V ladimir Putin is generally late to the stage for plenary sessions, and at the Arctic Forum in late March he turned up 40 minutes before Steve Rosenberg’s broadcasts for the News at Six and Radio 4. “And because I’m the only BBC person here now, I’m constantly on call, and it’s quite tiring, you know…” Rosenberg says, brightly, on Zoom from a white room in Moscow.
While he waited for Putin, he worked on his latest Eurovision song medley on his phone: all 37 entries spliced into one 11-minute piano piece. He decided Albania would segue well into Croatia. As his job as Russia editor has ramped up, so has his music. The only BBC journalist left in Moscow, he relies increasingly on the “holy trinity” of wife, dog and piano.
Eurovision is not light relief for Rosenberg but, like any obsession, seems to go to a deeper part of him. The 1974 song contest (Abba, “Waterloo”) was the first indicator, to the six-year-old from Chingford, both of the vastness of the world and the potential harmony of it. He began to write letters to BBC departments – Sport, the Finnish Service – and took a day off school to visit the director-general, Alasdair Milne, with his mother.
Many teenagers develop an obsession with the USSR, their latent revolutionary instincts inflamed by cool photos of Trotsky in his little round glasses. But Rosenberg was a perestroika boy from the start: he watched a BBC Russian-language course featuring a poignant national song called “Goodbye Summer”. When he accompanied Gorbachev on piano in 2013 after an interview (Gorby sang “Moscow Nights” and “Misty Morning”), it told him more about the former president than any of the pair’s five press encounters: “He was a typical politician, but when he sang it showed his humanity.” It is hard to imagine Putin doing a sing-song. But Rosenberg points out that there is footage of him performing “Blueberry Hill” with a full band.
Rosenberg was live at the keyboard as part of the BBC’s Eurovision broadcast in 2023, but there will be no “Piano Party” for him this year: “too much going on”. And nearly 45 years after it was dissolved, Putin is bringing back Intervision, the USSR’s rival song contest founded at the height of the Cold War. With the old Eastern Bloc countries committed elsewhere, Russia will be joined by China and other friends from the Brics grouping (ten states centred around Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
Rosenberg has lived in Russia since 1991, moving when he was 23 to teach English at the Moscow Machine Tool Construction Institute. He then worked his way up within the American news broadcaster CBS, where he had started off answering phones – and in 1997 began his BBC career as a producer: he gave his first broadcast in an emergency, being the only person in the studio at the moment Yeltsin resigned, on New Year’s Night at the turn of the millennium. Rosenberg’s life has spanned three Russias, he says: the chaotic, unregulated early Nineties, the strangely uneventful first years of Putin, and now, since the invasion of Ukraine, what he calls “Putin Z”.
If Rosenberg goes out of town, as he did when he went to the Arctic, he has no backup at work. In 2021 the BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford was expelled from Russia and banned for life: the following year, Nick Beake, Orla Guerin and Clive Myrie were added to the Kremlin’s blacklist. Others are now living in Berlin and desperate to get back. There are still foreign news teams in Moscow, but the numbers are dwindling. “It does feel a bit lonelier than it used to,” Rosenberg says, smiling. All remaining journalists are now on three-month tourist visas.
Reporting from Russia is like being a deep-sea diver, he says: “You put your aqualung on and you dive into this underwater world. There was a flood of Biblical proportions in 2022 [he means the full-scale invasion of Ukraine] and everything was submerged. You’re swimming underwater and there are sharks coming at you and all kinds of dangers, and that’s why you need to come up for air every three months.”
Getting out regularly has become essential for him, for mental reasons as well as practical – but if Rosenberg and his Russian wife, Raisa, want to see their two children, who are in their twenties and living in England, it takes them 16 hours via Istanbul, flying with Turkish Airlines for £1,500 per head. “The hard thing is getting on with your life, not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow. Not knowing whether the rules of the game are going to change. That’s disconcerting, I have to say. There’s nothing you can do about it. The last three years have tested my affection for Russia to the very limits. But there’s no point in being here unless I say what I think is happening in as calm and honest a way as I can.”
