‘Putin is deranged,’ says our fearless woman in Kyiv
Colin Freeman speaks to Melinda Simmons about being back in Ukraine and her personal connection to the war-torn nation
Melinda Simmons, Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine, feels no need to be diplomatic about Vladimir Putin. On Twitter, she accuses the Kremlin of “brutal depravity” in Ukraine. In person, she lays it on further, describing the Russian leader as “deranged”.
Yet when we met last week in Kyiv – where she has just returned after being forced to flee in February – it was her hands that did the talking. Each of her fingernails is varnished alternatively in blue and yellow, the colours of Ukraine’s national flag.
It is certainly a break from the Foreign Office’s usual buttoned-up style. Yet two months ago, in the run-up to the invasion, those same hands were giving off rather less confident signals, as Simmons noticed they were trembling constantly.
“Two or three weeks beforehand, my hands never stopped shaking when I was running around talking to people,” she says. “But they stopped the night the shelling began, and a kind of calm certainty took over. I’ve spoken to others who also felt shaky in the run-up, and also tell of this curious sense of relief afterwards. That sounds like a terrible word to use – but the relief is in knowing that the thing you feared has happened, and you just have to get on with your job.”
Not that her job got much better. The embassy had already relocated to Poland, amid fears it could be targeted. President Volodymyr Zelensky was warning that Putin’s forces had orders to assassinate him. And crawling in menacing fashion towards Kyiv was the enormous convoy of Russian armour, some 40 miles long.
Which explains why Simmons is now an expert on NLAWs, or Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapons: the shoulder-launched, easy-to-use missiles that Boris Johnson supplied thousands of to Ukraine ahead of the invasion.
“I get stopped in the street by Ukrainians, who tell me how the British gave the right kit at the right time, when many other countries were only giving helmets and bullet-proof stuff,” Simmons says. “They feel the NLAWs were decisive in that first phase.”
So did she see the invasion coming and, if so, how did she brief Downing Street? Foreign Office lore has it that whenever an ambassador is asked to adjudicate on the likelihood of war, they send two separate cables: one predicting mayhem, the other predicting peace. Whatever the outcome, they can then say to the prime minister: “As per my cable of...”
Simmons doesn’t answer directly. But from the moment she first saw intelligence suggesting Putin was serious about invasion, it struck her as a “fairy tale” to think that Ukrainians would welcome the Russian troops as liberators.
“My other reaction was that Ukrainians will fight, that this was a huge miscalculation by Putin, and that thousands of lives will be lost, and that was the brief I offered to the Government.”
She is delighted to be back in the embassy. Last week she was in the Kyiv parliament as Boris Johnson gave an online address to MPs, congratulating them on Ukraine’s “finest hour”. Deputies held Union Jacks – although the real hero of the day was President Zelensky, whom Simmons has met several times.
“He has been extraordinary as a wartime president, and he does have that X factor, that charisma,” she says. “I’ve travelled three or four times to the east with him, and he does have a genuine ability to connect – you’ll see people crowding to get a selfie with him.”
For all that Kyiv is now peaceful, with shops and parks filling up once more, she does not exclude the possibility of being forced to leave for a second time.
“Nobody on the inside thinks Russia is done with Kyiv or the rest of the country,” she says. “It is a relentless campaign, and while the east is clearly the focus right now, there may be a time when other parts of the country, and particularly Kyiv, will come back into scope. Everyone should listen carefully to what Mr Putin has to say, no matter how deranged some of it can sound.”
Born to Jewish parents in London’s East End, and raised in Ilford, Simmons does not regard herself as a “traditional” Foreign Office type. After reading French and German at Exeter University, she spent 10 years in advertising, before taking a pay cut to work for International Alert, a peace-building NGO. She moved to DFID in 2003, before joining the foreign office in 2013, where her talents saw her brought in on national security issues. Fellow civil servants talk of her as one of a new generation of rising female stars.
Kyiv, where she arrived in 2019 for her first ambassadorship, has a strong personal connection. Her maternal great-grandparents are from the northern city of Kharkiv, currently under heavy Russian bombardment.
It is not the first time the city has experienced horrors. On a winter’s day in 1941, it saw one of the worst massacres of the Holocaust, when Nazis killed more than 16,000 mainly Jewish people at Drobytsky Yar, a ravine on the outskirts. Men and women were shot, while children were flung into the gorge alive, where they froze to death.
After taking up her job in Kyiv, Simmons became the first member of her family to visit Kharkiv since her great grandparents had left. Part of her quest was to track down details of four relatives, thought to have perished at Drobytsky Yar. On a memorial wall, she found them – an uncle, aunt and their two children, aged 10 and 12.
“It was the first piece of information that we had ever found about what happened to the family and it was a hard thing to process,” she says.
Hence also her outrage when in late March, the Drobytsky Yar memorial was hit by Russian shelling. It was the second time a Holocaust site had been impacted during the war, coming just a fortnight after the Babyn Yar memorial garden in Kyiv was showered with shrapnel. The Kremlin denied targeting them deliberately – a claim Simmons finds hard to believe.
“I had quite an emotional reaction to it... that is two of the iconic Holocaust memorial sites in Ukraine that have been hit. The Drobytsky memorial is particularly inexplicable, there is nothing else there... so that felt deliberate to me.”
What does she make of Putin’s constant claims to be “de-Nazifying” Ukraine?
“Vicious anti-Semitism is what goes through my mind,” she replies. Asked if she thinks this is just Putin or Russia more widely, she adds, “There is a problem more generally in Russia, and it has gone back a really long time.”
She cities the “appalling” behaviour of Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who claimed in an interview last Sunday that Adolf Hitler “had Jewish blood”. His cack-handed comments – made to justify Russia’s demonisation of Zelensky, himself a Jew – forced Putin to apologise after complaints from the Israeli government.
Ukraine, she says, has its own lingering problems with antiSemitism. But she adds: “I genuinely believe that an anti-Semitic country would not elect a Jew as president.”
Not surprisingly, Simmons’s views do not endear her to everyone on Twitter, where she has 60,000 followers. Digital diplomacy is a must for all ambassadors these days, but it comes with heavy trolling. “I get abuse for being female, for being Jewish, for talking about things that people want to disagree with,” she says. “My tactic is to be like a bird catching a fish – you shoot in, then get the hell out.”
For her criticism of Putin, Simmons has more than just Twitter trolls to worry about. She currently lives in Kyiv alone, separated from her husband and adult children, whom she declines to name for security reasons. Given the Kremlin’s fondness for cyberhacking, poisonings and espionage against foreign critics, her family are also advised to take certain precautions. Does it worry her? “It does now you’ve put it like that!” she exclaims.
She makes no secret of the fact that British diplomats are not expected to keep a stiff upper lip. All her staff in Kyiv are encouraged to check in with a counsellor, as she herself does. “I find it really helpful, especially for some of those harder conversations – plus there’s an informal network of other ambassadors who are very supportive as well.”
If all else fails, she has other ways to deal with stress. One is baking, a long-standing hobby, and the other is to strap on her boxing gloves and take it out on a punchbag. Mr Putin, you have been warned...
‘Before the invasion my hands shook all the time. But they stopped the night shelling began’