Journeys in Europe’s grey zone

Caitlin Allen: Long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, conflict was already simmering on Europe’s borders. And according to the journalist Hannah Lucinda Smith, we ignore those disputes at our peril. I’m Caitlin Allen, commissioning editor at Engelsberg Ideas, and I’m delighted to be joined by Hannah today. She’s a foreign correspondent for The Times and The Atlantic, among others, and the author of a new book, Hinterlands: Journeys Across Europe’s Unfinished Frontiers. Hannah, welcome to The EI podcast.

Hannah Lucinda Smith: Thank you. 

Caitlin Allen: Now, you cover considerable terrain in this book, from Cyprus to Bosnia to Transnistria and beyond. Why did you decide to write Hinterlands now? And perhaps you can explain, in the context of this book, what exactly you mean by a hinterland?

Hannah Lucinda Smith: Sure. Well, book ideas come to me very, very slowly. I’m not somebody who sits down, has an idea for a book, and then goes and researches and writes it. What I like to do, because I’m a journalist, is go out and just do my job reporting, looking at what’s going on in various places, and then every few years sit back and take stock and see what threads I can pull from it – what kinds of narratives, what bigger picture is emerging.

So, the places that I refer to as hinterlands in the book are, like you say, very diverse on the map, but they share some things in common, principally that they’re all liminal places in that they are either unrecognised territories, occupied territories or disputed territories around Europe. And I started visiting them because a lot of them are just very, very interesting. They were also magnets not just for journalists, but also for tourists for a long time.

So, the place that I start the book in, which is a place called Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus, has been a frozen conflict since the 1990s. It was part of the Soviet Union. When that empire broke down, it was kind of pulled between two emerging nation states, which were Armenia and Azerbaijan, and ended up as an unrecognised quasi-state. But because of this status, it was sort of marketed by boutique tour companies. You’d go to the place that doesn’t exist, see ghost towns. These ghost towns actually were places that people were living until the early 1990s.

Again, Cyprus – the northern part of Cyprus. In Cyprus, you have Europe’s last divided capital in Nicosia. In the northern part of the island, you have what is called by itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, again, a quasi-state recognised only by Turkey. It’s a very jarring experience to walk from one side of Cyprus to the other.

So, when I was based in Istanbul, as I was for 13 years, these were all places that were very easy and quite cheap to get to and very interesting. So that’s why I started initially. It was in the second half of the 2010s that I began realising that I was seeing themes emerging and seeing a bigger picture emerging, which was how these places had gone from being held in stasis to, again, becoming central to the broader geopolitical story, which certainly from 2022 onwards and the invasion of Ukraine was the competition between Russia and the West in Europe. But actually, that had been going on for a long time. The argument that I make in the book is that it really started in 2011, with the start of the revolution in Syria.

Caitlin Allen: Your first chapter is on Syria. But obviously this is a slight outlier when it comes to your definition of a hinterland. So why did Syria feel like an appropriate place to start? And perhaps you can explain this rather arresting parallel you draw between Damascus in 2011 and Sarajevo in 1914?

Hannah Lucinda Smith: Sure. I think when we look at paper maps, they give us a certain sense of sureness about the world. Borders are here, this country is here. A map is not entirely an imaginary object. Of course, these borders exist on the ground, but when you go to a lot of places, the map doesn’t represent them exactly in the way that they actually are on the ground.

And I think this is very true of Europe. As Europeans, we tend to look at the map and say, ‘OK, the edge of Europe falls here between Greece and Turkey in the Mediterranean.’ Actually, when you look at reality, what happens on the edge of that region or outside that region really affects Europe. And we’ve seen that emanating from Syria over the past 15 years, particularly in, for example, the refugee crisis. This was a moment where we came face to face with the reality that we might have a border on a map, but in reality, what is that border?

For those refugees, it was a case of a journey of a couple of kilometres over the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece. And we saw it also with the spread of ideologies. The way that what was happening in Syria, and particularly with the rise of extremist groups like ISIS there, blew back into Europe and radicalised tens of thousands of young people living in London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels. It spurred them to go and join that war in Syria, again by crossing three borders, which look very definite on a map, but are kind of porous.

