60 Minutes - 8/21/2022: Bellingcat, Justice Defenders, Ballet in Exile

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

On this edition of “60 Minutes,” Scott Pelley on the data mining operation in Europe trying to uncover and detail the war crimes in Ukraine committed by Russian forces. Anderson Cooper meets Justice Defenders, who are training 100’s of prison inmates to be paralegals and even get law degrees so they can help others get fair hearings. The results have been astounding! In Russia, ballet has always been entwined with politics. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian artists opposed to the war were left with a choice: stay and be silent or voice their dissent and leave. Jon Wertheim speaks with the dancers making difficult decisions.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Nearly everyone in Ukraine is a witness. This is actually the location where the woman was killed. Which is helping a data mining operation in Europe expose apparent Russian war crimes. I feel it's almost my duty that when we're faced with all this information showing terrible things that are happening, is to pull it out there. It does involve risk, but then defending liberty, human rights, democracy involves taking risks. It's when we stop taking risks and we let the fear take hold that we see democracy die. Good afternoon, brothers. Our work is to help people who don't have lawyers to access justice.

This soft-spoken 37-year-old lawyer founded an organization called Justice Defenders, a group that so far has trained hundreds of incarcerated men and women in prisons in Africa to become paralegals and lawyers. The results have been astounding. Olga Smirnova is a Russian prima ballerina, one of the world's leading dancers. But days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Smirnova pirouetted and stepped off her stage at the renowned Bolshoi Theater with dramatic flourish. I was so ashamed of Russia. This is the truth. I'm not ashamed that I'm Russian, but I'm ashamed because Russia started this action. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. The war crimes in Ukraine are among the worst of the 21st century,

but they are just the latest in a history of assassinations and mass murder at the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin. We know this, in large part, thanks to a team of online data detectives that calls itself Bellingcat. Since 2014, Bellingcat investigations have exposed Russia's undercover hit squads and tied Russian troops to atrocities. Suffice to say, the Russian government denies everything you're about to see in this story. But that's exactly where Bellingcat comes in. As we first reported in May, Bellingcat's founder, Elliot Higgins, has created a method of mining online data and social media to put the lie to disinformation and unmask Vladimir Putin. I feel it's almost my duty that when we're faced with

all this information showing terrible things that are happening, is to pull it out there. It does involve risk, but then defending liberty, human rights, democracy involves taking risks. It's when we stop taking risks and we let the fear take hold that we see democracy die. We can see a Russian armoured column. We met Elliot Higgins in April in London as Bellingcat was building a database of social media exposing apparent war crimes in Ukraine. Eyewitness accounts of attacks on neighbourhoods, assaults on hospitals and murders of civilians are being collected and published on Bellingcat's website for all to see. This is actually the location where the woman was killed.

Nearly everyone in Ukraine is a witness with a camera. Bellingcat is combining tens of thousands of social media posts to make them searchable by place and time. And we look at as many sources as possible and use those sources to build a picture of what happened, videos, photographs, satellite imagery. Then we look at the witness statements and the various allegations made by either side. Locations and times are corroborated with independent sources, including satellite images and Google Street View.

The goal is to provide verified evidence for future criminal trials. And it also means that we're collecting an archive of material that for future generations they can go back and look at this material. I mean, it's often said that history is written by the victors, but it's being written now and it's being preserved now. Ukraine is the biggest project in Bellingcat's short career. Higgins started Bellingcat in 2014 as sort of an accidental activist. I was not someone with a professional background. I was doing this merely as a hobby. What were you doing for a living at the time? I was working for a company that housed refugees in the UK.

I then worked for a company that manufactured pipes and then a company that manufactured lingerie. So I had a wide range of experience, but nothing that was directly related to conflict. On his off hours, the conflict in Syria fascinated him, especially how social media was exposing atrocities there. You found your calling. Indeed I did.

But his search for the truth began with a fairy tale. Where does the name come from? So Bellingcat comes from the name of a fable, Belling the Cat, and it's about a group of mice who are very scared of a very large cat. So they have a meeting and they decide to put a bell on the cat's neck, but then they realize that no one knows how to do it and no one is willing to volunteer to do it. So what we're teaching people to do is bell the cat. Higgins belled his first predator in 2014 when Russia went to war in eastern Ukraine.

Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was high over Ukraine on its way to Asia when a missile brought it down. 298 were killed. Everyone denied responsibility. But Higgins noticed in the hours before the shoot-down, there were many social media posts from bystanders who saw a missile launcher on a flatbed trailer traveling in eastern Ukraine. We started discovering social media posts of people who had seen the missile launcher

being transported. And we also had social media posts of people saying there's a rocket that's just been shot up from this direction. And we could actually use their social media profiles to figure out where they lived. Other posts were written by Russian soldiers homesick for family. Higgins found clues in each image, billboards, buildings, road signs, that let him fix the location and time of each post. When he arranged all of the social media into a timeline,

he could run the convoy backward to its starting point. Using all those videos, we were able to trace it all the way back to the military brigade it came from, the 53rd Air Defense Brigade. In Russia? In Russia. And we used their social media profiles, the soldiers and their family members and everyone around them, to reconstruct basically their network online,

which meant we could get their names, their ranks, their photographs, see who was in that convoy and who traveled to the border. So that allowed us to prove that Russia had provided the missile launcher that shot down MH17. Bellingcat published its findings, and Russia imposed a new law. The Russian government passed a specific law banning soldiers from carrying mobile devices during hostilities, which is dubbed in Russia the Bellingcat law. Christo Grozev is executive director of Bellingcat, leading its 30 full-time researchers. His personal focus has been on Russian political assassinations. What have you learned about how Vladimir Putin operates?

What we have found out is that none of these crimes could have been perpetrated without Vladimir Putin being in the know and not only aware but approving of all of these crimes. So in a nutshell, what we found out was that Putin is operating an industrial-scale assassination program on his own people. Bellingcat's next big project, the Russian assassination program, started in 2018 after a Russian defector and his daughter living in Britain were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent.

The British had passport photos and false names of two suspects, but nothing else. Grozev knew that Russia's government and commercial records are for sale on an online black market. So with the fake names, he bought the suspect's passport records. The passport numbers on the two passports were identical except for the last digit. For the last digit, exactly. So they were clearly made one after the other. Exactly. Suspicious, Christo Grozev started data mining.

Based on official records, it seemed as though both men were born at the age of 32. And there was an unusual stamp on the passport documents. There was a big black stamp on the corner of their file which said, do not provide information on this person. In case of a query, call this number. And sure enough, we called that number. And it was the Ministry of Defense. When the Ministry of Defense answered, Grozev knew the would-be assassins were military intelligence agents. To match their faces to their true identities, he spent weeks combing

yearbooks and photographs from Russian military academies. The end result was that we were able not only to identify the real identities and the affiliation to the military intelligence, we were able to find a third and a fourth member of the same kill team that the British did not even know about. Over months, Grozev uncovered a network of Russian hitmen, working throughout Europe, armed with nerve agent from a government lab. He bought airline manifests and found some of the assassins travel overlapped

the campaign stops of Alexei Navalny, the top political opponent of Vladimir Putin. And we found a total of 66 overlaps, way beyond any statistical possibility for a coincidence. They'd been shadowing him for months, years. They'd been shadowing him for four years. They started shadowing him the moment he announced his presidential aspirations in 2017, apparently being on standby for a possible assassination whenever they would get the signal. A signal came in 2020.

On a campaign trip, Navalny was poisoned with that same nerve agent. He recovered in a German hospital, returned to oppose Putin, and is now in prison. Bellingcat's investigation found assassins also tailed other Putin opponents. And we found, for example, that the team that had poisoned Navalny had tailed, at the minimum, 12 other opposition figures, three of whom had been killed, in fact, poisoned. Investigations like that are published on Bellingcat's website, which is blocked in Russia.

