Angry Planet - On the Frontlines of Ukraine and a Roe Reaction in Real Time

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

The war in Ukraine grinds on. As the West’s attention wanes, Ukrainians fight for their lives and freedom. They need more of everything. Weapons, ammunition, supplies, people.Today we have various stories from the war, as told by returning guest Danny Gold. Gold is a writer and producer who focuses on crime and conflict. He’s also a reluctant podcaster who co-hosts the excellent Underworld Podcast.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. The war in Ukraine grinds on as the West's attention wanes. Ukrainian fighters are fighting for their lives and their freedom. They need more of everything. Weapons, ammunition, supplies, people. Today, we have various stories from the war, as told by returning guest, Danny Gold.

Gold is a writer and producer who focuses on crime and conflict. It's also a reluctant podcaster who co-hosts the excellent underworld podcast. Danny, thank you so much again for coming on to the show. Yeah, always a pleasure to be. here and thanks for having me. So the last time we spoke to you was what was only about a month ago, right? I think maybe like six weeks ago, something. Maybe five or six weeks ago.

Yeah, I think like in my first or second week in Ukraine, we spoke. Yeah, you had just gotten there and you were just kind of starting to figure out what the stories were you wanted to tell. You've come back and is it, I've got the two Rolling Stone and the one in Vanity Fair, but I feel like there was one or two others I let drop. Is that right? Yeah, I did a couple for a for tablet. For tablet.

Okay. Yeah. Really harrowing. some of it's just really horrible, but we'll get into that. So I wanted to, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about this, because there is news kind of today that doesn't look good. There are Ukraine's forces are withdrawing from the screw up all the pronunciations today. Severe. I will too. Yeah, I will too. Don't worry. What do you make of this loss of this city? I mean, it's on the one hand, it's a little concerning, but I don't think it's cause for for panic. And I also want to stress that like I'm not a military strategist. So I, So I, we go off vibes into here. So that's kind of what I'm basing on. But Severidon-esque is, I mean, look, it's a small city. I think it's about 100,000 people.

And all the predictions were that it was going to fall six weeks ago. It's a small city that I don't think is super significant, especially because in the war effort, because Liss a Chance, which is this kind of sister city right across the water, is on much higher ground. And it's supposed to be a better city to defend. So there was all this talk of Severado-Sk falling six weeks ago that the Ukrainians were going to pull out. And they didn't. They actually reinforced it and they fought and they grind it hard. And Russia was

concentrating a ton of its forces there. This was their most significant effort right now in fighting. And it still took them the better part of two months to take the city. And even now, the Ukrainians are strategically withdrawing. It was a bloodbath. I think Ukraine's lost a lot of people. The Russians lost a lot of people. There was insane amounts of bombardment with artillery, planes, all that. It was like a war of attrition in the 21st century. So it was, It was brutal. It was bloody. And it, of course, is concerning anytime you lose a city like that.

You lose a city in general and the Russians make gains. But it was not, I don't think it's this significant, like, holy crap moment that the Ukrainians are breaking down and are failing and all that sort of stuff. I think it's a loss. It's concerning. It's not a cause for panic. Even back in 2014, they were able to take. And again, that was a much different war with much different situations on both sides. But the Russians took a Russian back separate.

However, you want to phrase it, like they were Russian. They took Sloviansk, right, which is a main city that's still dozens of kilometers away from Lissa Chant and Severado-esque. They took a, you know, they held onto that city. And the way things are going, it's going to be months if they even are able to advance to the outskirts of that city right now. So concerning, but not cause for panic. Vibe int is a really great turn of phrase. I think I coined that. I should trademark it at this point.

It's really good. And I would say that that's a good way to describe your reporting. So much, so much of journalism about these conflicts is very like eagle eye view and kind of dull. Your stuff is really striking because you really focus on the people. And like you have, we get to know these soldiers and these families and like through your stories. I thought that's really impressive and really gives you an idea of how the war feels in a way that I think a lot of other journalism doesn't do like i mean certainly like hanrahan does that other people do do it i'm just saying yours is good thank you so what are the vibes of the soldiers in say that don't that mountain in the

don't boss where the shelling never stops yeah stone piece says it's a it's a it's a it's a tough thing i think to to wrap your head around this and i talked about this with jake on on popular front as well it's kind of like it's hard to get a grasp for the entire front for what's going on different soldiers feel different ways. And I talk about the stuff too with guys like Rob Lee who have military experience. And they're like, look, guys on the ground are always going to say things are chaotic. They're always going to give you this perspective. And they always are. But that doesn't mean all hope is lost. That doesn't mean all hope is move forward, all that sort of stuff. There is a fog of war, not just in statements from officials and things like that, but also on the ground and trying

to wrap your head around it. So it's one of those things that you're going to have contradictions and trying to figure things out. You'll hear everything is chaotic here. Everything's losing things are falling apart and then you'll be in one of these cities and there'll be dozens of soldiers in the supermarket and they seem relatively common they're not panicking. Now, does that mean that you shouldn't panic? I don't know. But it's kind of like trying to suss that out is one of the bigger challenges I think. So I found people that were like, yeah, it's tough. It's hard. It's a grind. Like this is war. But we're confident and we're going to keep going. We just need more equipment and more stuff to do. But like we're not giving up.