So that’s why I think that Syria, although we like to think of it as a place that’s very far away, is actually very central to the modern European story. 

The other reason why I started the book there is that I ended up in Istanbul by way of Syria. I was covering the Arab Spring and I was in Damascus for the first protests of the revolution there in 2011. I ended up living in a place called Antakya which is on the Syrian border. What I saw over that very long war, a generational war, is how it had really sparked things which changed the entire security paradigm in Europe and eventually led to what happened in 2022. Principally, this was the place where we saw, overtly, for the first time Russia and Iran, but most importantly Russia, facing off against the West on the battlefield for the first time. This was not just a civil war, it was a proxy war. It became so very quickly.

On Bashar al-Assad’s side, Russia and Iran came in behind him militarily but also supported him through continuing trade. One of the weapons that the West tried to use against Assad all throughout the war was sanctions. But sanctions only work if everyone’s willing to abide by them, and of course we saw that was not the case. Again, with the refugee movement, that had a profound impact on the European Union and on Europe’s idea of itself. It also exposed all kinds of weaknesses and fractures within the EU and emboldened leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary who really took on the anti-migrant rhetoric and used it for his own populist ends. 

So I think if you want to understand what is happening now on Europe’s eastern flank, and increasingly in the heartlands too – and understand the way hybrid warfare is playing out on our continent through things like drone attacks or cyber attacks that often we can’t pin on an adversary but the suspicion is there that they were behind it – I think we can trace so much of this back to what happened in Syria. 

Caitlin Allen: And you mentioned Russian involvement in Syria. And of course, a central theme of your book is how both Russia and Turkey are vying for influence in all of these contested European borderlands that you visit. But as you point out, they are slightly different – Erdogan and Putin have both been skilful soft-power players, but have slightly different cards to play. Turkey’s is religion and Russia’s is language. Could you talk a bit about how those cards offer them different leverage?

Hannah Lucinda Smith: I’ll talk a little bit first about this hard-to-grasp relationship between Turkey and Russia. I think just like maps offer some kind of false certainty about the way the world is, also being in the European paradigm gives us this false idea that the way that the world runs is through institutions and fixed policies and fixed relationships. Actually, in the kind of new world that’s increasingly emerging, I would say we’re moving away from the post-1945 paradigm. It was pretty much not a unipolar world, but a world that had very few big powers directing things. We’re moving into this far more unsure era where states like Turkey and, to a lesser degree, Russia have made themselves very flexible in the way that they do politics and alliances.

So you see, with Turkey, it’s a NATO member. For a long time it looked like it was on the doorstep of the EU. That’s kind of out the window. Tayyip Erdogan, the President, at the same time is incredibly autocratic. There’s almost no democracy or pluralism left in Turkey at all. He’s also built this friendship with Vladimir Putin, which has seen them going to air shows together in Russia and eating ice cream for the cameras. Turkey is, far more seriously, purchasing Russian defence equipment. At the same time, they are adversaries on multiple battlefields. Their adversaries on multiple battlefields – they were adversaries in Syria, to the point that there were incidents where Turkish soldiers were killed in Russian bombings. They were adversaries in the Caucasus, in Nagorno-Karabakh, also in Libya, and yet are also able to work together behind the scenes to achieve mutual aims.

I mean, clearly, the fall of Bashar al-Assad in 2024 in Syria was largely down to the fact that Russia did not step in to save him. And it’s very clear that there were discussions that had gone on behind the scenes in the lead-up to that. Similarly, because of the way that he has played politics, even though NATO and Western countries might not have liked it over the past 10 years, that’s allowed Erdogan to present himself as a mediator in Ukraine, to bring those two sides together. So, yeah, we’ve moved into this world where these powers are far more pragmatic, far more transactional in the way that they do politics and, particularly, in the way that they do foreign policy.

Caitlin Allen: It’s interesting reading your book how, as you say, these two men have managed to maintain fairly amicable relationships, and you point out some striking similarities between them. And yet more and more of these places that you visit, we see that they have pretty opposing interests or are often supporting opposing sides in these conflicts. But I know that there is a point in the book where you say that it’s important to remember that Russia has the upper hand in this relationship. Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?

