Angry Planet - The Human Stories Behind the Counteroffensive

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Ukraine’s counteroffensive is well under way. One of the best places to go to get stories and reporting about what’s happening is counteroffensive.news, a substack run by former U.S. Army Medic and NPR investigative journalist Tim Mak.He’s here with us today to talk about the war, the counteroffensive, and the charms of Kyiv.This is my mom’s brain on Russian propagandaFrench fighter for Ukraine, musing about God, heads to the frontlines; update on early counteroffensiveShe secretly sneaks to the frontlines to feed cats and dogs in the ruins of her cityAngry Planet has a Substack! Join 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.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. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I am Matthew Galt. Jason Fields is taking a powder. Ukraine's counteroffensive is well underway. One of the best places to get stories and reporting about what's happening is counteroffensive. News, a substack run by former U.S. Army medic and former NPR investigative journalist Tim Mack. He's here with us today to talk about the war, the counteroffensive, and the charms of Ukraine. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. And I'm wowed by the charms of Matthew Gulls as well here with that generous intro. Thank you so much. So really, I heard you on another podcast and I started reading your stuff and I was really blown away by it. It reminds me of a lot of some of the best war correspondents that I remember from like Syria and from Iraq and from some friends I've got.

It's very people-focused, and I don't read a whole lot of that from the major publications these days. Was that kind of, can you tell us the story about, like, how this thing got started and kind of what your goals and ambitions were and what you set out to do? Well, look, we're just, we're, you know, a month and a half old, right? But the focus of counteroffensive. News has been to get away from the same kinds of journalism that other outlets and are doing. And what we focus on is human interest, narrative journalism. And what does that mean? That means we see the news through the perspective of a person rather than through the event itself. I'll give you an example to make it a little bit more real.

when, you know, there's a counteroffensive underway right now. And a lot of that fighting is happening in a place called Orishiv. It's in southern Ukraine, it's maybe, you know, 65 kilometers from the major town of Zaporizia, which some people might have heard of. A lot of news outlets, and I don't want to point any fingers, the way they write about the counteroffensive is, oh, you know, this village was captured or there was fighting over here or, you know, Ukrainian forces advanced. 1400 meters over the last three days or whatever. The way we try to cover the news is we think of interesting stories as the meat and the news itself as the vegetables that we sneak into, sneak into the burger, right? So rather than just start the story with a recitation of facts, we went to a woman named

Fetlana, who is from Lory Heath. And we talked about her career as a typist and how slowly over time, she spent 10 months there since the war started, slowly over time, her home degraded because of the war. The roof caves in. A missile hits her balcony. She spends 10 months screaming and shouting and ducking and hoping to survive. And you kind of take this journey with her. first she's cooking with her gas stove and then the gas pipes are destroyed. Then she uses electricity to try to prepare our food.

And the power supply gets cut out. First, she's using the water pipes at her sink to get water. At the end of it, she's forced to cook her food with water from the river over an open fire. And at a certain point, it becomes just untenable for her to continue to live there. in the course of learning about her story and her life we learn a lot of things about the counteroffensive we learn about the pets at the animal the cats and the cats and dogs that are left behind and she still sneaks back into the city which 80% of her city is of the buildings in her city are damaged or destroyed she still sneaks back in the city to feed the cats and dogs that are left over there

from evacuees who haven't come back um but that's the sort of methodological we try to use in order to convey the news. You learn all about the counteroffensive, which is happening in a number of directions, including from the town that she's from, but is incidental almost to the human story that I hope would be interesting to read whether it was set in Ukraine or not. The meat and vegetable analogy really lands for me. I write about nuclear issues a lot, which is something that just shuts a lot of people's brains down. And you have to, you have to figure out a way to inject humanity and bring the characters

forward in these kinds of stories. Why do you, it strikes me, as I was reading your stuff, it really strikes me that like the humanity gets lost in a lot of the reporting on war. A lot of times things are, this kind of stuff is stripped out. You've worked for a lot of major publications. I've worked for a lot of major publications. I don't think it's that the editors sit and tell you to take that stuff out. There's just this tendency towards more bland reporting for some reason. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure. I think it's tradition. I think that there's a kind of voice of God tradition in a lot of major news outlets, that they want to appear above the fray, that there's a version of objectivity that requires the recitation of facts.

