This is the full speech at he ceremony of EL MUNDO ‘Freedom of the Press’ award 2024:

At dawn on February 24th 2022, I woke up in Kyiv to explosions in the distance and filed the most bitter urgent dispatch of my life. After pressing “send”, I spent a few seconds staring at the home page of EL MUNDO.es, like someone looking at a shop window with a brick in their hand.

Europe would no longer be the same. Ukraine, where I was at that moment, would no longer be the same. Russia, where I would soon have to return, would no longer be the same.

In front of that screen, I wanted to look at that world one last time. The old world of the end of history.

Russian totalitarianism projects outward the same traps with which it poisoned its own people: it told them they did not need to associate, did not need real parties, real trade unions or real media.

It convinced them that the government had to bring the media and the judges to heel. For the good of the country. Now the government keeps everyone in line. And there are no real media, real judges or real parties left to denounce it.

The system persuaded them that if they claimed their role as citizens – by writing, by protesting – then they were a threat to the country. And that if they bowed down before it, they would have nothing to fear. Now many people are afraid.

But it is too late.

The regime is now trying to impose the same numbing, self-pitying message when it comes to what it considers its European backyard. It tells us that our security alliances create insecurity, that our political unions are undemocratic, that our sanctions weaken us, that our evolution is our degradation.

We have spent a quarter of a century in which peace has been the norm in Europe.

Your Majesty, we are now faced with a present that is, frankly, unacceptable.

What is the point of a European Union that passes laws if there is a Russia that imposes borders?

Dictatorships prolong the present, but they have no future, and they know it. That is why they kill anything that is new.

They are not trying to rebuild the Russian/Soviet empire, but to destroy the alternatives that emerged after it. European integration is the boring alternative to the adventures of colonialism and war.

That is why the EU is in the crosshairs.

There are not two Vladimir Putins: one ruthless at home, who never has enough, and another who is only temporarily offended by our arrogance and with whom we can find a reasonable solution for everyone.

That is why, although it was very hard for me to give up Ukraine in order to go on covering Russia, I soon realised that describing in detail the repression suffered by Russians was precisely the best way to warn of the abuses it has in store for others.

But the move from authoritarianism to totalitarianism is also a lesson for us. The Russian transition, which went wrong, helps us see clearly that ours went right.

But we must not look down on totalitarian regimes from above. Russia is not the dictatorship of the past. It is the dictatorship we ourselves can become if we do not take care of the cleanliness of our own system; if we are not demanding with whichever government is in power; if we believe its story of eternal innocence.

Checks and balances are always cleaner than power. Power is always more vicious than its checks and balances.

All the time the government spends thinking about how to please the citizens, even unsuccessfully, is time in which at least the citizens are not afraid, wondering how not to anger the government.

A correspondent has to be someone who writes without fear about the government, as if the government were not watching them, and at the same time writes carefully about ordinary people, as if they really might read them the next day. Never the other way round.

Receiving an award is a kind of plot behind the recipient’s back. I want to thank the conspirators. Also my family. And my colleagues in the section.

Someone recently pointed out where the tipping point lies at which democracy gets its chance: that moment comes when people realize that the dictatorship does not work.

That is why it is so urgent to show the true face of repression, so that one day it might end.

Or at the very least so that it does not export its lies to the world in which we have grown used to being free.

EL MUNDO ‘Freedom of the Press’ award 2024