Hannah Lucinda Smith: I think definitely for a very long time it did. If you go back, it’s interesting, I think, to go back to the roots of the current relationship between – I was going to say Turkey and Russia, but actually probably more accurately, Putin and Erdogan, because this is a relationship based very squarely on those personalities. It dates back to late 2015, when it was far more of a simplistic relationship of antagonism in Syria between the two. In November 2015, a Russian fighter jet which was on a bombing raid in northern Syria, according to the Turks, breached Turkish airspace. According to the Russians, it didn’t. It stayed within Syrian borders. But ultimately that jet was shot down by the Turks. And that sparked, as you can imagine, a huge diplomatic incident.

Putin was furious. He imposed all kinds of economic embargoes on Turkey over that summer and the summer that followed. Russian tourist charter flights were stopped. Russian tourists were the biggest tourist group in Turkey. So that’s a major thing for Turkey. And it really, really battered Turkey’s economy at a time when it was already undergoing some strains because of the war in Syria and various terrorist attacks in Turkey. So eventually, in, I believe, late June 2016, the two leaders came to an accommodation and restored diplomatic ties. Pretty soon after that, there was the coup attempt in Turkey, which President Erdogan put down bloodily and with huge consequences for years after. And Putin was one of – no, sorry, I think he was the first leader to come and offer his support to Erdogan. That was the moment that marked the start of this very, very close personal relationship.

In the years after that, we saw that relationship being buoyed with constant visits between the two. It was usually Erdogan going to Sochi or to Moscow, and the purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defence system. And actually, a lot of these things were causing problems for Erdogan. He was constantly being berated by other Western leaders. Turkey was kicked out of NATO’s new-generation fighter jet programme. As a result, there were sanctions. But for Putin, it was great because what it did was create this constant debate and sort of angst at the heart of NATO that really kept the alliance distracted for many years – all these discussions constantly about whether Turkey would leave NATO or be kicked out.

And again, as I mentioned before, there were points during this period where Turkish soldiers were being killed by Russian fighter jets in Syria, and it was suppressed in the Turkish press. There was nothing said about it. These were all the signs that there were things that were not going Turkey’s way in that relationship. However, there are also benefits, particularly when it came to the invasion of Ukraine, because then the sanctions that were already on Russia really kind of strengthened. It became almost impossible for particularly people linked to the Kremlin to do business in Europe. Turkey provided a useful back door. It didn’t put sanctions on Russia immediately. You know, even in Istanbul, I remember seeing Medvedev’s yacht come and dock in one of the Istanbul marinas because all the oligarchs had to flee from the European ports.

So I think that that was a tipping point. And I do think there was another tipping point in 2024 with the fall of Assad. That has really shifted the power balance. So I think I wouldn’t say now as strongly that it’s a relationship where Putin holds the entire balance of power. I do think that’s shifted. But, of course, by nature of Russia’s size, its military strength, its economic strength and natural resources – although, of course, its economy is being tested – it still is, by far, the bigger partner to Turkey. And they do operate in the same sort of field of competition. The Black Sea, for example, has always been a theatre of competition between Turkey and Russia.

Caitlin Allen: I want to also ask you about the people living in the hinterlands, because it is as much a book about them as it is about an attempt to analyse wider geopolitical trends. Perhaps you can tell us about the widow you meet in Cyprus, and what her story reveals about the legal complexities of living in a grey zone.

Hannah Lucinda Smith: I think one really important thing to remember whenever you’re studying a place, but particularly places which are on the front lines or the fractures of geopolitics, is that the people living there, on the whole, just want to get on with their lives. In an ideal society, politics is secondary to all the other far more enjoyable things. And unfortunately for the people who live in disputed or unrecognised places, politics plays a far bigger role in their lives than often they would like.