And then every now and then you'd run into people who were like, it's a real grind. It's really hard. We're losing some faith. We're losing some hope. But, you know, that's what's going to happen on the front line when you're in a trench. And it's, it's a brutal, brutal war. So trying to wrap my head around that, I think, was one of the, the biggest challenges there. Because you're going to hear different things from different people. I mean, think of any other situation where you're talking to a couple of other people that are, I'm using in the trenches metaphorically, whether it's like police, whether it's like people at a company, you know, a couple of low-level employees that you're going to talk to.

You're going to hear different things from different people. Some people are going to be like, this is the fucking worst place ever, and I hate it. Some people are going to be like, this is great, love this company, doing great job, really trust the CEO. So it's kind of like trying to talk to as many people as you can and wrap your hand, your head around the entire situation. And yeah, you do have to make judgment calls in that regard. You have to kind of use some of your own analysis.

And I try to talk to people that are much smarter than me, like Rob. and like a couple other people I know who are really the kind of guys who can look at a piece of military equipment and within three seconds tell you like what the range is on it. I'm not one of those people. But trying to bring all that in and try to suss it out. And that's why I don't generally like making big proclamations. And I try to hedge everything I say because I don't know and not many people do know. So yeah, I mean, I guess that doesn't answer your question, but it does in a way as well. Well, tell me about this mountain and what it was like there.

About the mountain. on bus, the rolling stove piece about where the Shelley never stops. Yeah, yeah. So we kind of got a, I was able to sort of glom on to a couple of friends there who are reporters who had met this English speaking couple maybe a week or two before. And they had invited them out to spend the night at this sort of like second line position, which is where we were. And it was south of Izzyum.

That's not the most active front, the most active part of the front there, but it still is an area where the Russians are trying to push down from. And we were told that's like not high action, but you get there. And there's just like repeated shell. selling going on for an hour and a half as soon as we pulled up. And it was kind of one of these positions where the soldiers go, they rotate out every, it was supposed to be three days on, three days off, three days on that sort of situation. I don't know how often they stick to that.

But it was one of those places where these guys go. It's like a little farmhouse. They've sort of taken over and turned to a bunker. Just kind of like beds on plywood lining it. They come there. They get their equipment in shape. They take a break. They get some cooked food.

They get to relax and sleep a bit. and people cycle in and out. And that's kind of where we spent the night. And luckily, there were a couple of English-speaking soldiers there. It was still like heavy, heavy shelling. They're going out with drones. They're looking for Russian drones that are coming in. And we were just kind of talking about what they're seeing, what's going on.

And part of it was just mostly just hanging out with them and seeing how they're feeling. It was really interesting. I think maybe there were 12 to 15 guys rotating in while we were there. Two of them have PhDs. Two of them were going for their PhDs. a bunch of them were kind of, I don't want to say radicalized, but they were kind of like galvanized by Maidan and protesting at Maidan, which is the thing you hear often from a couple of these soldiers that had actually fought in the East for years going back and just taking it in and seeing how

they feel and what they're seeing, what they need, what their experience has been so far. And that's the kind of stuff that I kind of love doing. I don't need to be at the front of the front, sheltering in place. It's kind of just like these guys who are doing it, who are there, but also just kind of like at the moment relax and get. giving you a rundown and what their lives were like before, what they're looking forward to after the war, and just kind of like busting balls with each other,

which is the stuff that I kind of enjoy doing and reporting on. I was just wondering about how many of these guys are volunteers? Is it all volunteers at this point? So it's hard to get a grasp on that too, because I feel like it kind of blends. The couple we were with Stanislop and his wife, Oksana, they were, you know, he was technically a volunteer in the East. He fought there for a couple years.

And then he was a volunteer when this war started, but then he signed a military contract. So he had military experience fighting in the East, but he was technically a volunteer. She's a volunteer, but then she signed a contract as well. We had a couple guys that were coming in that were volunteers, but they've signed contracts or technically in the military. I think it was a mixture. So they weren't like, they might have been volunteers, but they were volunteers who had experience, but they weren't like officially Ukrainian military,

until this war started, this patient of the war started in February, and then they signed a contract. So are they're not being drafted, per se? No, no, no, they weren't being drafted. These were all people who, like, wanted to be there and wanted to be at the front. But again, that doesn't hold for a lot of, for a lot, for some of the other forces that you're going to see in the, in the Dombas. Like, we would spend days just driving around and you find soldiers on the side of the road and pull up and just talk to them. You'd find some middle-aged guys who, like, wanted to be there and others who hadn't. And you also hear, you hear these stories.