Bellingcat is website, which is blocked in Russia. Bellingcat is a nonprofit foundation which has trained more than 4,000 journalists and war crime investigators in its techniques of geolocation, verification, and data mining. We're headed into an entirely new era of human rights investigations and war crimes investigations more generally. Bellingcat trained Alexa Koenig's team at the University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Center. Koenig is the executive director of the center, which has used Bellingcat's techniques to expose atrocities in Myanmar and chemical attacks in Syria. They're showing the world that you don't have to be a large outfit like the New York Times or the International Criminal Court to pull these disparate bits of information together and actually get underneath who's done what to whom and when.

Still, Koenig says this new era is challenged by the fact that anyone with an Internet connection can be an investigator. The problem becomes how do you make sure they're right? That's always the risk, and I think one big concern in this space is the ethics of doing this work and making sure that you don't get it wrong. Alexa Koenig's UC Berkeley Center recently worked with the United Nations to publish guidelines for witnesses who post evidence and for amateur investigators. Standards.

Yes. Rules of evidence. Exactly. So a lot of people are being really innovative and creative about how to use a lot of digital tools and techniques to ultimately solve these puzzles. But the problem is a lot of them are not trained as legal investigators. They're not thinking about things like chain of custody and how do you establish that something you grab from the internet hasn't been changed in transit and should actually be trusted as reliable once it reaches a court of law.

So our work is hopefully designed around helping them do that in a way that maximizes that value for accountability. Ultimately, what is your hope for your Ukraine investigations? We already have been approached by the International Criminal Court. We've been approached by several prosecution authorities in Europe who want to initiate their own cases into war crimes. And we not only hope, but we know that our database, our research now, will be used in a future, let's call it something like a Nuremberg trial. There may be no accountability for Russia in a courtroom, but the work of traditional journalists and Bellingcat's expanding database are overwhelming Putin's propaganda.

You have exposed a number of Russian intelligence operations, some of which involve assassins. And I wonder if you fear for your own safety? You have to be careful about your own security. It's an extra level of paranoia. It doesn't kind of rule my life, but you just have to be kind of hypersensitive sometimes to certain things. Why take the risk? Why you? If Russia is to sustain itself, it has to rule by fear. You can't just let that fear overtake you. If you're in a position to do something, if you have information, if you have the motivation and you have the strength to do it, you should do it. Ukraine will be the most thoroughly documented war in history. Russia says no civilians have been harmed by its forces and scenes of atrocities are staged. But Putin's defense is a throwback to a previous century, analog denials in the age

of the digital witness. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years, we've done a number of stories about wrongly convicted prisoners who get exonerated when a crusading attorney takes on their case. In prisons around the world,

however, that rarely happens. In Kenya, for example, more than 80% of inmates have never been represented by a lawyer. Justice Defenders would like to change that. It's an organization started in Africa by a soft-spoken 37-year-old lawyer named Alexander McLean. Justice Defenders has worked in 55 prisons in Kenya, Uganda, and the Gambia, giving legal training to hundreds of inmates who can then help their fellow prisoners, the innocent and the guilty, get a fair hearing in court. They are also helping some prisoners get law degrees.

And as we found out when we visited Kenya before the pandemic, the results have been astounding. Thika Main Prison outside Nairobi is a miserable place. Built almost 70 years ago to hold 300 prisoners, when we visited three years ago, there were more than a thousand. In this one dank holding cell, 140 men were packed tightly together. The air thick with the smell of sweat and urine. They'd been accused of everything from trespassing and robbery to assault and murder. Some have already been convicted, but most have yet to stand trial. They can't afford bail, so they'll likely have to wait here for years.

Good afternoon, brothers. Our work is to help people who don't have lawyers to access justice. That's Alexander McLean, the founder of Justice Defenders, which has been working in Kenya's prisons for 13 years. How many of you have a lawyer? Two. Three. Just three men in this group of more than 200 prisoners have an attorney. We think it's a problem that often poor people go to court without defense. Defending the defenseless is at the heart of Alexander McLean's mission.

Most of the people who are in prisons in Kenya don't come to court knowing their rights, knowing how the court works. You might meet people in prison who think that the police are the ones who've convicted them of an offense, or they've never had a copy of their judgment. So they know that they've been convicted, but they don't know exactly what of and why. And so our hope with our work is that we give people fair hearings. So even if they're convicted or they're given a prison sentence, afterwards they say, well, that's fair because my voice has been heard. Morris Cabiria was sent to Thika prison in 2005. He was a police officer and was accused of stealing a cell phone and credit card.