But I think that leads, that doesn't really lend itself to a deeper understanding of, you know, the humanity and the people, which motivate me. You know, there's a lot more of a tradition in this in magazines, right? For example, you think about long-form reporting in the New Yorker or long-form reporting at the Atlantic. Many of these needs have traditionally been the home for this sort of thing, but then again, they don't publish, they take a long period of time to publish. We push out two to three human-oriented human interest stories a week peg to the news. So we're fast and we're human interests oriented in a way that mixes the news and that long-form magazine feature writing in a way that I think that not a lot of folks are doing. You talked about nuclear issues and reporting, right?

So when we were trying to report about the Zepar Asia nuclear power plant, what we did was we profiled a nuclear engineer who was working in the Zepar Asia nuclear power plant, who was in the control room while the Russians occupied them. This is an incredible story. And he escapes, and he escapes from Russian occupation almost accidentally on one of his many, many tries to get into. the Ukrainian territory. And he talks about the dangers of, and not only that, we go to the, we go to a nuclear issues museum, a Chernobyl Museum in Kiev. We go through all the exhibits, talking about nuclear energy, we talk about nuclear safety and all the dangers that could occur if during this war there is some sort of nuclear crisis. And again, you know, so that's our, that's the method that we use to cover and write about the news. Can you tell me a little bit more

about this Chernobyl museum. I believe you said it was the scariest, one of the scariest museums you've ever visited, right? It is the scariest museum I've ever visited in my life. Like, I've been to the Hiroshima Museum in Japan, and they're very focused on, like, nuclear non-proliferation, and they're focused on peace, and they're focused on reconciliation, and, like, let's make sure this never happens again. The Chernobyl Museum in Kiev is much more about scaring the pants off you. You know, there's no peace and reconciliation

there. And I guess it's because the differing nature of the nuclear incidents. But Trinople is this very dark and spooky place where they have all these model dressed in

dressed in protective gear, the same sorts of protective gear. that people who went in, first responders after the Chernobyl incident, would wear. They had a mock-up of the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, and everything is in black and white,

from the photos to the prints to... It's a very dark, spooky place. And the whole idea, I think, is to press upon the visitor, the terrible human effects that happened. the sickness and the death and the long-term implications of it. And I think to scare children who are visiting into taking into maybe later in life taking the issue very seriously, I'm not a child and I was pretty scared about it.

In fact, right after, right after we started ordering potassium iodine and steeper chemical, biological, radiological nuclear. protective gear because I was like, well, you know, I am scared straight here. I need to be prepared if there is an incident. Because let's just be honest, the nuclear issue, right? I mean, in a normal developed country, not in a period of war, nuclear power is relatively safe. Yeah. But in a in a situation where the power goes out all the time, as has happened multiple times at the that operation nuclear pipeline. Or where the water level, the water reservoirs,

which feed into the nuclear reactor and are necessary for nuclear safety, but that water supply might be compromised, as it has been due to the breach of the Kovka dam on the Nepro River, all of these things, you know, we're adding up, we're taking away the layers of protection

that are necessary for the functioning of nuclear safety. And it raises the chance over and with each cascading problem raises the chance for some terrible nuclear disaster from which we cannot escape. The way that story is written is very fascinating to me because there's this old, that old writing Maxim show don't tell. Traditionally, when you're telling a story about what bad things can happen with that power plant, you just tell the audience. right. This goes wrong. There could be a disaster would look similar to something like this. There's something

about going into I don't know how bad that noise is. There's something about going into a museum for the last disaster that was in the area that's very affecting. And I thought that was very extremely well done. Thank you.

I think the point of our kind of Yeah, I think our kind of reporting really tries to accent the immersive experience. You know, another example I have is of a U.S., a former U.S. soldier who is now fighting for Ukraine, and he's fighting in Bokhmut just days before Bokhm falls. And he gives us point of view kind of head cam footage. So it's like you're in Bokmote, and he's running around the city. you see the destruction and the fighting and the fear. And it's kind of our goal to do that kind of reporting,

to make you feel like you're actually there. I want to stay in the nuclear power plant. Just one more moment. Sure. Tell me about Alexander's experience when the IAEA visits. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the questions I asked him was, do you think the IAEA has been effective in preventing a nuclear catastrophe?