I know a guy there who's American, who's a volunteer, who had been in the American military, but hadn't served combat. And he's, like, desperately trying to get to the front. And they won't let him. And then you hear other stories of guys who, like, signed up and had two days of training and got out there and, like, and, like, didn't think they should be out. So it's kind of weird. You're trying to wrap your head around it because there are so many different versions of this story that you'll hear.

None of the people I spoke to were people who were like, yeah, they just shipped us out. We didn't want to be here. I spoke to some, we spoke to some, me and Neil Auerre spoke to some police. Well, he spoke, because he speaks, he's fluent in Russian, spoke to some police guys from Mon outside of cafe. Where were they from? They might have been from, I think they were from Liman in that area or Alyssa Chan. One of those areas, one of those cities that's being bombarded.

And they were a policeman who like wanted to have wanted to fight. And they were like, we just need more. We need more of this. We need more of that, all that. And they were kind of like downcast. but it's kind of like everyone has what seems sounds like an almost different story in that regard. And you hear two completely contradicted things one day apart in terms of like what their experience is, what they're seeing, how they ended up there and things like that. So it is kind of hard to wrap your, there's no uniform sort of story in that regard.

Tell us a little bit more about this married couple that you met there. Yeah, Oksana and Stanislav. They actually ended up being like, I think they kind of were pressed darlings. We got there and we were like, hey, they were like, they're the only other reporters we've had here besides this like French channel. And then over the next couple weeks, I think there was a New York Times story that talked about them briefly, maybe like another like Washington Post or Washington. So they, they knew how to hustle it. They're young. I think he's in his early 30s.

She's in her mid-20s. They had met, I think in 2013. He was a police officer in Crimea. And according to him, he and I think he has a Wikipedia entry on like Ukrainian. in Wikipedia, but I couldn't, I couldn't confirm some of the details. So he was a police officer in Crimea. He kind of helped expose a sex trafficking ring that was tied to Russian politicians. And Crimea in 2013, this is before 2014 takeover, was very heavily Russian influence. And a lot of like Russian allied people in the government there and the police forces. So he was constantly

being threatened after this. So he essentially fled to Kiev. And then that's where he met, Aksana, Maidan kicked off. They were both on the front lines of Maidan, both were injured. And that's sort of, I think, what radicalized them in a way. I don't know. Have you guys seen Winter on fire? So it's not the, it's not the best done documentary, but it really captures

the mentality of Maidan and what people were fighting for there. And it really is the story of and look, they're giving you the cleanest version, obviously, of what's going on. But it really was this thing of like, these young people are out there simply because they want a better future. And they see that as having been given away by the Russian Allied president at that time for not leaning more towards deals with Western Europe as opposed to Russia. And that's what they were fighting

for. They wanted a better future. It is the most clean version. Obviously, there's complications with that. It's not going to be as black and white as it's portrayed, obviously. But that's like the main sort of galvanizing factor in that. And that's kind of the same thing that's going on here, right? They want a future for themselves. They want a better future for Ukraine. And they see that as leaning towards Western Europe and these Western allied deals as opposed to leaning towards Russia. They look at that situation. They don't want that.

And that's sort of the mentality that Aksana and Stanislav, her husband, bring to the table, right? And they're also not like, you know, they're not like, we're a perfect country. They're like, we want to get rid of the Russians. Then we want to get rid of the corruption in Ukraine after that. Like they just want to fight for this better future. And they're both, they're both lawyers. At one point, Oksana, I think had briefly worked for the Ombuds woman in Ukraine. And they were human rights lawyers as how they described it.

They're both getting PhDs in criminology. I forget which one was studying which, but which one was focused on detention methods and one of them was focused on on polygraph tests. And that's kind of what they were focusing on. But they're lawyers. They're kind of the best and brightest of what the country has to offer. And they want to get on an anti-corruption crusade after the war. And that's sort of what they were focused on, what they want to do when this is all set

and done. But for now, they're going to keep fighting. And I think Stanislav actually posted to his Facebook a couple days ago. He was injured by a tank shell. He got a concussion. I think he's back fighting almost already. But they're in it, man. They are in it both of them.

They were also using the drone while we were there too. They had like the little consumer drones and they were kind of focusing on looking out for Russian drones and seeing other stuff as well and focusing on incursions and things like that too. So they were great, man. They were a really fun couple to kind of hang out with. So before we move on to another story, I just want to highlight the last quote in there that I thought was real brutal. And I wanted you to kind of contextualize it if you can. Quote, they can't afford to lose and they can't win.

