How two Nottingham men ended up on opposite sides of the Russia-Ukrain | World | News

The first thing Aiden Aslin heard was a heavily accented Russian voice. A nasal hum echoing down the corridor of a filthy prison block in Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk region. “Oh God, please don’t be who I think you are,” he muttered. Aslin, from Nottingham, was still recovering from the pain of a mock execution and being stabbed in the shoulder by a Russian guard. Now he had something else to worry about.

A door opened. Standing in front of him was a clean-shaven Russian propagandist holding a camera and microphone.
Just a few days ago, Aslin was fighting on behalf of Ukraine in the siege of Mariupol, hiding in the city’s steel mills and exposed to Russian artillery shells.

Food and ammunition had finally run out, forcing the unit to surrender in April 2022, two months after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He quickly learned that British POWs, held captive in a maze of Russian cells and interrogation rooms, were receiving “special” treatment.

“At this point my mental health was at its worst since I had been in captivity. I had managed to find a razor blade hidden in the window of our prison cell. And I remember lying in bed at night contemplating ending my life.”

At regular intervals, guards would drag him from his cell to participate in filmed interviews with a series of hard-line Kremlin propagandists and conspiracy theorists. The 28-year-old would be accused of being a Nazi and would be forced to sing the Russian anthem with all his might. This was all for the entertainment of tens of thousands of Putin supporters and weirdos on the internet; They watched videos of a Briton being humiliated before serving his sentence as he faced a Russian firing squad, blindfolded and tied to a pole.

Among this poor collection of self-styled “independent journalists,” there was one person in particular that Aiden hoped he would never meet. He was the man standing in front of him that day in the Donetsk prison, and he was definitely not Russian. He was British. Not only this. He was also from Nottingham.

“He walked in and I said, ‘Jesus,'” Aslin recalled. “Of all the propagandists I encountered, it had to be this man. I knew immediately that it was Graham Phillips.”

Forty-three-year-old Phillips had undergone a strange transformation from British civil servant to Russian social media star.
“I think the only thing he was talking about was that we were both from Nottingham,” Aslin continues. “He was trying to break the ice.
“Then he got aggressive, like ‘oh, you’re a mercenary’ straight up.”

Traveling around eastern Ukraine, often on the front lines manned by Russian troops, Phillips had triumphantly reported from fallen Ukrainian towns while denouncing Zelensky’s government as “Nazis.” His indomitable, sometimes crazy ideas have helped him amass more than 300,000 followers on YouTube. People were curious to see an Englishman towing the Kremlin line.

Now wearing a green Fred Perry T-shirt and brandishing a Canon camera, Phillips sat the handcuffed Aiden Aslin on a stool. Phillips’ face was stern, full of nervous energy and excitement. Aslin was bruised, confused, and her eyes were empty.
In a strange twist of fate, these two young men from Nottingham found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict in a Russian-controlled prison.

The first is a questioner hoping to increase their online following; the other is a doomed man who is ready to do anything to survive.
I was there at the time, just a few kilometers away, on the Ukrainian side of the front line, reporting on the war for the BBC. I saw the video of the Brit-on-Brit interrogation and found it extremely disturbing, chilling, even terrifying.

I quickly realized that this was probably a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Every self-respecting journalist knows that you cannot interview a prisoner of war. They are not free to speak their minds and their consent is meaningless. However, I remember Phillips accusing his fellow countryman of being a mercenary and then exclaiming with gusto, “It’s the death penalty!” When I watched him say it, I wondered how two men from the same town could choose such different paths in life. I began investigating a story that turned out to have a sweeping and convoluted Tolstoy-like narrative that could cause a bidding war in Hollywood. It had love, war, death, patriots and traitors.

It turns out that Phillips was once a college graduate who dabbled in stand-up comedy, apparently had the same performance as Russell Brand, and then surrendered to the grind of a desk job. He went to Ukraine for the 2012 European Championship not as a war correspondent but as an England football fan. Phillips was seduced not only by the Byzantine domes of Kiev’s St. Sophia Cathedral, the idyllic steppes or the invigorating waters of the Black Sea, but also by the “otherworldly women” of Ukraine.

She had decided to stay here, start a sex tourism blog and submit occasional reports to British newspapers.

During the Square Revolution in February 2014, Phillips observed dozens of people making Nazi salutes while reporting from a rally of the far-right Svoboda Party. It was an earth-shattering moment for the fresh-faced young journalist from Nottingham. When the Kremlin blamed “Nazis” for the overthrow of their puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, Graham Phillips decided to take their side.

He broke up with his Ukrainian girlfriend and headed for the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. A Briton among the burly balaclava-wearing separatists, he was quickly given special access to Russian facilities, privileged placements and even awarded Kremlin medals.
Phillips had found his tribe.

Les Scott, an old friend of Phillips who filmed with him in occupied Crimea, recalled: “I thought the gangs would follow us. People say, ‘Oh, you’re that propagandist.’ And it wasn’t anything like that. It was like walking around with a celebrity, and that’s no exaggeration.”

“Some of them were touched, some of them were moved to tears because they said, ‘Thank you. You’re the only person of Western descent who tells people how we feel.’ And I guess if you ask what it was that drove Graham as an individual to do it so passionately, so provocatively, then this is it.”

Aiden Aslin’s complicated path to Ukraine was even more dramatic. Expelled from his school in Newark for fighting, he became a caretaker before seeing horrific ISIS videos on social media. Reviewing each horror, he concluded that the West must do more; Western liberal democracy was in danger.

“I’m going to Syria to fight ISIS,” he told his shaken mother, Angela.

Untrained, and with no frontline experience, relying on Facebook for instructions, he’d crossed the border into Syria in 2015 and joined the Kurdish militia group, the YPG. Soon Aslin was armed with an AK-47, cooking under the stars and fighting on the front lines. He was surrounded by foreign fighters from the United States, Canada and Britain. Some romantically compared themselves to the International Brigades fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. After two grueling tours, Aslin’s attention turned to Ukraine and what he saw as the forgotten conflict there.

He packed his bags, boarded a plane for snowy Kiev in 2018, and officially joined the Ukrainian armed forces. Four years later, he was in mortar position in the freezing countryside near Mariupol when he heard the terrifying whir of rockets.
Putin’s full-scale invasion had begun.

Aslı’s surrender two months later was the most difficult decision of her life. He had anticipated the beatings in custody and the trial that sentenced him to death, but he had not anticipated the intervention of a British friend in the interrogation room in Donetsk.
Both men were struggling with a conflict that was not their own. They had chosen sides in an age when ideas, facts and fantasies danced dazzlingly around even the soberest minds. Many of us do the same, but we save our opinion for boozy lunches with friends.

The difference was that these two lads from Nottingham decided to take action. Today, as the war approaches its fifth year, Aslin finds herself on the right side of history; It fights against the forces of autocracy and terrorism on the front lines of Western liberal democracy. Phillips chose the latter, encouraged by his growing fame and online purveyors of a similarly distorted worldview.

But the cost of action for each person was enormous. Aslin, who was released through a prisoner exchange, is still trying to repair the trauma she experienced during execution. Phillips insists his interview with Aslin was freely given and in line with international law, but his pro-Kremlin activities saw him sanctioned by the British government.

His assets in the UK have been frozen and he is reportedly living in a bombed house in Donetsk. It was here, in this ruined backyard of a stolen Ukrainian city, that the fizzy world of social media took material form, at least for Phillips, amidst the dying embers of another Russian winter.

Hear the full story of Two Nottingham Lads every Wednesday morning on BBC Radio 4 until 14 January or listen now via The History Podcast on BBC Sounds