I woke up on Friday morning a pawn in a Kafka-esque story. Except I hadn’t been transformed into a chess piece but was a diplomatic pawn, a small player in a much larger international story. I read the news that I and 119 other “prominent” Australians were banned from travelling to Russia “indefinitely”.
The Russian sanctions were a response to Western sanctions and the “spreading of false information about Russia”. The Russian Foreign Ministry announced 121 people had been sanctioned but, in a beautifully Russian bureaucratic bungle, Air Vice-Marshal Darren Goldie was banned twice, making it just 120 of us on the list.