Yeah, that was Stanislav. And he was basically, that was when Oxana was saying she's like maybe the active part of the war will finish in a couple months, but this is going to go on for years. And that's what he added to the conversation. And this whole thing was that like Russia's not going to win here. right. They're not going to, they're not going to like, I mean, we didn't get into details, but maybe they'll go back to the February 24th lines. Maybe they'll annex those parts of the Dombaas, but they're not going to win, right? But he also was just like, in terms of saving face for Putin, like they can't afford to lose. They can't admit to their people that they lost.

They've got to fight a way to save face because it is kind of humiliating what's happened to them so far. And he thinks, we didn't get into details about what he meant by that, but I think what he was saying was that they've got to, Putin's got to have something to show his people in terms of what they were fighting for and whatnot. I mean, he can always lie, which I'm sure is pretty common in terms of what their war effort, how it's being portrayed back home. So there is that, but I think that's what he meant was just like, they're in a bind because they're not going to be able to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. And they've got to figure out a way to portray this as some sort of military victory. All right. So we're going to, we're going to scoot.

over to something you kind of teased and talked about a little bit the last time you were on the show. So this is something you were chasing down. I think you'd started to report out. I think you may have been actually starting to write it too. Tell me about writing shotgun with Koval. I can't, I can't pronounce. Ehor. Ehor. Ehor. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, Ehor's great, man. He, that was my first piece I did. Ehor is this Ukrainian businessman who has lived in Cleveland for 30 years. And yeah, actually, I'm going to message him today and see how he's doing. He's just like a cool guy, man. I just, I got connected with him while I was still in the States. He arranged for like rides for me from the airport in Poland, from the border. And he like, you know, he's like kind of the All-American immigrant success story. He runs like a small roofing company, well, a medium-sized roofing company in Cleveland. He imports and distributes, actually does it all over Europe too, a drink called Alcohol Killer, which is like a hangover remedy drink. And that's like the main stuff that he does. And he's also from from Leviv. He loves that city. He loves Ukraine. He's like, fear. He's like, fear. He's like, I'm seriously proud of the country.

And he had already been arranging donations and sort of sourcing donations and supplies, non-lethal aid from all over the world, basically, to the east. The last like five or six years. But when the war kicked off, he gave up his business essentially, moved to Ukraine and just focused on that, focusing on everything, any sort of like creature comfort you could get for them. Food, medical supplies, vests were a big thing. Thermal, thermal optics, consumer drones. things like that to get to like his cousin, other fighters that he knew in the East. And that's all he does was try to get donations, try to get supplies. And he's a logistics guy.

So he's coordinating this stuff from off. We've got the shipment coming in from Bulgaria to Warsaw. We've got this shipment coming in. Where can I get this stuff? How do I arrange it? How do I export it? How do I import it? That sort of stuff.

And then he coordinates and just drives the stuff out himself, like 40 hours round trip to the east to drop off supplies for these guys that need it. And he's just, yeah, he's a fun dude, man. I had a really good time with him, actually. I'm sorry if I'm a little distracted. I'll cut this out. Rowe v. Wade was just knocked off. Get the fuck.

Yeah, it was just so sorry. I just got the other. Yeah, I think we both just got a whole bunch of pings, Jason. I could see. Yeah, sorry. No, no, no, no. That's exactly where I'm at, too. Yeah, they dropped the decision.

The scary thing in it, well, there's a, I mean, the whole thing's fucking scary. And I'm not a constitutional scholar at all. Oh, really? Yeah. But the line from Thomas that says we have a duty to re to relitigate old cases where past Supreme Court's fucked up. And he highlights three cases. The contraception one, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriages. Fuck me.

Same-sex relationships. Same-sex relationships. Yeah. Wait, one of the overturned that? No, no, no, no. They're saying that they have a duty to go back and look at some of these old cases. Wait, I'm sorry. Same-sex relationships.

Like, they would make it illegal to be a gay... Is that Oberfell, which I think was a Texas case, which overturned sodomy laws, basically? Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah. Which was used, like, laws like that were used in conservative states to prosecute same-sex relationships without, like, outright making it illegal. They would use, like, sodomy laws. Yes. They would prosecute the way people were interacting behind closed doors.

It's, like, how they would come down on people. fucking hell, man. Wow. This is, this is not good. All right. No, it's dark. Yeah, my wife is in Israel. I think I'm going to join her.

Jesus. It feels like the direction of the country is real fucked up in dark right now, man. Yeah, I mean, I try not to be like a impending civil war, fallen America is coming, blah, blah, blah.

But like, you hear stuff like that And you're kind of like, maybe these guys have a, like, I try it to be like a doomer. Right. But this kind of stuff happens and you're like, I don't know. It's getting there. It's got to get in there. People will pull the levers of power available to them. And increasingly it's going to, I feel like increasingly it's going to be that the easiest lever of power to pull is direct violence.

