On Thursday, March 20, a very special meeting will take place: two correspondents with a brilliant career, two well-known journalists -one Spanish and one British- will talk about the long periods they spent in the USSR and Russia in the 21st century. Join us for this very interesting talk on 20/03/2025 at 18:30 at the Euro-Arab Foundation for Higher Studies (San Geronimo Street, 27).
The event will be held in English. Simultaneous interpretation into Spanish will be provided.
Host and moderator: Antonio Sánchez Ortega, lecturer in the Department of International Public Law and International Relations at the University of Granada.
Pilar Bonet Cardona (Ibiza, 1952) is a Spanish journalist. For 15 years she was the head correspondent for the journal El País in the Soviet Union, in the Moscow headquarters. In this period, she covered events such as the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification, Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union and the fall of the Communist regimes in the Eastern countries. Furthermore, she worked as a correspondent in Germany for four years before returning to Moscow to continue reporting from Russia and many of the countries that make up the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Bonet is a research associate, Think Tank expert in the CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs) and author of the following books: Moscú (1988), Figures in a Red Landscape (1992) and La Rusia imposible: Borís Yeltsin, un provinciano en el Kremlin (1994). In 1990 she was awarded the Víctor de la Serna Prize, and in 1996, the Cirilo Rodríguez Journalism Prize. She has also twice received awards from the International Press Club as Spain's best foreign correspondent.
Helen Ruth Womack worked in Russia under three Kremlin leaders. In the Gorbachev years, she reported for Reuters news agency. Under Yeltsin, she was a Moscow correspondent for the British daily, The Independent. From 2000-2003, she had a break in Australia and when she returned to Moscow, she was writing for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Melbourne). In 2015, an extremist website called her a "pathological Russophobe" and the Foreign Ministry refused to renew her accreditation. She moved to Budapest, where she now writes about refugees for UNHCR.