And he gives us this story that shows how the Russian military and the Russian occupation authorities manipulate the IAEA to think that, oh, the Ukrainians are attacking the plant, the nuclear bomb. And he says he saw with his own eyes Russian soldiers running around from crater to crater with a used or spent missile, like just the hulk of the spruce. missile, trying to plant it in such a way that when the IEA delegation arrived, they could say, oh, well, the Ukrainians fired this at us and look at how they're deeply worsening the situation. Now, in kind of a comedy of errors, the Russians accidentally placed it in a direction that indicated it was pointing from the Russian front lines rather than the Ukrainian front lines. But it was just kind of one of those anecdotes that show how the information war is happening in Ukraine, as well as the actual war is happening in Ukraine. What do you make of the information war, by the way?

There was all of this, you know, a fury of noise in the six years leading up to, this escalation of the war that happens in February, especially in the West, very frightened of Russia's ability to manage the information space, very kind of building it up. There's all the stuff with Donald Trump, right? And to my mind, in the aftermath of this escalated invasion in February, that narrative kind of falls apart a little bit. it doesn't seem like Russia is as good at managing the information spaces we perhaps thought they were when they encounter like, you know, a real war and a very resistant people. Again, I'm looking, I'm very much rooted in the eastern coast of America. I'm looking at it from that perspective.

What do you see from where you are? I think the real war really undercut their information war objectives, right? I mean, it's really hard to argue to the West or to Ukrainians that there are some sort of liberators when every day we see apartments being hit. We see civilians dying. We see very clear evidence of Russian war crimes, looting killings of unarmed individuals and all other sorts of terrible atrocities. In fact, the person, one of the people were going to be profiling. soon on counteroffensive. News. It isn't an exclusive for your podcast.

Is someone who has kind of lost her mother to Russian propaganda. And as I was talking to her, I kind of I feel like a lot of Americans might be able to relate

to the story. She talked about how her mother became obsessively, became an obsessive watcher of television, Russian television, and slowly began to live in this alternate reality that bore no relation to the reality that she lived. That her mother, who had grown up in Ukraine but now lives in Russia, almost exclusively gets her news from television. And that when the war started,

she had a conversation with a mother, and her mother was talking about how there were, Ukraine was filled with Nazis and Zelensky controlled, you know, Zelensky was responsible for the war and that Russia was rightfully coming to liberate and denazify Ukraine. And, you know, here's this woman who was living in Harkeef, whose own apartment had been bombed and destroyed, and she was forced to flee to Kiev. Here's this woman looking at this and saying, I've never met a Nazi my entire life. I'm not, they're not, she's not living in a reality that resembles my life. And it caused, as you can imagine, a huge, huge divide between the two of them. But that's where I see the information war at in a kind of very personal anecdote, which is that among a certain segment, it's extremely effective. You know, I think that especially among those who watch, for example, Russian language television,

it's kind of taken over the brains of certain folks in Eastern Ukraine or in Russia itself. And there are There It is not Trying to think I had to phrase this question Since we're talking about this Can we also talk about the use of fascist imagery On

By some soldiers in Ukraine And also You know A fascist militia With loose connections to Kiev is my understanding You know Taking over a border town in Russia, right? These are people that do look, they, you know, they, they, they look

like there's some of out Nazis in that group, right? You're referring to the, to the Russians who have been somewhat aligned with the government in Ukraine, who are doing these cross-border raids into Russia, and causing a lot of trouble for the authorities in Belgarod. Correct. Yeah, I spoke to one Ukrainian official today who said tactically it was a good decision, but strategically, a very unwise decision, at least from the standpoint of Ukrainian interest. Because Ukraine knows that it depends on the West, and it depends on the continued support of Americans and the Brits and Canadians and other elements of the European Union. And it cannot be associated with far-right groups.