These things were, like, these wars were fought like 30 years ago. The culture wars were, like, how are we? going, let's fight the new culture war as fucking, like, at least, okay, the trans situation is awful, right? But at least that's like a new culture war that we're fighting. We're not fucking retroactively going back and fighting

the gay marriage thing again, which we settled 30 fucking years ago, 20 years ago. Like, what is this? Apparently we're going to have to. Yeah, like what is going on? Yeah. It's, I don't know. Feels like a dark moment. What am I? What am I, speaking of vibes, I have a friend

who's like, the vibe is Uncle Sam with a shotgun in his mouth. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Just completely letting the death drive run the country. Anyway, so this is where we'll put our commercial break. Yeah. Maybe we should just leave it in.

I don't know. Maybe we should leave it in, actually. Yeah, I'm okay with that. I mean, it's... All right. Fucking dark. Anyway. Anyway, okay, so speaking of...

Speaking of dark, here's a word from our sponsors. And then we'll come back. Anyway, welcome back to the show. This is Angry Planet. Sorry, we're all feeling a little. Maybe it's Angry Planet. Maybe it's Angry America. It's hard to tell.

I don't know. I think we all just feeling very sad right now. And I'm sorry for the conservative listeners that we're alienating right now. I'm not really. I don't know. I don't know anymore. We've been around long enough. I think you guys know, like we try to keep the politics out of the show as much as possible.

But I think we're politics at this point or have picked up on it. And it does just feel, things just feel off in America right now in a way that they haven't, like even, even during the Trump years, like, it just feels bad right now. And it feels like we don't, we don't trust each other. And every, I don't know, I don't know. It just, I don't know. The, the need for all of us to own each other, our political opponent. and for some people on the left to deny, I think, what's going on.

Like, we were talking about before we got on the show, Danny, you do a lot of stuff about crime reporting, right? Like, that's what Underrule Pod's about. And you've been on the ground in places like St. Louis and have really looked at, like, a crime in the country and they're, like, it's going up. It's not, like, the crime stuff is not a vibes-based thing. No. Like, violent crime is going up.

People are getting hurt and shot more. And there's going to be a reaction to it. that. And when you've got people on the left hand side of the aisle that don't want to pay attention to it or say that it's like, well, it was much worse 30 years ago. That doesn't change what's happening now. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's just, I was saying during the break, like, too, like, I'm not, I try not to be a doomer when it comes to the stuff. I don't, I don't foresee the next civil war. I don't foresee the country falling apart. I don't think this is the end of America.

But it's starting, I don't know, man, those thoughts start to creep in after a while. And I think today is one of those days where, you're like, maybe, maybe the Dumeers are on to something a little bit. Maybe I need to recalibrate how I'm viewing the future and how things are going. It doesn't shock me that someone attempted to kill a Supreme Court justice. And that the reaction was, of course, very quickly to give them as much, much more protection. as possible. I think it's bad. I think political violence is full stop bad, and that's not a way that we should resolve conflict. But again, people will pull the levers of power available to them.

And being told to go out and vote is not going to cut it for a lot of people, especially when women in the country have fewer rights now than they did when they woke up. They have less bodily autonomy, especially in places like where I live, like in South Carolina, and places like Louisiana, in the southern parts of this country are about to get real nightmarish and scary, even more so than they already are. Yeah, I mean, these are culture wars that we fought already.

Like, we thought they were over, especially for all this talk right now about gay marriage and stuff like, like, I mean, this is ridiculous. We've moved past this. I don't understand why we're going back in time in this.

I don't know, man. It's fucking silly is what it. I still is like the wrong word because it is, it is a lot more serious, but it's fucking silly and stupid. It's absurd. Yeah.

I just don't. I think we have this assumption. Liberals especially have this assumption that progress is inevitable that the arrow of history is pointed in one direction. And I don't know if there's just enough evidence of that. Oh, it's a flat circle. Oh, well, thanks for that. Way to take a serious conversation and just shit all over it. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to. I know. I'm joking. I'm joking. We're all just reacting right now. Have you guys read American nations? Oh, is this the idea that there's different, there's like four or five different nations within America?

Yeah, it's like eight, I think eight or nine. It's actually, it's quite good. Like, it's bringing up a lot of history that I didn't know, but it kind of shows these discrepancies in parts of the country that have always been there and the attitudes that have shaped them. And it's something that I would have assumed was, was in the past, but it's clearly not. No.