How much time did you end up in pretrial detention, waiting for your trial? Eight good years. Eight years? Eight years, from 2005 to 2013. In court, he claimed he'd been framed because he didn't pay a bribe to a superior officer. The judge found him guilty of armed robbery and gave him the mandatory sentence, death. PAUL JAY, The death penalty for an armed robbery?

MAKLEEN MAKLEEN, Yes. PAUL JAY, When the verdict came, do you remember that day? MAKLEEN MAKLEEN, Very much. When the judge sentenced me to death, to suffer death by hanging, I just saw blackness everywhere. McLean took us to Langada Women's Prison in Nairobi, where Justice Defenders has trained 47 inmates to be what they call paralegals. They're given a three-week law course, which enables them to teach other prisoners about bail, court procedures, and rules of evidence. The paralegals also prepare petitions and write appeals

challenging inmates' convictions and sentences. What year did you arrive here? Jane Manyongae became a paralegal five years ago. She was a schoolteacher when she was charged with killing her husband, who she says was abusive. Convicted of murder, she too was given a mandatory death sentence. You didn't know your rights? Never, never.

How courts work? Yeah, never. And that's what propelled me to join the paralegal. That legal basic knowledge that I get, it goes a long way. You don't need a degree to draft somebody an appeal or something like that. How does that feel? You feel that you are still a human being, even if you are here. You can do something to change someone's life. Alexander McLean began volunteering to help others as a teenager,

growing up in South London. His father was Jamaican and his mother is English. He first went to Africa when he was 18 to do hospice work in prisons and hospitals in Uganda. We went onto this ward, and by the toilet on the floor, I saw a man lying on a plastic sheet in a pool of urine. And for five days, I washed him and tried to advocate for him. Came the sixth day, and he was lying dead and naked on the floor. It's not something a lot of people, I think, would volunteer to do.

I guess that sometimes in life, we see things that we can't unsee, and then we have a choice as to how we respond to them. Because every person has gifts and talents and something to contribute to our society. Our society can only flourish when the inherent worth of each person is valued. After returning to London and graduating from law school, he could have gotten a high-paying job.

Instead, in 2007, he started a charity to improve conditions in African prisons. At Nairobi's Committee Maximum Security Prison, a notorious and sometimes violent place, he met George Karaba, who was on death row for killing a man in a dispute over land. I remember the first thing that we asked was how he can be able to provide us with reading materials. So McLean began collecting whatever books he could find for the prisoners. My sense was that books could transform us and transform our circumstances and take us

to a different place. Nine, ten, eleven. PAUL SOLMAN, Prison authorities had already started an academy of their own, with classes from first grade through high school, teaching math, English, science, and religion. And with McLean's help, they turned a room at the end of a cell block into a library. MAKLEAN MAKLEAN, You can't imagine the happiness. You can't imagine. PAUL SOLMAN, Just from a book? M. Because when I started reading this book, and it's actually enlightening me.

It's like now I'm being opened up to the outside world. It started giving us hope. McLean wanted to do more than just improve life in Kenya's prisons. He wanted to make sure those accused of crimes had a fair hearing. Often it's people from backgrounds of privilege who become lawyers or become politicians and make the law, but it's the poorest people in our societies who disproportionately feel the impact of the law. And I wondered what it looked like to tap into that lived experience. So in 2012, McLean arranged with the University of London Law School for inmates to begin taking a three-year correspondence course, the same one Nelson Mandela took when he was in

prison. To qualify, they have to pass an entrance exam and have a track record of helping other prisoners while they've been behind bars. So even if they may have murdered somebody and have a life sentence, if they have transformed themselves in prison, if they are serving others, they might be able to qualify. Yes, because we believe that there's more to someone that's killed than being a murderer or more to someone who's stolen than being a thief. I don't think any of us has to be defined by the worst thing that we've done. Remember Morris Kiberia, the cop in for armed robbery? He enrolled in law school and found the learning curve steep. I never touched a computer in my life before I went to prison. Really?