So there's a real vibrant debate and controversy here, even amongst Ukrainians, about should we be aligned with these folks? Does it make sense for us? I mean, I think a lot of Ukrainians cheered the outcome, but not the process, right? that they're very happy for Russians to be making trouble for other Russians and to, let's say, create another front in the war and to distract the Russian military from areas of Ukraine where the Russian military is currently occupied. But I think there's a real unease about the sort of wartime alignment that may not be in in Ukraine's long term strategic

influence. I think the point that they are Russians that went back into Russia is a good one. A lot of those guys and they're like music festival Nazis as well. I don't know if you know that. If you know that, one of them is a music festival

organizer who's famous for like organizing like a neo-Nazi black metal festival every year. Anyway, what is the mood in Kiev right now. How is the sense that the counter, how is the counteroffensive perceived

to be going? I know it's kind of early days and things change almost by the hour, right? Yeah, well, we will get these messages and we'll get these updates and we'll get these the new stories about one village that, like

this tiny village has been taken over by the Ukrainians and the Russians are falling back. But it we're talking 25, 50, 100, 300 meters at a time, right? That the fighting is happening at this grueling and terrible pace and causing enormous casualties on both sides. The thing that I try to convey about the situation in Ukraine

is that it's kind of, it's bizarre. It's not a situation like you would see, for example, in Sudan. There's the front lines and then there's danger everywhere throughout the country, but then there's also a McDonald's that's open. You know, there's this big controversy this week, or actually not this week, but in the last few weeks, when the head of a major Ukrainian economics university posted this very vibrant video, this video of a very vibrant McDonald's on a Friday night. and opponents of aid to Ukraine seized on this video of young people ordering Big Macs and McNuggets to say the war isn't real and why are we giving so much money to Ukraine or supplies humanitarian aid or military equipment to Ukraine? It doesn't look like the war is really happening up there. the reality is that living in Kiev is this kind of constant low-level stress, right? It's not always acutely dangerous.

There are no tanks, and there's not very often gunfire. But most nights in May, there were attacks here at 3 o'clock in the morning or 2 o'clock in the morning or 4 o'clock in morning. it was a very kind of high intensity high tempo period of Russian military operations against Ukraine. And so, yes, there are people sitting out on patios enjoying a nice coffee or having a beer. But then everyone heads home around curfee, which is midnight here in Kiev. And then they brace for what time am I going to be woken up in the middle of the night that I have to run to a to an air raid shelter or get woken up by explosions. That's the sort of dichotomy that I find it like hard to explain to folks who have not

not been here, that you could see these nice things happening and somehow there's some normalcy going on, but at the same point, there's obvious signs of violence and war. Yeah, I don't think people in America specifically because we've never had anything like this on the home front, right? Don't understand that life continues during wartime, that people still go to their job, you still have to eat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you still have to take care of your home and your family. It's just that you are doing that with the added stress of a war going on around you, right? And it's not at a high-level intensity 100% of the time, right? Well, things would have been very different.

if we were speaking here a year and change ago, right? When the siege of Kiev was happening, when the city was empty, when there were Russian troops and armored vehicles and tanks just in the suburbs. And this was a reality not that long ago. And everyone remembers it when this was a very, very dangerous city to be in and the city was on the front lines. nowadays, Kiev is not within, you know, shelling distance or mortar distance. It's still within the distance of missiles and Chehey drones. But there's, but they've had well over a year to try to adjust,

to try to adjust the power of the structure so that, I mean, there were large portions of the city that didn't have power in the winter when Russia attacked the power infrastructure to, to make things harder here for the remaining civilian population. But now that power level is back. There was enormous disruption to businesses when millions of Ukrainians left the country as refugees, but a large number of them have decided to return. There was enormous disruption, obviously, to the economy when, at the beginning of the war,

all commercial flights into the country overnight stopped. But now they found ways to use trucks to get goods into Kiev. And so they've been able to adapt in incredible ways. And that kind of puts a band-aid, papers over the reality of war on some ways. But of course, you still hear the explosions in the air shower tonight. You're listening to Angry Planet. We'll be right back. And we're back with more of the best show.

