This summer alone, Katya Adler has covered riots in France, a snap Spanish general election and a Nato summit in Lithuania. She even made it to London to debut as a Proms presenter, enthusing about Beethoven’s Fifth and discussing the enduring power of folk music with composer and cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson. And yet, to the British public, her name remains synonymous with Brexit.
When she took up the post of BBC Europe editor in 2014, returning from maternity leave after the birth of her third child, it must have seemed a far cry from the intensity of her years of frontline reporting in Kosovo and the Middle East. Instead, of course, the EU referendum happened and she found herself at the epicentre of another kind of drama, unenviably tasked with finding out what Brussels bureaucrats were thinking as divorce negotiations got under way. “Why would they want to tell me when I’m part of the other side of the table, to put it politely?” she points out. But tell her they did, albeit anonymously. One senior official even took her call while his wife was in labour, a detail that still delights her.
It says as much about Adler’s own commitment to the job as it does about her schedule that she’s agreed to an interview while on holiday with her family. On video call, she’s as engaged and unflappably well-informed as ever, except that the backdrop isn’t some bland corridor in Europe’s halls of power, it’s the dazzling white of an Ionian interior, and in place of her customary executive chic she’s dressed in halter-neck beachwear.
Later this month, viewers will get to see a very different side of Adler when she presents a two-part documentary, Living Next Door to Putin, a pacy, accessible investigation into the anxieties of Europeans living in countries that border Russia, including Finland, Norway and Latvia. It packs a lot into its two hours, offering a flavour of the complex history shaping each nation’s distinct fears as well as contemporary pressures. Ask Adler how concerned she is about the war rippling further into her patch, and she notes it’s already here, just not in conventional ways. Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of the series is its demonstration that, while they’re more exposed geographically, Putin’s neighbours are also more switched on to the threat of hybrid warfare, whether it’s disinformation or cyber-attacks.
Adler began her career almost 30 years ago, and she’s acutely aware of the many ways in which the reporter’s job has changed. She’s especially interested in the rise of fake news and mistrust of the mainstream media – one of her favourite subjects, she says, is the rise of populism, the political errors that enabled it and the reporting missteps that fuel it. She’s also well aware of the toll taken by the recent pile-up of seismic news stories – first Brexit, then Covid, now the return of war to Europe.
“I understand why a lot of people say, ‘I can’t take any more news, it’s too much,’” she says. “How do you not depress people beyond belief? How do you inform people but not scare them into thinking the world is about to end? This doc helps with that because it’s a mix, it’s light and shade. It’s serious but it’s also lighthearted – and not in a way I felt was superficial.”
Those lighter notes, she points out, come largely at her own expense. She communes with a beluga whale that the Norwegians named Hvaldimir – blending the Norwegian for whale, hval, with Putin’s first name – after he suddenly showed up in their waters wearing a harness fitted with GoPro mounts, and suspiciously drawn to humans. She’s sent up in the air with the Baltic’s answer to the Red Arrows, and experiences “drifting” – a motorsport that involves high-speed oversteering – with a Lithuanian who’s sending camouflaged saunas to troops on the frontline, responding to both experiences exactly as you or I might: by shutting her eyes and screaming.
Would she have been reluctant, as a woman, to sign up for stunts like this had she not already made her name as a hard news journalist? “I’d like to say yes, because that’s what you want to hear, but I haven’t changed the way I approach my career because of being a woman, and I was never in danger of taking myself too seriously”, she says. “The job, yes, but myself no.” By way of illustration, she tells the story of how she got her big broadcasting break – on children’s radio in Austria. She wrote and presented a programme aimed at making learning English fun, and unfortunately – Adler’s word – it proved so successful she was sent out on the road with it, touring Austrian schools accompanied by a man dressed as a cat. The hokey cokey featured prominently and still, she says, causes her to twitch.
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Having grown up in London, Adler studied Italian and German at university and is vehement about the importance of learning foreign languages. It’s a belief that was instilled in childhood, like her passion for journalism (she remembers sitting on the sofa with her dad, who died when she was very young, watching Kate Adie on telly) and her determination (her mum couldn’t afford higher education but worked her way up from a temp to become the world’s first female stamp auctioneer). They’d become British citizens by the time she was born, but both her parents were German nationals and that was the language they spoke together when they didn’t want Adler and her brother to understand. What could be more motivating?
Languages open doors, she says. “You can read loads of articles that have been written somewhere but that’s not going to give you the really nuanced understanding. You want to be able to understand people at the bus stop or in the supermarket. I like to be able to understand the graffiti on the wall.” Conveying nuance can be challenging in news journalism. “I’m always thinking, what shades of grey can I get into my one minute? How can I avoid the black and white?” It’s one of the reasons she’s stayed at the BBC for so long, she explains, likening it to an octopus, all of whose tentacles need feeding. “Somewhere, on those outlets, that nuance will come across.”
Tellingly, Adler’s favourite thing to do as the Brexit process ground on was to go on Radio 5 Live and converse with irate callers. “When you engage – and again, that’s where languages help a lot, but also tone – most people are not raging extremists,” she says. You have to keep that in mind when discussing the rise of the far right across Europe, too, she insists. “It’s very important, on those sorts of stories, to make a big distinction between politicians, who are often quite cynical – I think that’s fair to say – and people who vote for them.”
She does a lot of listening in the new documentary, beginning by meeting a 75-year-old Ukrainian refugee in Poland whose account she’s visibly moved by. “Sometimes the stories I cover are really sad, and it’s not always easy to leave them at the door when I come home,” she admits. “We leave and come back to very privileged lives, and that’s something that I’m very aware of, but you carry that sadness, or you have to hold yourself back from saying to the kids, ‘You’re so lucky!’”
Like many war reporters, she’s suffered from PTSD in the past, although she didn’t recognise it at the time and downplays it now.
“I didn’t stumble around war zones feeling traumatised, nor was I forced to go where I didn’t want to,” she says. When she met women and young girls who’d been raped by Serb soldiers in Kosovo, she felt only outrage. “That didn’t give me PTSD, it gave me impetus to do coverage, to report on it, to talk to people.”
Mostly, it’s the comic moments that she highlights in her anecdotes. For example, there’s the time in Israel during the Lebanon war when she’d thrown herself into a ditch to avoid an incoming missile and her phone started ringing. She answered it, still lying in the ditch, and it was the jewellers saying that the rings for her upcoming wedding were ready for collection. To illustrate the sheer length of Finland’s border with Russia in the new series, Adler took a hot air balloon, something she’s always wanted to do. The Russians like to scramble GPS signals near the border, and the balloon lost contact with the support team. After it tipped over in a snowy field, Adler ended up having to hang off the side of the basket to stop it from taking off again. “I almost wish that the cameraman had been able to film me, but he had to hang off the other side.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has given the rest of Europe – and that includes the United Kingdom, Adler is quick to note – much to be fearful of, but her years of reporting on some of the most fraught news stories of our times have taught her nothing if not the value of laughter in the dark.
Laughter in the dark, it seems, is how she remained so upbeat and infectiously enthusiastic during the interminable seeming Brexit process. “I would drive home at 4 o’clock in the morning and lie on the floor in the kitchen and talk to my cats, knowing I’d have to go back again in a few hours,” she says. “And before I left I’d watch a skit – Monty Python, Alan Partridge, anything that would make me laugh.”
Living Next Door to Putin starts 12 September, BBC One, 8pm