Yes. I touched the first computer in that law class. In some ways, they are like law students anywhere. In the chapel at Committee Maximum Security Prison, we watched as they held a moot court, a mock legal hearing where they role play, arguing cases with all the gravitas and grandeur of a real Kenyan courtroom. Some prisoners play prosecutors.

The society as a whole needs protection. Others, the defense. Some prisoners play prosecutors. Others, the defense. There's also a defendant. And prisoner judges to render a verdict. The appellants have proved their appeal. You may have noticed prison guards in attendance. Remarkably, some of them are taking law classes as well. Willie Ojolu is the chief inspector at Langada Women's Prison and just completed his University of London law degree.

I don't know that I know of many guards in the United States who train to become a lawyer so they can give legal advice to the people they're guarding. It's pretty unique. Well, it sounds unique, but that's what happens here. You know, people are brought to prison as a punishment, but not for punishment. I've never heard a phrase that way.

So your goal is not to punish them, but... To help them improve on their life and manage their life properly so that they don't get in conflict with the law. Three years ago, inside Committee Maximum Security Prison, there was a graduation ceremony the likes of which no one here had ever seen. Eighteen inmates, former prisoners and guards, received their University of London law school degrees. George Karaba got his, and while he may spend the rest of his life in prison, he says he's been transformed. If I do not get out of prison, I will still continue doing what I do.

To see somebody you've helped get out of prison. Does it feel like part of you goes out with that person? George Karaba and others helped Morris Kabiria appeal his death penalty conviction. Kabiria argued the case himself and was stunned when the judge acquitted him of all charges after 13 years in prison. I felt like I did not hear right. So I asked her, what? She told me, hey, come on, I thought you're a lawyer.

You didn't believe what she was saying? You wanted to see it on writing? I don't believe it can happen that way, because it was not even in my mind. First impression is very important. Morris Kabiria was freed, but when he got out, he went right back to prison as a full-time employee of Justice Defenders. Here he is teaching inmates a lesson he learned in court firsthand. Always look the judge straight in the eye.

Don't just lie low. Don't keep quiet. It might affect your defense or your case. Justice Defender says since we visited Kenya, they've provided more than 37,000 legal services to prisoners and seen almost 11,000 people released. This was Pauline Najeri's walk to freedom after five years in prison for fraud. Thank you, thank you, darling, for coming. Her daughter was there to greet her.

Some of the people that your paralegals are training have committed very serious offences. For sure. Do they really deserve a chance to get out if they've really committed those crimes? We're not determining sentence. Those who are guilty of offenses should be punished, and the punishment should be proportionate,

and it should be viewed towards equipping them one day to leave prison and to contribute to society. But those who are innocent shouldn't be wrongly punished. Justice Defenders relies entirely on donations and spends about two million dollars a year helping inmates. They've begun trying to expand their work into other prisons in Africa, Europe, and the United States. We have a shared hunger for justice. Already their impact in Kenya has been profound. Morris Kabiria was part of a team of justice defenders who successfully challenged

the constitutionality of Kenya's mandatory death sentence. The law was changed, and as a result, thousands of death row inmates became eligible for resentencing. That must feel extraordinary. Extraordinary. I love law. I love law. I eat law, I drink law, I love law. You eat and drink it? Completely. I do everything in law. I love law. I eat law, I drink law, I love law. You eat and drink it? Completely. I do everything in law. Listening to you talk about the law, it sort of makes me excited about the law. Yes. Nathaniel Cooper. You know, there is one thing we do.

