ANALYSIS: Russian businessman Viatcheslav (Slava) Meyn came to Christchurch in 2009 and used his own money to build a football facility for the city at Yaldhurst. He talks, reluctantly, to Martin van Beynen about the situation in Ukraine.

I won't lie. Slava Meyn doesn't see much point in talking to me about the Russian invasion of Ukraine now in its third week.

“It will be difficult to talk to you,” he says at the start of a 20-minute telephone interview. “I don't think you know a lot about this conflict.”

Later when I try to arrange a face-to-face interview, he says: “I don't think my opinion will be really interesting for your readers because we have different sources of information and different levels of knowledge of the situation. So I don't think I can help you.”

Of course his opinion is interesting. He is a wealthy Russian entrepreneur with a Ukrainian background who must currently be feeling torn. He says he is just a simple businessman and not anywhere near an oligarch. But he is likely Christchurch’s richest Russian and well known in many Christchurch circles.

It’s easy to understand Meyn’s reticence. Outspoken comments, unflattering to the Russian regime, might have an impact on the business interests he still has in East Siberia.

He is also on a hiding to nothing. We expect Russians who have made their home in our country to be as outraged as we are. If they aren’t, we judge them complicit, which is unfair. And he is also right that discussing the Ukraine situation and history with journalists, who tend to parachute into a subject, is fraught.

Ukraine has a complex history. After attempts to set up a separate state after Russia’s 1917 revolution, Soviet armies subdued the country in 1920 and it was reconstituted into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which became a founding member of the Soviet Union in 1922. It declared its independence in 1991, as the Soviet Union started breaking up.

That’s why people like Meyn say Ukraine isn’t really a country, although he accepts Ukrainians might disagree.

“I could tell you,” he says, “that Ukraine was formed by communists in 1922, but people from Ukraine will say they had national consciousness earlier. But Ukraine didn't exist as an independent country until 1991.

“By our mentality, our history, it is one.”

Perhaps Meyn was also a bit harsh on journalists. Thanks to Jared Diamond’s book Upheaval - How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change I’m not entirely blind to the geopolitical situation in the area and Russia’s intense insecurity about its borders and threats from outside. The book is about Finland’s difficulties with the Soviets which have eerie parallels to the situation in Ukraine.

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In the century before WWI, Finland was an autonomous part of Russia. Finland and Russia fought two wars with each other between 1939 and 1942. Finland, grossly outmatched, was never going to succeed against the Soviet Union but its fighting spirit and superior tactics imposed a huge cost on the Soviet Union with about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn.

Diamond’s book outlines how Finland reached an arrangement with the Soviets based essentially on making the Soviets feel they could trust Finland. That meant Finland foregoing some rights we would normally associate with a sovereign nation in order to deal with the realities of its geography as a buffer country between Sweden and Russia. In practice this meant being open with the Soviets and doing nothing to upset them.

Meyn and his wife Natalia Zarypova moved to Christchurch in 2009 from Nakhodka, in the far east of Russia near Vladivostok, for a better future for their children.

They built a house on a 3.5 hectare site at Clearwater and have a property now worth about $8 million. They also bought 11ha of land in Kaikōura.

Always passionate about football and surprised he couldn’t enrol his son in a football academy, he turned his attention to setting up such an academy in Christchurch with the ultimate goal of producing players who could forge a professional career.

He had the experience for the job. He was President of FC Okean Nakhodka, which played in Russia’s third tier football league, and funded two full-size artificial pitches and an indoor mini stadium for the club’s youth football academy. The club went into liquidation in 2015 but has since been resurrected.

Meyn, through a company called Canterbury Sport, bought a 19ha block of land in Yaldhurst and built four football fields, two of them with artificial turf. Canterbury Sport’s main shareholders are Meyn and Nikolai Myshletcov (24 per cent) of Vladivostok.

The facility merged with the Christchurch United Football Club in 2016 and, with Meyn as president, is hoping to earn a spot in the National League this year.

Former English professional and Wellington Phoenix star Paul Ifill has been appointed coach of the first team. On the club’s website, he says: “When you see these facilities and you hear Slava's passion and vision, it is hard not to be impressed. I think Christchurch United is the sleeping giant of New Zealand football.”

The generous provision of the facility makes it easy to think well of Meyn, but there is still the matter of what he thinks about Ukraine.

He says the situation is a "catastrophe" and must be stopped.

To him, it is an appalling situation. His grandparents are from Ukraine, he has many relatives and friends there, and he believes most Russians have similar connections.

“You could imagine North Island and South Island. That's it. You can compare Russia and Ukraine like North and South Island.”

He says everyone in Ukraine speaks Russian, but some parts look more to the West and others more to the east.

The present conflict has nothing to do with Ukraine and Russia, he says.

“It is all about Nato, US and Russia.

“...It's Russians fighting Russians,” he says.

I mention the Russian aggression and breach of international rules but Meyn believes the West could easily have defused the conflict.

“The West could have asked Putin to sit down and say let’s talk about the mutual status of Ukraine but they don't do it.”

A promise that Ukraine would never be part of Nato would go a long way to solving the issues, he believes.

Meyn says “you need to go back to 2014 in Donbas”.

“Eight years in a row Ukrainians bombed Donbas – their own territory. Did you see photos or video about it? No. A thousand people died. There is plenty of evidence.”

Meyn is referring to the Donbas region, a territory about a third the size of Canterbury, in east Ukraine. Donbas is a collective term for the Donetsk and Luhansk areas which have both declared themselves republics, now recognised by Russia.

The Donbas has been a war zone since 2014 with Ukrainian government forces pitched against Russian-backed separatists. Russia's assistance to the separatists has ranged from covert activities, supply of war materials and direct intervention. Shelling from both sides have killed civilians and the Ukrainian forces have used drones and fighter aircraft. Thousands have died. Estimates depend on the source.

Despite his reticence, Meyn says he would love to do an interview about the US invasion of Afghanistan. The US invaded Afghanistan to remove a regime friendly to al-Queda in 2001. It left hastily, amid chaotic scenes last year.

I mention that the Soviet Union also had a big presence in Afghanistan for 10 years from 1979. He agrees.

This line of discussion is a common argument. Critics of Russia are usually pointed to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ukraine, of course, wasn't ruled by a vicious dictator who had started several wars and recently invaded a neighbour.

We move on to Meyn's business interests in Russia. His main source of income appears to be a meat processing company called Ratimir, based near Vladivostok, employing about 1300 people. In addition to producing fresh meat, it makes sausages and other small goods, selling them all over Russia. It also has a retail arm. Meyn is a major shareholder and says the conflict and the impact on the Russian economy will have an effect on his business.

He says businesses can be run in Russia in a legal and transparent way and believes New Zealand has in some ways more impediments to business than Russia.

He argues that Russia is actually a more capitalist state than places like New Zealand or Sweden.

Meyn makes it clear he is not supporting one system – capitalism, communism etc – over the other.

“My point is that there is not a perfect system.”