Boris Bondarev

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Boris Bondarev (born 1980) is a former Russian diplomat who worked at Russia’s permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva from 2019 until he resigned in May 2022 in protest of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He grew up in Moscow in a middle‑class family; his father was an economist in the foreign trade ministry and his mother taught English at the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations. He spent a short time living in Switzerland in 1984–85 when his father worked there. He studied at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and began working for the Russian Foreign Ministry in 2002. He served in various posts, including as an assistant attaché in Cambodia and later at the Mongolian embassy, and he later advised on nuclear non‑proliferation before joining Geneva in 2019.

Bondarev resigned in May 2022, calling the invasion of Ukraine an aggressive war and a crime against the Ukrainian people and against Russia’s future. He said he had warned senior diplomats but was told to keep quiet. The Kremlin said it did not know about his letter. In 2025 he commented on Donald Trump’s attempts to negotiate peace in Ukraine, saying Trump had no leverage over Putin. Bondarev is married.