We make assumptions as people, as a society, and we dig our graves through those assumptions. Law is not for lawyers. Law is not for the government. Law is not for some people somewhere or the rich. Law is for everyone. In the coming weeks, 100,000 inmates will have been advised by justice defenders. With their planned expansion into new prisons and countries, they aim to serve one million prisoners by 2030. For decades now, Russians have known the drill. When there's bad news brewing, such as the death of a leader or a convulsive, such as the Chernobyl disaster,

state TV switches its programming and begins airing Tchaikovsky's ballet, Swan Lake. Nothing to see here, folks. But also note the choice of distraction. Ballet is centrally important to Russian society and to Russian image. Dancers slicing through the air and challenging laws of physics and gravity represent civility and grace. But after February 24th, when Russian military troops invaded Ukraine, Russian ballet troops had their Western tours canceled, and Moscow's Bolshoi Theater has shuttered shows by directors critical of Putin's war. As we first reported earlier this year, this brutal war plays out on the most delicate of fronts, leaving ballet in exile. When ballet dancers are described as God's

athletes, well, you could offer up Olga Smirnova as supporting evidence. She treads on air, coming in on little cat feet. She's a Russian prima ballerina, one of the world's leading dancers. But days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Smirnova pirouetted and stepped off her stage at the renowned Bolshoi Theater with dramatic flourish. She took to social media to express her outrage, and then fled the country, the modern-day version of Nureyev or Baryshnikov defecting. When you sat down to write that social media post, what did you want to communicate? What did you want to say? I just couldn't keep it inside. I was so ashamed of Russia. This is the truth. I'm not ashamed that I'm Russian, but I'm ashamed because Russia started this action.

I want to read what you wrote. You said you were against this war with every fiber of your being, but I now feel that a line has been drawn that separates the before and the after. It's how I felt. 24th of February, this was the line, because it's all changed, all changed. The reputation of Russian people, even if you are not a soldier, you're just Russian, it still makes a shadow on you. Being Russian.

Being Russian. And it's really painful. Predictably, Smirnova's post went viral. She was, after all, a leading light at Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet. From the Russian word for big, Bolshoi is the world's largest ballet company and the most prestigious. The theater is physically close to the Kremlin, a short walk away, and also aligned inextricably with the Russian government. Tsars love the Bolshoi. For decades, communist leaders used the Bolshoi Theater for political stagecraft, holding rallies and giving national addresses there. This is something that celebrates Russia. Every important guest who would visit

the Soviet Union would be invited to the Bolshoi to see the performance, and there was a pride of Russia at any time. Alexei Radmansky trained at the Bolshoi School and was for a time its artistic director. He was born in Russia, but grew up in Kiev, where his parents still live. At the time of the invasion, he was in Russia choreographing two ballets. He left the country immediately,

unwilling to continue working in a world so tied to the Putin regime. As I was going in a taxi to the airport, I felt these two sandcastles falling apart behind my back. Those sandcastles were the work you had done? Yes, yes, yes. It was an agony. It was a very hard day. And, of course, a catastrophic day for Ukraine. Indiscriminate bombings and missile strikes raining down upon the country, crushing lives and dreams. Not least, those of an ascendant ballerina from Kiev,

Paulina Chepik, age 17. You wanted to be a ballerina for years and years. What was it like when suddenly you couldn't go to school, couldn't dance? I was shocked and I was like, oh my god. And first, about what I'm thinking, that I left my pointe shoes in college. That was your first thought? Yes. You left your pointe shoes at school? I left everything, actually. Ward didn't stop her in her footsteps. She resumed dancing at home, using whatever she could as a bar. But after a few days, her parents, both former dancers, focused on getting Paulina out. They called on a famously well-connected figure

in the tight-knit ballet community, New Jersey-based Larissa Savlyev. You're getting this barrage of emails from parents and from dancers. What are they telling you? What are they asking you? Please help. Devils, get us out of here. They're willing to give up everything else,

but they have to dance. And the parents were, you know, it doesn't matter what we do, they have to dance. This was their lifeline. This is it. They just, they could not imagine not dance. In the 1990s, she founded Youth America Grand Prix. A ballet competition and scholarship program, pairing aspiring dancers with ballet schools worldwide. Well, no, they want to see her for a full year, but you have to come for the summer first.