At the Brics press conference in October 2024, the Russian press secretary Dmitry Peskov dealt Rosenberg a diss as he stood to address Putin: “Steve Rosenberg, a rare guest these days.”
“Yes, I’m not quite sure what that was about,” Rosenberg says, embarrassed. His questions to Putin – calm, reasonable and delivered in fluent Russian – unroll in a manner that can make the heart race: “I read the final declaration of the Brics summit. It talks about the need for global and regional stability and security, and a fair world… What does that have in common with your actions over the last two and a half years, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Where are fairness, stability and security here? Including Russia’s security. Because before the start of the ‘special military operation’, there were no drone attacks on Russian territory. No shelling of Russian towns. And finally, how does that match up with recent statements by British intelligence, that Russia aims to spread chaos on the streets of Europe, through arson and acts of sabotage? Where’s the stability here? Thank you.”
Such speeches are worked on syllable by syllable, Rosenberg explains. “A week before the press conference, you start thinking of a question, writing it down and rewriting, thinking about every word. Do you use the word war? Invasion? You’re practising and practising, because if the cameras are on, you can’t afford to mess up.”
Putin wrote notes while Rosenberg spoke (“I would love to see his notepad”) and laughed out loud when he got to the bit about arson. Then he fired eight questions back at Rosenberg, accusing Western countries of aggressively expanding Nato east towards Russia. This is the president’s way with him, often. “I once said, ‘Excuse me, this is your press conference! I’m asking the questions!’” he says. “As a British journalist, you’re very much public enemy number one now. Yet we still get invited, from time to time, to Putin events. I hope that reflects some degree of respect for us.” Rosenberg, always so light and easy, is dancing a delicate dance only he can fully understand.
He may get his questions answered, but has never had a one-on-one with Putin. Interviewing the world’s strongmen appears to involve putting in a request every few months for decades. It eventually worked with the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, whom he first contacted in 1999 and met 22 years later. “He’s Europe’s last dictator yet he’s still willing to sit down and have a bit of a ding-dong,” he says. “You get the feeling that he enjoys the challenge of being asked questions that perhaps he’s not normally asked, certainly by state employees. He was everything in that interview: he was a bully, he was charming, he threatened to end the interview, he said he was pleased to be doing it. All kinds of emotions, and you just have to sit there and make sure you don’t give them a platform to spread their disinformation.”
Lukashenko seems to like him. What’s that about? “I’d love to know. There’s some kind of rapport there.” On election day – he makes quotes with his fingers – the president gave a four-and-a-half-hour press conference and Rosenberg put up the second question. “He said, ‘Steve, more questions.’ I said: ‘There are other people here, please let them ask.’” A Russian journalist asked him why he decided to deploy the new Russian Oreshnik missiles. He said: “That’s Steve’s fault. He criticised me for deploying Russian nuclear missiles last year, so I thought I’d better get a different kind.”
Rosenberg does not intend to tell Lukashenko that he is of Belarusian descent himself. His great-grandfather was born in a shtetl in Shklov, where Lukashenko later ran a collective farm. Shklov is the cucumber capital of Belarus – there is a statue of a cucumber to celebrate this – and in the 19th century was 90 per cent Jewish. “Now there are only about five Jews left,” says Rosenberg, who is Jewish himself. His great-grandfather bought passage on a ship to America, but in a bit of a con it was actually bound for the UK. “How different things could have been,” he says. “I could be working for CNN.”
What does he make of these counterfactuals, given the position he finds himself in?“I think my whole life has led up to this moment.”
Most people who had lived in Moscow far longer than they’d lived anywhere else might consider themselves Russian by now. It must work in Rosenberg’s favour, his ability to blend in – his command of the language, his slightly Russian looks. He used to go unrecognised: “But something strange is happening. Every day now there is a political talk show on Russian state television where they show bits of reports from foreign journalists. They see me asking Putin questions at press conferences, and I get recognised much more often on the streets than I ever used to. And I find that disconcerting, because you want to blend in.”