So, in northern Cyprus, I met a lady called Sevilay Kasapoglu. She’s a Turkish Cypriot. She lives in a village that is not only right on the line between north and south Cyprus, but also sits in one of two sovereign base areas. These are the areas which are British military bases, and they’re still actually British sovereign territory. So when you go into these places, it’s bizarre because they sort of look like little versions of suburban England. There are cul-de-sacs and corner shops, with Walkers Crisps and Cadbury’s chocolate everywhere, and they’re home not only to British soldiers but also to local people.

These areas are really big, actually, particularly the one at Dhekelia, which she lives close to. There are a lot of people farming there and living normal lives. Her husband was a cleaner on the base. He was employed by the Ministry of Defence for many years. When he died, because the village is split between all these lines, there was a problem. Obviously, when the village was founded, Cyprus was just an island – these divisions didn’t exist. So the village cemetery falls on the Greek Cypriot side.

As a widow, she’s entitled to his pension. But in order to get that, there’s a web of bureaucracy that she has to go through. It’s a bureaucratic place anyway, but it’s made worse by the fact that where he worked was also considered the Republic of Cyprus, the Greek-speaking side. Northern Cyprus, where they live, is not recognised by anybody, including the British government, even though they’re employing people who come from there. And so, in order to pay his pension, it has to be paid to the Greek side, and then for the Greek side to recognise Sevilay as the widow and rightful recipient, she has to go and live on the other side, because they don’t recognise her marriage certificate, as it comes from the northern side. According to them, the north doesn’t exist, and all its institutions don’t exist.

So this poor lady, having already lost her husband and having to travel through a border even to visit his grave, which is in the same village, was also presented with this ridiculous rigmarole of bureaucracy simply for the misfortune of being from a village which happened to fall right on the borderline of these hinterlands.

Caitlin Allen: Another theme that struck me reading your book, and I think you actually used the phrase ‘held in stasis’ earlier, is this theme of places that appear to be frozen in time. So, in Transnistria, you write that time stood still. And then in Cyprus, you talk about these no-go areas that act as a time portal. And in Syria, there’s this quite vivid anecdote of this pair of children’s tractor pyjamas still hanging in the Turkish embassy, belonging to the former ambassador’s son, who’s now in his mid-20s. Perhaps you can talk a bit more about why time warps are a motif of the hinterlands.

Hannah Lucinda Smith: By the nature of these places, when they become inaccessible, either for people, finance, investment or trade, it locks them in a certain point in time. In Cyprus, what you’re referring to is the Green Line. So this is the line of division between the Republic of Cyprus and the North. It’s not just a line, it’s actually a buffer zone. It cuts right across the island. You’ve got soldiers on either side facing off against each other, and you’ve got border crossings on either side.

If you have a British passport or a European passport, it’s very easy to cross through it at the border crossings, but you’re hurried through. You can’t stay within the Green Line. It’s patrolled actually by British soldiers on UN missions. And there are whole buildings, sometimes nearly whole villages, trapped in between. There’s the entire old Cyprus airport and there’s still a jumbo jet on the runway. There is a hotel called the Ledra Palace, which used to be the finest hotel in Cyprus. It’s right in the middle, in sort of no man’s land. It was housing British troops for a really long time. And then they started complaining about the conditions there, because it was no longer the grandest accommodation on the island. It really deteriorated.

I’ve never been fortunate enough to go and have a tour in the bit of the Green Line that goes through the capital, Nicosia, because it’s literally a slice of the old capital. There are a few streets and, from the pictures I’ve seen of it, there are car showrooms that still have cars from the 1970s in them. It’s now got too dangerous. Unfortunately, there used to be occasional tours for diplomats and journalists who were taken in there.

But in other places it’s more about a lack of investment. So the rest of North Cyprus, for example – this is changing now, but for the longest time, compared to the South, it was delightful because the South turned into this absolute package-holiday hotspot: overdeveloped, huge hotels, concreted over, mass tourism. Whereas the North was delightful. It was really undeveloped. And I’d always recommend that people go to the North over the South.

