Fortunately, Ukraine had just opened the eight o’clock news, Derk Sauer (69) started at Summer guests. Well, not happy at all, because the war is of course very bad, he quickly corrected himself, but he was glad that the war was getting attention again, because it was in danger of disappearing from the news a bit.
If one thing is clear after seeing Sauers Summer guestsevening, it is the war that dominates the life of the journalist and entrepreneur who fled Russia. Not only because of his work as editor-in-chief of The Moscow Times, but also because of his nostalgia for Russia; the country where he lived with his wife since 1989 and until recently, where he had three sons and to which – as the fascinating and current selection of film fragments showed – he longs to return.
Sauer had said beforehand that he wanted to show how and why we got into the current war. That explained his kick-off with a fragment from the video The Occupant, in which we see shocking private images of a very young Russian soldier before and during the invasion of Ukraine. We see the young man, who is now a prisoner of war, as a proud father, drunk with friends and finally between the destroyed cities and people.
From an early age, Sauer was drawn to adventure. Something he seems to share with the Russians, who he says are anything but risk-averse. His uncle, resistance hero Peter Tazelaar, who was known in his family as ‘the real Soldier of Orange’, was a role model for him. The craving for such an immersive life led Sauer to the IRA in Belfast at the age of 19 and eventually took him to Russia, where he built a media empire under the protection of an oligarch.
His Tintin-esque biography delivered juicy anecdotes throughout the evening about dealings with Russian mafia in casinos and weapons he was transporting for the IRA. Sauer spoke remarkably soberly about it. What made him transport weapons as a journalist?, asked Janine Abbring, who regularly criticized the elusive media entrepreneur. He wasn’t a real journalist at the time, Sauer replied. “I was a revolutionary with a pen.”
His days as a revolutionary are now far behind him. His idealism is now reflected in the maintenance of independent Russian journalism. He drew attention to the plight of this with an excerpt from F@ck this job, about the Russian news station TV Dozhd. And in repeatedly expressing his disgust at the Putin regime, which he regrets not doing much earlier and much more clearly.
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you go back to Russia?” Abbring asked. Dine with those wonderfully diverse Russians and toast with them a lot, Sauer replied. And they toasted to that.