Yeah. It makes me wonder if the future of this country isn't either some sort of hyper-federalization or Balkanization, like one or the other. Yeah. I mean, the way it portrays it was always this sort of like teetering on the edge of Balkanization, but like a real federalization situation, but it was teetering on the edge at the time. I mean, I'm only into like the mid-1800s.

this point, but it really does show that, like, it wasn't, at least up until where I am right now in the book, it wasn't this like unified front ever really. Yeah. No, from the beginning, it was always a fight about the different cultures were always fighting. Right, right. And continued, even in times where you assume there would be national unity. Uh, so Ukraine. Yeah, Ukraine. A lot of national unity there. A lot of national unity there. Well, when things like what happened in the Vanity Fair piece at Hostomel. Is it Hostomel? Yeah.

Do you like that segue? I do a segue. Yeah, good segue. Thank you. What happened there? That's the kind of thing that would unify a people, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

So Ostemel is an area like in the northern suburbs of Kiev. And I mean, most people know Earpa and Irpene and Buccia, which are where a lot of war crimes were committed and a lot of stories have come out. Mass graves, executions, people with their hands tied, rape, things of things of that nature. And so Hostomel is right next to them. And Hostamel is also the site of this airport that the Russian military really concentrated on in terms of landing special forces type people there to go into Kiev. And there was like infamous battle over it. And I met this woman who lives in Hostomel and she was kind of living the Ukrainian suburban dream. She's in her,

I think, late 50s or late 40, no, late 50s. She's a doctor, general practitioner. And her husband is a retired police officer. And they have a couple kids. One of the kids lives in the city with them. And they have a beautiful home, a nice garden. And Ostamel in these areas are like these beautiful suburbs where people walk their, their amazing dogs and people go biking. A lot of city folk have like their little country houses there.

They go to. So it's a beautiful area. Compare it to like northern Westchester or places like that. So this, this war sort of. It kicks off February 24th. The airport was a huge battle. And it's chaos. No one knows what's going on.

It explosions all day, all night, fighting all day and all night. O'S eventually gets occupied by the Russian forces. And this woman, O'Lena becomes this like only doctor in the village, in the city, in the town, whatever. I think it's a city, but a small city. Only doctor there. And she starts treating people with her husband. Eventually, it gets too safe to, too unsafe to go around. So they're just in her, in her house, in their house.

And in this, this like ad hoc bomb shelter nearby, which was an apartment complex that was unfinished in the basement. And she's just becoming this one woman doctor service. Her husband, he'd actually served in Afghanistan in the Soviet military in the 80s. He was like a special forces type guy. So he, he's a pretty gnarly dude, like a sweet man, but a pretty gnarly dude. and they just turn into this like this clinic basically treating all their neighbors. Trafna wounds, bullet wounds.

It's freezing there because this is February and March in Ukraine. So people are getting sick all the time. Children are getting sick and it's just chaos. She's having to tell people, people asking what to do with the bodies of their loved ones. She's like, bury them in the yard. You don't want to leave them out. Stuff. Real, real dark situation until mid-March and the Russians start showing up at their door.

And the first couple groups that visit them, they kind of just check out. situation. They asked them for their phones, all that sort of stuff. And then one day, a different Russian force shows up. They shoot her husband twice, once in the knee, once in the hip. They take her, her husband and her son, who's kind of been in a bit of a PTSD-d-out situation in their house. And they essentially kidnap them and bring them to the ad hoc Russian bases and torture them. And after two days, they let Olena go because I think she convinces them that she's the only doctor there and more people are going to die if she's not there treating them. So they's kind of like drop her off in the middle town. She goes back. And they tell her if she behaves

herself, they're going to let her husband and her son go. What happens is they bring her husband and her son to a filtration camp, which is kind of like a concentration camp for a lack, a detention camp concentration camp, however you want to refer to it in Belarus. I think we can, I think we can call it a concentration camp. Yeah, where they filter out the, they sort of divide up the Ukrainians that they're holding into where they're going to go and what's going to happen. And they separate them and they bring the husband to a prison in Russia with a bunch of other military guys. And I think a couple other civilians they suspected. So they suspected the husband of like calling in artillery, which he claims like, he's like, look, I'm not, I'm retired.

I don't know anyone anymore. I wasn't involved in this stuff and all. So they bring them to this Russian prison. He's getting beat the entire time. They're hooded the entire time bound. One of the guys gets beat so bad on arrival. He dies in the prison cell. And this is a word I can't pronounce.

It's Kyrsk, Kyrsk, which is a Russian city where there's a prison. So they're held there. And like he, like I said, he was a special force as guy. He's tough as nails. So he's like unbothered a strong term, but he's just like, I keep asking him like how he feels. He's like, look, I'm like this is what I'm built for. Like during war, like I feel at home. Like I get it.

So he is not worried about that. But his wife, the whole time, doesn't know where he and his son is. He at this point doesn't know what's happening to his son. after a couple weeks held in the in the prison, he's actually released through a prison exchange, which is like this crazy story. I couldn't put much of it in. He's brought through like four or five different occupied cities, eventually to Crimea, then driven up through Mariupil, and eventually like on a bridge, they exchange a bunch of prisoners.

