The magazines that bought her freedom
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The magazines that bought her freedom is a family story John Kiriakou told on the DeProgram programme in September 2025, in the course of an argument about the recruitment of children for sabotage in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

The argument it belongs to

The hosts had been discussing reporting that both Russian and Ukrainian services were paying teenagers over messaging apps to commit acts of sabotage, and in some cases coercing them with intimate photographs. Put to them was the objection that resistance movements in occupied Greece and France had also used the young.

Kiriakou accepted the parallel only on a condition: "as long as you go in with your eyes open."

His grandmother

The example he offered was his own family's. "My grandmother did something similar and was caught and imprisoned by the quisling government that was in Athens at the time."

The release was purchased, and cheaply. "My grandfather bribed a prison guard with American magazines to let her go, and they escaped to the United States."

Kiriakou gives no date, no charge and no further detail about what she had done. The episode is one of very few he tells about his grandparents' generation, and it places the family's emigration in the aftermath of the occupation.

The distinction he draws

Having offered a resister in his own family, Kiriakou uses her to mark the boundary rather than to erase it. Wartime resisters, in the account he endorsed, were volunteers acting out of conviction, not, as he put it of the current recruiters, people "blackmailing kids with nude photos of themselves."

His objection to the present practice is about capacity rather than politics: "kids can't process this kind of thing. They can't really consider ideas of what might happen to them if they get caught."

He assigns the blame to both belligerents equally: "this is shame on both Russia and Ukraine for doing something like this. Kids are so easily exploited. Their brains aren't fully formed."

See also

- Kiriakou's Greek citizenship
- John Kiriakou
- The Greek Orthodox Church