Now, in a humanitarian crisis, she and the international ballet community, scrambled to action. Savlyev tapped her vast network, relocating more than 100 young Ukrainian dancers to new schools and host families. We give each child a number just to move faster. And we say, OK, number 55 is like, just get a spot in Stuttgart. OK, number 54, just get a spot in Dresden. Cross it off the list. Cross it off the list. When a slot opened for Paulina, she stuffed leotards and tutus into a suitcase,

along with a bottle of her mom's perfume, a reminder of home. And then she headed to Keith's train station. And my parents are in the window of train. They said, goodbye, we love you, everything will be fine. And I was crying and we were all crying. I was thinking maybe I need to take my suitcase and go back to my family because my heart was broken, really. How did you overcome that?

What made you not get off that train? Because it's open door for me. It's like door for my dream. 17-year-old that she is, Paulina documented the lonely odyssey on TikTok. Trains and buses, five days and 1,200 miles, Kyiv to Lviv, Poland to Berlin, finally to Amsterdam, where she landed at the Dutch National Ballet Academy, one of the leading schools in the world.

When you got to the new school and started dancing again, how did that feel? I was very happy, yes. My mind changed because I was thinking about my parents all the time, for my family, for my sister. And when I go to ballet class, this world changed for me. I have another world of ballet. Her adjustment was made easier when she found other Ukrainian dance students,

who, thanks to Larissa Savlyev, also found safe harbor in Amsterdam. Paulina fell into a routine immediately. On the cusp of a professional career, she prepared for final exams. She was jittery beforehand. She emerged relieved, triumphant, and eager to report back to mom. What did you tell her? That I was nervous, but when I start, I do everything right. If the war has made refugees out of some Ukrainian dancers, it's made soldiers out of others.

When the war began, Alexei Podiumkin, a principal dancer with Ukraine's National Ballet, turned in his tights for military fatigues. Here he is in downtown Lviv, having just returned from duty as a medic. What was your life like before the war? Before war, I must, I preparing new premier in ballet, Ukrainian ballet. No, like real normal life. And just one moment, it's like changes. But I need to do something.

I can't sit just at home in shelter and watch TV, how my friends die, and everyone do something. What have you seen these last few months? Every day, it's really scary. They crashed everything, destroyed houses of civilians, people, its brothers, son, fathers, sisters. While he says he's shaken by what he's seen unfold on the battlefield, he's also appalled by a war taking place on another front, at the Bolshoi. The Bolshoi now, it's toxic feature. Nobody want to work with you. You said toxic.

Toxic, yes. In Russia, art, it's politics. It's Russian government use it, ballet, it's like weapon. The weapon was deployed at the Bolshoi as recently as this past April, when the theater revived a production of Spartacus in support of the Russian military invasion, unnerving many in the dance world, including longtime head of the Dutch National Ballet, Ted Branson. Well, it was a very clear statement that we have to support our boys who are on a military operation to save Ukraine from the fascists, which is a totally ridiculous concept, of course. This allegory Spartacus about the slave revolt is somehow being co-opted by the aggressive superpower.

Absolutely. No, it's not for nothing that this became one of the signature ballets of the Soviet time. Abroad, the ballet community has staged benefit concerts to raise funds for Ukraine, while Russia's famed companies, the Bolshoi and St. Petersburg's Marinsky, have had their touring dates canceled. I think you need to be a little bit more exit with your arms. With the Iron Curtain down, artists have to pick a side. Alexei Radmonsky left Moscow for American Ballet Theatre in New York,

where he is artist-in-residence and where we spoke with him remotely this past April. Sounds like you don't buy this idea that, look, individuals shouldn't bear the responsibility for the acts of the state, that artists should just be artists. No, I don't think the artists are separate from politics. And besides, it's not, for me, it's not politics. It's about humanity. It's about responding to war crimes,

responding to the crimes of your government, of your president. It just made things clear which things are important and which aren't. And you make a choice. You decide where you want to belong. For Olga Smirnova, that choice came together in a matter of days after she condemned the war. She left Russia and landed on her feet at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, just around the corner from Paulina's school.

It must have been incredibly difficult to leave the Bolshoi. If you make a choice, you have consequences. But this is how it works. I had to leave everything. Like my home, my theater, my repertoire, my partners, my parents, sister, brother, everything. But I don't have regrets. No regrets? No.

Because at least I can be honest with myself. I'm John Wertheim. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.