In other places, it’s sort of almost self-consciously, literally stuck in time. Transnistria is the prime example of this. Transnistria is part of Moldova, but since the 1990s, it’s been again semi-autonomous. You have to go over a quasi-border to get in. And it basically didn’t want to accept the fact that the Soviet Union was over. So it kept all its Lenin statues. It kept its House of Soviets. It kept its KGB until about five, no, maybe a bit longer, maybe about 10 years ago. And that drew a huge amount of tourists. What the sort of jollity of it overlooked was the fact that it was also a massive Russian weapons dump and home to a huge number of Russian soldiers. And when 2022 happened, all of a sudden analysts were looking at Transnistria and seeing how close it was to Odessa. You could be in Odessa in a matter of hours, and suddenly it became a security problem.

Caitlin Allen: Would you say, as much as this is a book about this new Cold War, that this is also a book about what happens when empires fall?

Hannah Lucinda Smith: I think it’s also a book about what happens when empires fall and what comes after isn’t properly finished off. We haven’t talked about the Balkans yet, but this is another region that I visited widely, actually over many years. It was the first region I worked in as a foreign correspondent 20 years ago. This is a place that was definitely a result of the end of the Cold War. But Yugoslavia obviously wasn’t within the Soviet Union. It was a separate socialist entity, a multi-ethnic federation. And after the death of its long-time leader, Josip Tito, it broke down into ethnic conflict in the 1990s.

The states that emerged as a result of that – there are seven post-Yugoslav states – all still have border disputes in some way or another. The two countries which saw the two bloodiest and most bitter wars, Bosnia and Kosovo, are the ones that are still the most fragile and unfinished. So in Bosnia, what you have is a country of about 3 million people. It’s very small, but it’s split into broadly two entities. There’s the Bosnia and Herzegovina Federation, which is largely Muslim Bosniaks and Croats living in Sarajevo and Mostar and the  places around there. And then in the north, you have an entity called Republika Srpska, which is Bosnian Serbs. The de facto capital is a place called Banja Luka, which is like a provincial town. I think it’s about 300,000 people there. But it’s got the parliament, it’s got a presidency, it’s got a stock exchange, all these things. And increasingly in recent years, the leader there has built ties with Vladimir Putin.

There are Serbs in the Balkans, and Russians have deep historic ties based on their religion, Orthodox Christianity. In fact, there’s a very deep Slavic historical alliance. And Putin has really been fanning the sentiments of separatism in Republika Srpska. It’s led to increasingly loud declarations from a guy called Milorad Dodik, who’s basically been in charge of Republika Srpska since the late 1990s. He’s going to secede from federal Bosnia, go out on his own, possibly seek a union with Serbia, although I don’t think that’s something that Serbia would want. And that’s incredibly dangerous because you start looking at border changes in Bosnia, and it can set off a chain reaction across the Balkans.

So this is what happens when empires fall, or when confederations fall and new countries are formed. It’s rarely easy and peaceful. It’s usually extremely traumatic. But when those borders and new states are not fully finished, as they often aren’t for very good reasons – in the case of Bosnia, the reason why it ended up like that is because it was a result of the Dayton Accords, which ended the fighting in 1995 – nobody can argue with the fact that it was a very good thing that that war ended and largely remained at peace since. But it did leave this fragile political situation, which is just open to meddling from outside and pressure from within as well.

Caitlin Allen: And why is it Putin who benefits from chaos in these former Yugoslav countries?

Hannah Lucinda Smith: It’s really useful for Putin to be able to do things which are on the borderline of deniable. Again, this comes back to the hybrid attacks we’ve been seeing over the past few years in Europe, things like explosions at DHL depots, electricity outages, things like that. It’s always just deniable. And it’s also a low-cost and low-risk way to bring chaos or instability right into the heart of Europe, the Balkans. When you look on the map, you realise how close it is actually to the centre of Europe. This is not a peripheral region. You could be in Sarajevo probably in a day driving from Vienna. Definitely, you could be in Belgrade within a few hours.

And any kind of sense of newly rising tension in that region is going to distract the EU. It’s going to distract NATO. One of the really poignant things that stayed with me as I was writing this book, I was speaking with an analyst in Bosnia. He said, ‘We think that if the Russian troops had reached Kyiv in February 2022, that war would have broken out in Bosnia. The next day, Milorad Dodik in Republika Srpska would have been fully empowered and fully backed by Putin to open up a second crisis on the EU’s doorstep.’ And can you imagine? I mean, the amount of attention and money and loss of life that’s already happened in Ukraine. Now imagine that another war was going on. This is why it’s incredibly useful for Putin to have these regions where he does project influence and can create chaos, possibly even conflict, with really not much effort at all.

