Review: 'On Thin Ice' by Charlie Walker, a Siberian trek during Ukraine invasion

In late February 2022, Charlie Walker set off on a hiking holiday in northern Siberia. In temperatures as low as -50C, he intended to trek a thousand miles north along the frozen surface of the river Lena, then out across the solid Laptev Sea to the port town of Tiksi, before finally flying home to London. “The plan,” he writes, “was simple in concept.” A sub-zero camping trip through a region populated by wolves and bears and scarred by centuries of historical trauma, in a country that was about to invade one of its neighbours: what could possibly go wrong?

On Thin Ice is Walker’s third travelogue. Previous excursions have included a 43,000-mile bicycle ride across three continents, a 1,000-mile solo walk through the Gobi desert, and a river trip down the Congo in a leaky canoe. When not performing incredible feats of forward motion, according to his website, he gives talks to business leaders on subjects such as “risk taking” and “the line between courage and recklessness”. Reading his latest, it’s clear he’s familiar with the terrain on both sides of that line.

Landing in the Siberian city of Yakutsk with his skis, sled, tent and a “comically huge sleeping bag” Walker is busy provisioning when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine begins. With the Foreign Office advising against travel to Russia, he briefly considers abandoning his plans. But, reasoning that “Yakutsk is comfortably closer to the Alaskan city of Anchorage than it is to Kyiv”, he presses on.

“The journey would be different now,” he writes. “As one of the last Western tourists in Russia, I was presented with a unique opportunity … to record the thoughts and feelings of ordinary Russian people, neither soldiers nor politicians. Living far from the front lines, their various opinions would provide insight into the silent majority of 144 million citizens. This seemed worth the risk of remaining inside a police state where already-limited freedoms of expression could evaporate overnight.”

Armed with a flare gun, a can of pepper spray and a dagger for protection from the wolves and bears, Walker spends weeks trudging along ice roads – zimniki – by day, shivering in his tent at night, and occasionally experiencing the extremes of Siberian hospitality. The lorry drivers he meets on the zimniki stop for photos, sharing coffee and conversation. One scolds him for pitching his tent on the road: many truckers fuel themselves with vodka, while some watch television as they drive. He’s treated to local delicacies: grilled horse ribs, reindeer shin pie, a sausage made from aged horse blood (“the puck of boiled blood escaped its horse-gut housing and smeared across the roof of my mouth, setting fast like some ungodly grouting”). Indigenous Sakha women place a wolf’s penis amulet around his neck and offer pancakes to Bayani, “spirit lord of the taiga”, to safeguard his passage.

Many of the people he encounters are more than willing to talk about Ukraine. “Ukraine’s a corrupt country run by Nazis,” declares one young Sakha man. “Ukraine belongs to Russia,” says another. Even in areas so barren trees struggle to grow, Kremlin propaganda is deeply rooted. “I heard that President Putin is saving the Ukrainian people and I’m happy to know they’re being helped,” a lone Eveni herder tells Walker over a meal of roasted reindeer spine. Almost everyone seems to believe some version of the same story: that Putin saved Russia from the chaos of the 90s, and whatever he does is for the best. One wonders – a million Russian casualties later – how that story has weathered.

More than votive pancakes, more than daggers and flares, it soon becomes apparent that the survival tool Walker really should have packed was the business card of a competent local lawyer. It’s not bears who stalk him across the ice, but the FSB, who take an increasingly hostile interest in this inexplicable Englishman, especially as his intended destination, Tiksi, turns out to be a military base. He is accused of “committing journalism”; of being a spy; people he encounters are harassed, others rush to inform on him. He takes insane risks, recording his own “anti-Putin rants” on a Dictaphone – when anti-war journalists face 15-year sentences – and signing a confession without having it translated first. He ends up in a detention centre, where he spends an agonising month awaiting deportation. Reflecting on his choices, he remembers an old Russian saying: “You saw what you were buying, so eat up, even if you choke on it.”

At the start of his journey, Walker had hoped he might see a rosier side of Siberia. There are moments of beauty – the aurora borealis, rare bursts of warmth from the locals – but almost everywhere else is horror and corruption. Growing sinkholes, decaying towns, roads packed with the skeletons of the prisoners who died building them, a “blackened wasteland” the size of Belgium left by wildfires. Walker evokes it all with a masterly touch. Nobody, after reading this book, will be in a rush to book tickets to Siberia, least of all its author, who is now banned from the country.