No one ever asks why I want to cover the war in Ukraine. They know it’s the most important story in the world to me.
‘Aren’t you afraid?’ is the question I hear most often. Frankly, no, though there have been sobering moments. Experience is an antidote to fear. When I took the last flight to Baghdad before the 2003 US-led invasion, there were dire predictions of chemical warfare and other terrors which did not materialise.
Likewise, the first days of this Ukraine war were fraught with uncertainty. I would not have been surprised to see Russian tanks thunder into Lviv, like those I saw advancing on the Georgian capital Tbilisi – until they turned around – in 2008.
I am not a Ukraine correspondent and have spent an aggregate of only seven weeks in Ukraine for The Irish Times since the full-scale Russian invasion of February 24th, 2022.
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My most frightening experience of the war was arriving at a deserted train station in Lviv late at night on March 4th, 2022, during a blackout and after curfew. No one came to fetch me. My phone battery was almost dead, and I didn’t speak a word of Ukrainian.
A few days before I left Paris for Ukraine last month, my brilliant interpreter and fixer, Nazar Yatsyshyn, sent me an amateur video of a Russian missile strike on Zaporizhzhia that killed two promising young women musicians, Khrystyna Spitsyna and Svitlana Semeykina. The missile whooshes overhead and explodes into an enormous orange fireball. It sent a brief shiver of fear through me.
In most cases we are excluded from the combat zone, if not by the Ukrainians, then by insurance companies
The Ukraine war is two wars in one: the brutal and horrendous first World War-like combat in Donbas and along the Black Sea coast, and a seemingly arbitrary missile war that can be fatal if one is in the wrong place at the wrong time, but in which the odds of being killed or wounded are substantially lower than in the combat zone.
Unlike the US and other Nato forces in their recent wars, the Ukrainian army do not “embed” journalists. In most cases we are excluded from the combat zone, if not by the Ukrainians, then by insurance companies who charge exorbitant rates, ban journalists from all truly dangerous areas and demand that one carry a back-breakingly heavy flak jacket and helmet. Few journalists make it to the frontline.
Tension, and danger, nonetheless increase as one moves across the country from west to east, though there are civilian casualties in the west too.
In Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, I was reminded that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which the Russians occupied on the first day of the war, was only 100km away. There are constant fears that the Russians will blow the plant up and release radiation. I bought iodine tablets in Paris, just in case. Such precautions help you park your fear on a shelf in the brain.
But compared with the 1999 Nato bombardment of Belgrade, or the US bombardment of Baghdad in 2003, the missile war on Ukraine is not frightening. Unless one was in the market where 16 were killed in Konstyantnynivka in the Donetsk region on September 6th, or on the main square in Chernihiv where seven died on August 19th, or in the pizzeria where 13 perished in Kramatorsk on June 27th. There are, alas, many other examples.
Do not think for a moment that the relative tranquillity of much of Ukraine indicates mercy or restraint on the part of the Russians. They would bomb relentlessly if they could. Patriot missiles and other air defence systems would require the sacrifice of too high a number of pilots and aircraft.
Fear is a personal thing. Ulyana Kuzyk, a military logistician based in Lviv, told me she was less afraid on the frontline. “I find missiles in Lviv more frightening than artillery shells in Donbas,” she said, “because when you go to the front, you expect this to happen. At home in Lviv, you can go to bed at night, and you may not wake up”.
Sadness is an integral part of covering a war
In many ways, covering Ukraine war is easier than past wars. For years I had nightmares about not being able to file my copy. Communications, food and lodging, all big challenges of past wars, have not been a problem in Ukraine. On the other hand, the immense size of the country requires sleepless nights on a heroically functioning railway network.
I was tempted to complain about stained sheets and a grotty toilet on the overnight train from Kyiv to Kryvyi Rih until I remembered my interview with Lieut Yulia Mykytenko, the commander of a frontline drone unit, who told me the war taught her to live without creature comforts.
Sadness is an integral part of covering a war. I will never forget the funeral in Lviv of Viktor Dudar, one of the first Ukrainian journalists killed in the war. “It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward” were the immortal words of his widow Oksana as she stood by his grave.
The plight of children in war is also deeply moving. At a holiday summer camp for war orphans, the clinginess of nine-year-old Katya, who had lost her father, was heartbreaking.
A close friend said she found my reporting depressing. On the contrary, I told her. The unity and resolve of Ukrainians are incredibly uplifting.
Not to mention their humour. “Grandpa Svyryd”, the popular historian who was badly wounded on the eastern front, made me laugh with stories of a young woman with polished fingernails who demanded a machine gun to fight the Russians, and of the Russian unit that forgot to test the wind before firing smoke grenades. The smoke blew back over Russian lines.
Moral clarity is an outstanding feature of this war. Lieut Mykytenko told me it was “much easier to see what is black and what is white here”. She referred to the combat zone, but I would say the same of all Ukraine.