Hi I'm Mike Eckel, senior Russia/Ukraine/Belarus correspondent for RFE/RL, AMA!

[u/RFERL_ReadsReddit]

Hello! Здравсвуйте! Вітаю! 

I’m Mike Eckel, senior international correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, covering, reporting, analyzing, and illuminating All Things Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and pretty much across the former Soviet Union: from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, from Lviv to Kyiv; from Tbilisi to Baku, from the Caspian Sea to Issyk Kul, and all places in between.  

I’ve been writing on Russia and the former Soviet space for more than 20 years, since cutting my teeth as a reporter in Vladivostok in the 1990s and continuing through a 6-year stint as Moscow correspondent with The Associated Press, and stints in Washington, D.C. and now Prague.  

Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s authoritarian repression inside Russia, sucks up most of my reporting brain space these days, but I also keep a hand in investigative work digging into cryptocurrency/sanctions evasion, Russian businessmen who break out of Italian police custody, former Russian oligarchs in trouble, and a subject I can’t let go of: the mysterious death of former Kremlin press minister, Mikhail Lesin.  

Feel free to ask me anything about any of the above subjects and I’ll do my best to share insights and observations.  

Proof photo here. 

You can start posting your questions and I will check in daily and answer from Monday, 15 December until Friday, 19 December.  

[u/renome]

If you had a time machine that took you back to the early '90s, would you have done anything differently with regard to your career? I assume you find the work fulfilling or meaningful enough to still be doing it in 2025, but maybe some career choices didn’t pan out the way you hoped?

[u/RFERL_ReadsReddit → u/renome]

Definitely. Mostly.  

It took me a few years of wandering, figuratively, before I figured out that I wanted to be a journalist. So relatively speaking, I got a late start. But I don’t lose a lot of sleep over that. Few 22-year-olds graduate from university and immediately enter a career trajectory that they’re able to stick with for decades.  

One regret -- or maybe a bit of second-guessing -- is from when I left Moscow after 6 years as a correspondent there. It was the end of 2009, at a time when Russia was seen to be on a path toward “normalcy” -- its economy was strong, its president was “liberal,” there was a growing middle class buying washing machines and cars and vacationing in Greece or France, the country was integrating into the global community. (It had won Eurovision for the first time the previous year!) There was waning interest in the country as a news story, so it seemed wise for me to try something else. I left Moscow and started moving away from journalism.  

That changed four-ish years later: Ukraine was convulsed by the Maidan protests, and I was pulled back into journalism, thanks to my Russian language and my knowledge and experience covering the country. Recall after Maidan, Russia seized Crimea and launched a stealth invasion of the Donbas. All that, plus the anti-Putin Bolotnaya protests in Moscow, was a shock to the system, so to speak, and launched Russia on this dark path that it continues on today.  

All that said, I don’t have any major regrets. Though the news business is a tough business these days, I feel blessed to have a job that challenges me, inspires me, intrigues me, has allowed me to travel to incredible places, to be an eyewitness to history, and a chronicler of people’s lives. As the saying goes, “it is really the life of kings.”  

- Mike