of its kind on the internet. What draws people to Ukraine? Two-part question. You've got a great profile of the foreign fighters that come. It opens with the French gentleman with the Tokyo ghoul pseudonym. But also I'm wondering, what draws people like you? What draws the reporters? We've interviewed more than one reporter on this show that you're making the face,

of course this is a war zone. Of course people, reporters are going to come. But we've interviewed more than one reporter on the show that have traditional, like, combat experience or war correspondence experience, go to Ukraine, and they're supposed to be there for like a week or two weeks. And then they stay. I've known a couple people that have moved and have married and are like building lives there as well as doing the reporting.

And that's not a phenomenon that I've seen. in other war zones. So what do you think is going on? The face I made wasn't one of skepticism to your question. I think it was one of, I'm still trying to figure that out myself. It was one of bewilderment more than of skepticism. And I don't know.

I've had some hard times in Ukraine. You know, I have, there have been periods, last fall I swore to myself, I'd never come back here. And then I moved here and started a company based on the idea of living and reporting from here. The only thing I could say is that when it comes to the sort of journalism, I really love the most, which is this narrative style of journalism, this human interest style of journalism. There are no higher stakes than here.

And that the stories that you can tell and that I'm lucky enough, enough to convey to some folks, they have, it feels like you're telling important stories. Not that I was, I spent most of the last 15 years in Washington, D.C., telling all sorts of stories about politics and doing investigative work for outlets like NPR and The Daily Beast and Politico. And those are important, too. but the emotional impact of these stories that I've told over the last year in change in Ukraine it tugs at me and when I went back to the states and I decided I wasn't going to come back here

I kept tugging at me and I kept pulling me and I kept whispering at me until the point at which well here I am in an apartment and keep talking to you but like there's an upside and there's a downside The downside is there's obviously a long-term emotional impact on everyone here, the least of which is on the reporters. But the way I've described it is that when I'm talking to people, it's like I have this cup. And I'm walking from source to source, from interview subject to interview subject. And every person that I talk to has one of the saddest stories ever has had. had one of the worst days of their life recently. And then they pour a little bit of their sadness into the cut with every story they tell.

And you, as the conveyor of that information, you can't help but be affected by there, right? And so that's the downside of it all that you're doing hard work worth doing. But you're also trying to manage and deal with all this grief that's being. ordered into your cop long term. And how are you managing that grief? I'm trying to be proactive about dealing with it. So like I'm very much

you know, as you mentioned, I'm a former US Army medic. And I think among people, there's become over the last 20, 25 years, particularly in the American experience, particularly among soldiers in the US military, my observation, not, not statistical fact, but my observation is that there's been so many suicides, there have been so many mental health issues as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that so many people have lost so many other people, so many friends and family members,

that there's more openness and transparency about mental health among the formerly too macho. and that the best way to prevent these terrible things from taking hold in your soul is to be open about it, to talk to your friends about it, to create a network where you have social support. And I've been taking, I've been trying to be as proactive as possible about that and to kind of nip it in the butt as well. Because I've had some dark moments as a result of the reporting here. And you need to take breaks.

You need to seek therapy. You need to have a kind and supportive network of friends and colleagues around you. But mostly you need to be open to trying to find ways to express the pain you're feeling, for example, or the sadness you're feeling, for example, so that it doesn't impress and become something more difficult to handle. So it doesn't fester. So it doesn't fester and then express itself in terribly negative ways. You know, another thing also, when I started counteroffensive dot news, I reached out to a number of former war correspondents, people like Chris Hedges, people like Sebastian Younger and Kim Dozier. And I started noticing this trend among the people I was talking to because I was asking them for advice.

And what I found, not every single one of them, but what I found is a lot of them don't drink alcohol anymore. They found the compounding impacts of alcohol to dramatically worsen their mental state after a period of mental trauma. You know, Sebastian Younger told me, you know, I've had many a great drink in my life. And, you know, I'd be worse off if I had never drank any alcohol, but I don't, I haven't touched it in years. because I know the long-term effects about it. And it made me really, I'm not a t-totaler myself, but it made me rethink my relationship with alcohol. And particularly, it's used as a kind of stress reliever. You know, at the end of the week on a Friday night, you'd had a week.