The Russian, the Ukrainian held prisoners, the Russian soldiers walk this way. The Ukrainian ones were held by Russia, walked that way. They get exchanged. He gets brought to his wife, who still actively. working with a host of Mel gets liberated. She's working with MSF now. And so they're back and they still just don't know where their son is. So the whole time, he was hoping the son had been let go.

She was hoping the son was with him and all that. But as of now, the last place he was seen was Belarus in that filtration camp and nobody knows where he is. And they're on this sort of mission to figure. So they're contacting everyone they've ever known in politics. He's got police connections. There's even like a network of ex-cons. Ukraine and ex-cons that are had served in prison and they know some of the guys in Russian prisons

and they're reaching out to them to see if they can figure out if he's being held in a prison somewhere. And it's just this story where they're just trying to, they're in HostML, which is trying to rebuild itself after this brutal occupation where hundreds of people were murdered, executed or died in the war. She has this moment where she talks about how every time they would find bodies, you know, buried in shallow graves or whatever it was, she would go and to identify if they were her son or her husband. She would go look at everybody. Yeah, that's where we kind of left and they still have

no updates on the sun and what's how. He's like this 22, 23 year old kid who was like a champion wrestler who just graduated and they still have no, no idea what happened to him. The story is important. I think one of the reasons is important is because we don't hear enough, kind of what we were talking about at the top, where we have these human stories about the war that are going on. I don't think we hear a lot about, in the mainstream press, the way that Russia is conducting this war. And as you say in the piece, how needlessly cruel it is. And we don't hear enough about these camps that people are being taken to across borders and like what's happening to people there. Was this something that how common were.

stories like this. Like, how often did you hear about the cruelty of the Russians and, like, people being taken? I think, I think in those areas, it's, it's quite common in Irpene and and Bhutan Hostomel. In the East, not as much in that regard. But, yeah, I mean, I think that we're all waiting for what's going to happen with Maripal and Kherson when those stories start, start coming out. Spent some time in Kharkiv, which is close to the Russian border, and some ethnic Russians there. And it didn't seem like that amount of like person to person war crimes were as common. And I think it might have been different troops or because it's so close to the border, there was more of a kinship there.

But I don't know. Actually, Simon Ostrovsky, a buddy of mine who's a great reporter who spent a lot of time in Ukraine, speaks the language, is Ukrainian, Ukrainian-American. He just had a piece that went up, I think, on Monday or Tuesday about the filtration camps that he did for the New York Times video. So this is why I shouldn't say things like that because I hate it when people do because that's always not true. It just came out. So I'm off faulting you. I know. I know.

But I'm calling myself out though because inevitably whenever someone said, like I always see someone on Twitter be like, why is no one talking about this? It takes me five seconds to find 10 stories. Yeah. It's just like you're not paying attention. So I'm calling myself out. I'm not saying that you did. Well, I think I think it's hard for for daily news reporters, people who work for. the Washington Post, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, LA Times to really get that much

time and space. And not just space like space into papers themselves to get to tell these stories as much as I know they would like to. They're often forced to write up the day's events in 800, 1,200 words and you really have to have to shorten them. Like my Vanity Fair article was like 3,500, 4,000 words. And I think I turned in 6,500 words to Mary Melder. And she had to bring it down to make it actually compelling and have people read it. But there's so much to say in these regards and you don't get to do that in daily newspapers often. And there are so few magazines these days and so few resources to do this kind of work. I was fairly lucky in that I had a free place to stay in Kiev. I sort of didn't have to pay for a fixer for the majority of my trip.

I did it very bare bones budget. And I kind of went into it with like a midlife crisis being like, You know, I told myself years and years ago, I would never do a trip like this again where I went somewhere without the backing of an institution, without having sold a story, just kind of like winging it. But a bunch of things worked out where I was like, fuck it. I'm going and I'm going to, I'm going to figure it out. And I got very, very lucky in terms of the stories that I got, the people that I was working with and all that. Because I didn't have any expenses covered by like by anyone. This was all out of pocket. And my rates weren't, you know, know, they're not the kind of rates that someone I think with my experience and the kind of work

that I was doing should normally get. But I chose to do this. I accepted them. I said, yeah, so I've no one to blame but myself. But that's just the nature of the industry these days where, you know, it's kind of like, it's the way it is. And Ukraine was fairly, very cheap for me to work in. Like I said, I had a free place to stay in Kiev where I spent a lot of time writing. And I got very lucky with the majority of my stories where I either had a friend with an insane budget who let me tag along or the first couple stories I did like this story a friend of mine and msf worked as my translator introduced me arranged my ride the the first story I had Ihor basically took care of me the entire time and translated for me let me live with him fed me all that sort of stuff so I rarely