Caitlin Allen: I know there’s also this very forthright conversation with the European diplomat that you recount in the book, who tells you, ‘If Russia were to invade the Baltics tomorrow, there is not a thing that Europe can do. Article 5 is dead.’ Now, this is perhaps a difficult question for you to answer, but I wonder if you think this is alarmist, or if writing this book has brought you to a somewhat similar conclusion yourself.

Hannah Lucinda Smith: I really hope not. I definitely hope not. I mean, I guess we have to take it in the context of a diplomat talking to a journalist, right? This was actually a lunch in Istanbul that several of us had been asked to attend. So clearly, the diplomat had a message that he wanted to give, and that was his message.

What I always find interesting when reporting on NATO is that you get two quite different versions of events, whether you speak to politicians or whether you speak to military people. Military people always, even at the height of Turkey seeming to cosy up to Russia and buying its defence equipment, would say, ‘Oh, no, these are political disputes. On a military level, we’re all united.’ You go to the politicians and they tell you something a bit different. I suspect the answer lies somewhere between the two.

This is the question for NATO, I think: at what point is an attack considered an attack? Because I think when NATO was conceived and Article 5 was written, it was quite clear what an attack was. It was one country’s army going to another country and attacking it, invading it. Now, OK, let’s talk about, for example, if there was an attack on a pipeline or an internet cable in the UK that shut off all our internet for a couple of days. We would descend into chaos pretty quickly without the internet, for all kinds of reasons. Is that an attack? Should that trigger Article 5?

I think these are the really difficult questions that NATO is grappling with, and I think this is the more salient thing to think about when we ask, ‘Is Article 5 dead?’ Because already there are things happening on Europe’s eastern flank that could feasibly be seen as attacks. If you have drones going into buildings in Romania or in Germany – wasn’t it the other week when, by chance, one was found and it was carrying explosives? Would that trigger Article 5? So I think this is the crisis that NATO faces, actually. And also, once you’ve settled on what an attack is, how do you get all the members to agree with you? Because you have some members that are far more enthusiastic than others.

Caitlin Allen: It’s very difficult to predict our geopolitical future. And even with Syria, the fall of Assad might have been predicted time and again. But the exact timing of it certainly caught many of us off-guard. But obviously you make a compelling case in Hinterlands that what is happening in these contested borderlands of Europe has implications for the continent as a whole, and offers a glimpse of future struggles. So what do you see as the direction of travel? Are more democracies set to slide into forms of autocracy?

Hannah Lucinda Smith: That’s certainly been the pattern, not just recently, but for the past 20 years. I think we’ve seen a steady decline in democracy all over the world. We’ve seen backsliding in places like Turkey and Hungary. Of course, Hungary is a small reason for optimism. It shows that things can go into reverse in a good way as well as a bad one. But I do think the general trend isn’t great.

We have all kinds of challenges to democracy that are not going away. Not just in the form of leaders like Putin or Erdogan, but also through social media and the way that has changed the way that we talk about social issues here. It’s made an opening for populists here to rise through the polls and take seats in parliaments.

Then, on a broader defence level, I think it is really quite clear that the war in Ukraine is not stopping. Again, I was one of the people who thought that Bashar al-Assad was there until he died. So we can all be really wrong, and things can happen suddenly. But I think certainly the direction of travel people are talking about, for example, how soon will it be until Putin feels that he can attack a NATO ally openly? The talk here in the UK is about the defence spending that we need to increase. It does, unfortunately, feel like we are rolling towards quite a serious security situation in Europe.

Caitlin Allen: I think we will end on that troubling note. For all of those listening, Hannah’s book, Hinterlands: Journeys Across Europe’s Unfinished Frontiers, is out now, and it’s an incredibly insightful and wide-ranging book. Hannah, thank you so much for joining me.

Hannah Lucinda Smith: Thank you for having me.