He wakes at 5am and walks his dog, then comes in to the studio, does the morning’s live broadcasts and a newspaper review for social media. He will often be there right through till the end of the News at Ten, which is midnight in Moscow. Back at the start of Putin’s era, it was hard to make the news at all. He found fun things to report on, like the national song contest for prisoners: first prize, freedom (“It’s hard to hit the big time when you’re currently doing time”). His team were given access to Prison Camp 15 in the Ural Mountains, “and we interviewed a prisoner, who I think had committed an awful crime, but he had a lovely, lovely voice, and he played the harp. He didn’t win – I think his crime had been too nasty – and it was a bit of a swizz, because the person who won was coming up for parole.”
He was in the queue for Moscow’s first McDonald’s in 1990, which snaked for three hours round Pushkin Square. McDonald’s exited the Russian market in 2022, selling its restaurants to a local buyer: the new outfit, Vkusno i Tochka, has different chips. The Russian Starbucks is called Stars Coffee, and its logo is not a mermaid but a woman more classically Russian, in a headscarf: Rosenberg sends me a photo from his phone.
“It’s absolutely incredible. Just in the last three years, I don’t recognise the place, you know?”
In the 1990s, he says, there was tremendous hope. “People had a vision of the future. Now they don’t know what to expect, and they don’t believe that they can influence what future they have, and so they wait, head down.” He appeared on a 1990s comedy show, The White Parrot, hosted by the country’s most famous clown. The clown started singing a song about a Russian woman falling in love with a British sailor in the Second World War: “It really felt as if we were close, Russia and Britain. Well, it didn’t work out. We went our separate ways. Russians have been told that the West is out to destroy Russia, that Britain is the source of all evil. There’s a phrase the commentators keep coming out with, which translates as ‘the English woman always makes a mess everywhere’. They say that Britain’s always causing problems for Russia. I find it very upsetting.”
He recently went to report on a Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow. A local resident recognised him from the television and shouted, “As soon as anything bad happens in our country, you’re here like a vulture.” This is the kind of thing that you feel would deeply upset Rosenberg, who is known for his relationships with everyday people in Moscow. He made a long-running series of short videos with his local newspaper vendor, Valentina; when she left Moscow for cancer treatment he wrote her a song, “Valentina’s Kiosk (Tomorrow Will Be Better Than Today)”, and recorded it with the BBC Singers, using her newsstand as a metaphor for calm in the chaos of modern Moscow. Even Rosenberg’s songs sound like Russian songs.
A day or so after the “vulture comment”, he stopped at a minimart 200 miles out of the city to buy some biscuits, and someone in the queue insisted on paying for them, having recognised him from TV. “People like Biscuit Man give me hope that not all Russians believe that Westerners are bad.”
Vox-pop journalism is sometimes derided in the UK but in Russia, Rosenberg says, it is more important than ever – even if it is arguably dangerous, now, for those interviewed: “There are lots of questions you can ask that are safe for people to answer but still give you an impression of a feeling. Everybody – everybody we talk to – first of all, calls this a war, they don’t say ‘special military operation’. They see it on their television, they use the word war. Everybody I speak to says they want it to be over, whether on Russia’s terms or through negotiation, in whatever form that may be. There is this kind of fatigue I sense in them.”
What does he make of the peace talks?
“I think Russia wants to push on with the war, I think it’s feeling confident. It’s getting more territory, not quickly, but with no hint of compromise, not giving concessions. When you see Putin at the debates here, he’s looking much more confident than he did a couple of years ago, but definitely he feels that he’s winding things up, and the longer this goes on, the less interest he believes, I think, the West will have in supporting Ukraine. So I don’t see any imminent end to this, and in the meantime, people die. It’s just appalling, what’s happening. And it’s very odd now, with this Trump-Putin relationship – where is that leading us?”
Then, like any good reporter, he starts to wind up his bulletin: “Was that OK?” he asks.
“I’ll just say one more thing. You can live here all your life and you still won’t be an expert in Russia. I don’t pretend to know what’s happening. I never thought they were going to invade Ukraine three years ago, I never thought Putin would do it, but he did.”
Will Steve Rosenberg get his interview?
“I’m not hopeful,” he says. “Maybe Lukashenko will put in a good word for me.”
[See also: Trump’s third term is coming]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025