had to shell out of my own pocket for that which I wouldn't have been able to survive as long as I did if I did have to do that are there any other stories that you wanted to tell but couldn't find a place for? Yeah, I mean, I didn't have any stories left. I had no reporting left that I could have sold. But my goal was always to find a unit that I could spend a significant amount of time with. And I wasn't able to arrange that, mostly because the timing and also like I couldn't afford to pay a fixer for like five or six days, which I would have needed. You know, the situation in that bunkhouse was great because there were more than a couple people that spoke English. And we were originally going to go with my buddy Neil Hauer, who's fluent in Russian, who we

we use as a translator much to his annoyance. But he wasn't able to make that trip. So we kind of did it. Again, that story could have been much better if I had someone there translating for me. But those are the kind of sacrifices you have to make when you're just like bare budget, bare bones doing this sort of situation. What do you think is the West's responsibility here? And what should it do?

That's a tough question because I think it depends. I mean, my feelings are that we should be doing as much as we can for Ukraine. should be giving them the equipment they need. They've done a significant amount. I don't want to pretend like the U.S. and Western Europe haven't contributed significantly to this war effort because they definitely have. And I'm sure there's stuff we don't know when it comes to sharing intel and stuff like that that they're even doing more of.

But it's kind of like, you know, at this point, do you want this to grind out longer? Because the way we're doing it right now, like end it. Like we have the power to end it. I don't think Russia is capable of doing anything back. I don't think, I don't think, I would bet everything I have, and I guess you kind of are, that they're not, I mean, they're fucking nukes. I've probably been stripped for parts at this point. Who knows if they're even functional.

But they're not going to do anything. You know, they can barely take. That's a big roll of the dice. Yeah, yeah, that's, I have not heard that before, in fact. No, I mean, I've heard this argument before from other nuke wonks, but it's a big, it's such a big gamble. It is a big gamble, but at this point, like, what are the other options? Like, what, watch something truly horrific unfold before our eyes and slow motion? For years and years.

I was going to say, the longer any situation like this goes on, the harder it is to go back up. And I'm not just talking about what's happening in Ukraine right now. We know what's going to happen if this blockade continues on Ukraine and if the Russian blockade continues. People are going to starve to death all over the world. And like, that's a guarantee at this point. Like, we've seen the numbers. Everyone is predicting it.

No one's doing anything about it, except for the Ukrainians and the people that are that are that are giving to their war effort. But it's kind of like, it's interesting. You have these these countries in the global south, in the Middle East and Africa that are kind of like not choosing sides. And I get that. This is a war of people they see as not having had their best interests at heart for generations. And like who are we to tell them to trust NATO or trust the U.S. or trust Western Europe at this point with what's happened to their countries? But at the same time, like, they're the ones who are going to be starving if this blockade continues, if Russia continues this war. And it is the fault of Russia that this is happening.

Like, it's not the Ukraine's fault that they're forced to defend their country. And like, you're not going to, it's not their fault that they're not bending the knee to a country that's perpetuated an insane amount of war crimes against them. and that we know if had their way would do more. Like that's what would happen if Ukraine, if the world kowt out to Russia right now in Ukraine. We'd have more Bouchas. We'd have more Europeans. We'd have more Mariupils. Like, you can't tell them to bend the knee in that regard.

So this blockade is going to continue unless Russia has stopped. And what that blockade means is that all this, all this agriculture, all this grain in Ukraine that goes and feeds the world is not going to, and not just the stuff that's being blockcated. but also the fields that are being just fucking scorched earth all over Ukraine. That's going to continue and the people in these countries are going to die because they're not going to be able to eat. We know, like, we know that's what's happening. So where do you draw the line? That's the kind of dire note we like to strike at the show.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Remember when I said I wasn't a dumer? Like half an hour. Lord. I mean, it's just a bad day. Thank you for, thank you, Danny Gold. Thank you for coming on to the show. I always love coming on, man.

Thank you for reacting with us to the news and doing something a little different and strange. And incredible reporting. It's in Rolling Stone. It's in Vanity Fair. And it's in tablet. Well, thank you guys always for having me. Also, thank you guys for your support always with this in my reporting and with the underworld podcast. I really appreciate it from you guys.

So thank you very much for that. Thank you. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason. Fields. We're going to be back on Friday this week with other mainline dispatch. We're going to have Jake Hanrahan on talking about his frontline huligans documentary. We've got another one. We've recorded about Saudi Arabia and the oil of it all will also be coming out here soon. As always,

if you like the show, please go to angryplanet.substack.com or angryplanetpod.com. He gets $9. You get bonus episodes and you get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes. Again, that's at angryplanetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com. We will be back a little bit later this week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.