You've had, you know, terrible time. And you think, oh, I'm entitled to a few. beers to just let off some steam. And from my conversations with, you know, with both doctors who specialize in PTSD and, and, and more correspondence is that that's not a wise move. A lot of people will say, hey, if you're watching the game and you want to hang out with some friends, you have a couple beers, it's no problem. But once you start using it as a medication to manage your stress, you're going down this

pathway where there's nothing but darkness and that you're kind of delaying and amplifying actually your anxiety and sadness, but you're just, you're punting it to tomorrow where it will compound and where it will make things more difficult to you. I'm not here, by the way, to, you know, pass judgment on anyone who drinks or chooses to drink or anything like that. I'm just kind of conveying my new strategy as it relates to alcohol. In Washington, D.C., you can't go anywhere. You can't meet anyone, as you know, you can't meet anyone without drinking alcohol. It's just unheard of. And so it's taking a real kind of shift in my approach and my mindset to even step back from that a little bit and come down to like, hey, I'm a two drink person now.

I've always said that the biggest challenge in life is the delineation between your third drink and your fourth drink. Because four equals nine, actually. and if you can stop at three, if you can stop at three, and you can exert the will necessary to stop at three, you'll be okay. But if you cross the line into four, you're likely to lose all control,

and it's going to be a bad morning for you. How does, just out of curiosity, what is the alcohol culture like in Kiev? Is it like D.C. where you need to lubricate? I've met a lot of people who... Sorry, go ahead. No, it's really not. I mean, there's...

No, no, there's... It's really not. It's not really like that at all. And in fact, I've been surprised by how many people just don't drink here. I haven't really explored why. But I find actually that I spend more time getting copies with people than in D.C., you know, the common thing is to get drinks with people. at least putting my reporter hat on

From a source perspective I get a lot more coffees here And a lot fewer drinks I still drink with friends And I still have drinks from time to time And perhaps a little bit more than I should But But it hasn't it's not central to your professional life

Here like it is in Washington, D.C. What are you working on for this week? What's coming to the counteroffensive.new. I gave you one exclusive already, Matthew. You're trying to, as a good reporter, you're trying to dig deeper. Well, I'm doing a number of stories. We're profiling this Ukrainian ATV company called Shirk. Basically, we, there's a really cool,

kind of massive ATV that can be both driven, be used as a drone, it could be used as a remote control thing, which is right now being used on the front lines of humanitarian relief and in sort of battlefield evacuation. You could just put someone in this vehicle, set its location, and it can drive through anything. It can drive on land, it can drive on water, it can go over mountains, it can go anywhere. And so we did a test drive of this amazing Ukrainian-made ATV called the Sherp. And we're writing about what's it like to have a business in Ukraine during the war. A business, by the way, which could easily be targeted by the Russians for destruction

because the Russians have destroyed a lot of factory warehouse type buildings over the course of last year. And so that's one thing. I'm working on a number of stories. I'm on things like people who are rescuing animals and putting them up for adoption because of the flooding in her song. We're doing stories about the changing nature of comedy in Ukraine. The things that were funny before the war that aren't funny anymore and the things that weren't funny before but are funny now, that's a story we're working on.

We're profiling a really, like what I think is the most important war, the most important battle to take place during this war. We're doing stories on everything. You know, I mean, we're doing stories on not just the battlefield and soldiers, but also about Ukrainian culture and cuisine and language, history. And trying to wrap that in the war to tell a different kind of story. And tell us story that will cut through this whole phenomenon of quote unquote Ukraine fatigue, right? Yeah. Like, I want to tell stories that would be interesting to read, whether they happen in Ukraine or not.

But the fact is that they are happening in Ukraine, and that gives it a little edge. and that's kind of my philosophy and I hope to bring more stories like that to counteroffensive. News. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. The substack is

counteroffensive.News. It is a really incredible place to get stories from the war and I encourage everyone to go and sign up. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to another episode of AngryPen. The show is produced. With Love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Nodale. This is the place where we ask you for money.

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