection within Russia. He won't be deported back to the UK when he leaves the

military, but it presents its own headaches. Technically, British volunteers fighting for Ukraine and

Russia alike are both bound by the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act, which makes it illegal for British

citizens to enlist in a foreign army at war with the country at peace with the UK. No one, however,

has ever actually been prosecuted under it. For Fraser, Minnes, and the rest of their comrades,

the issue is more modern. Section 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981 gives the home secretary

the right to revoke citizenship if it's deemed conducive to the public good. They could also face

terrorism charges like Ben Stimpson. The British Nationality Act 1981 was, most

informously, applied to Shemima Begum, the British-born teenager who had a citizenship revoked in 2019,

after she'd left the UK to join ISIS back in the mid-2010s. The cases involving perceived

threats to national security, there's actually no obligation to even notify the subject. In January,

Mark Bullen, a former Hertfordshire police officer, had a citizenship strip, having spent the

last 11 years living in Russia, having obtained Russian citizenship in 2022. Do you have any

indication at all about your British citizenship? There's zero indication as to whether

I still have citizenship or not, but I suppose the only real way to try it is like, you know,

try and use the passport order to try and go back. The irony is, Jay's quest for meaning

has only ever led to greater confusion. He doesn't hold out much hope for the future.

Back home, 1,800 miles away, his oldest friends are still working through the fallout of Jay's

actions, but they might just be one of the handful willing to welcome Jay Fraser back.

Even now, reflecting on his decision to join up with Russia, it all feels slightly detached.

His concerns aren't around the toll he's taken on others, or the people he's killed,

or those he's left behind even. It's about what's next. Perhaps this is the only way to deal with

the magnitude of his actions. He is at least almost entirely free of self-pity, and he doesn't seek

to lay the blame on anybody else. Looking back, it seems reasonably clear to him now. He was,

he says, little more than a young man with a death wish. Orthodoxy and grand talk of an existential

struggle between eastern and western civilizations, they were just means of injecting it with a

previously unknown grandia. There was no sinister hand directing him or trying to drag him into

the abyss. Fraser was, a transpired, quite capable of seeking that out for himself.

The truth, he said, is that choosing death was a lot easier than learning how to live.

It's unclear whether this realization merits the terrible efforts spent in its extraction.

It's on this person that I have been and who I truly be. The ability to live in the moment

and think in the moment and consider these things, because when you come face-to-face with death,

on a regular basis, it kind of puts that into respect for the handyday could be your last.

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Thanks for listening to this episode of the Slow Newscast from the Observer.

This episode was reported by me, Francisco Garcia. The producers were Gary Marshall and Matt

Russell, artwork by Lucy Stevenson, a music by Dominic DeLarge. The editor was Jasper Corbett.

The Observer.

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