Jono, Ben & Megan - The Podcast - MINI: We Chat To Kiwi Journalist Tom Mutch Who Is In Ukraine Right Now

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

What is it like to be in Ukraine right now? Tom Mutch is a reporter who is over there at the moment and he spoke to us about the situation and what he has experienced so far. A very interesting chat and one worth listening to.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Hits, the Jono and Ben podcast. Very scary scenes on the news over the last few nights. Russia have invaded Ukraine and the world is watching. But what would it be like to be over there right now? A Kiwi journalist, a freelance journalist by the name of Tom Mutch is in Ukraine and he joins us right now. Good morning, Tom. Good morning or good evening as it is over here in Ukraine. Now we're seeing on the news some images that we haven't seen for a long time.

They're horrible to watch. I mean, you were over there. What is it like to be experiencing this right now? I mean, it's just utterly, utterly bizarre and crazy. One moment, we all kind of knew this was coming. All of the intelligence stuff sort of suggested it. But until the very last moment, you never really believed in your heart of hearts it was going to happen. But, you know, Wednesday night, you know, everyone was going out to bars, having drinks, having a laugh.

We're all making weekend plans, you know. We had plans to throw a house party in our apartment on Saturday. 5.30 in the morning, you're woken up to cruise missiles just rocketing in, in targets, in and around, like, you know, a really, really major city. Like, this is a reasonably developed modern city of three million people. Are you fearful for your life at the moment? I'm trying not to think about that too much. I'm, right at the moment, I'm, as I said, I'm in Lviv think about that too much. Right at the moment, as I said, I'm in Lviv,

which is in the west of Ukraine, which so far hasn't experienced much of the fighting. However, the Russians have now said that they're going to bomb targets very near Lviv, and there's a big convoy of Belarusian troops on the border to the north, so it is quite possible that this city will come under fire at any moment. But hey, that's part of the job, I guess. In a war, are there zones where the public are safe

and there's not going to be missiles fired? Are there any rules around that? Well, it depends on a lot of things. So it depends where you are in Ukraine at the moment. Now in Kharkiv, which is a city on the east of Ukraine, that is now starting to see some really, really serious bombardment by Russian heavy artillery. getting direct casualty figures, but we believe 30, 40, 50 people might have been killed in an apartment block in one blast. So there, it's just getting less and less safe. We're talking to Tom Marchese, a New Zealand freelance journalist. He's in Ukraine at the moment. Tom, my kids were asking last night when it was on the news, just what is going on? Now, I know that obviously Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union. There was conflict, it seems to be,

over something with NATO. They wanted to join NATO, the military part of the Soviet Union. There was conflict, it seems to be, over something with NATO. They wanted to join NATO, the military alliance between the countries. Am I kind of in the ballpark with what exactly is going on? Yeah, you're kind of in the ballpark. So basically, after the Soviet Union broke up, Russia kind of wanted to keep, they didn't want to keep these countries as part of Russia, but they wanted to keep these countries quite pro-Russian. And Ukraine, after quite a few years, decided that it wanted to kind of join the West and become part of the European Union, wanted to become part of NATO.

The Russians were obviously very opposed to that. So they tried, you know, kind of disrupting the country from doing that. They started that they, you know, annexed, invaded Crimea in 2014. They started off this war in eastern Ukraine and what's called the Donbass region. But then basically they realized that they thought that that would scare Ukraine into stopping joining NATO or the EU. Now, actually, it made the Ukrainians much more united and it made them want to join NATO and the EU even more. So Russia figured the only way to stop Ukraine from doing this was to invade with a full military force. Seems like the sensible option. Do you see, I noticed people

on Instagram putting up the Ukrainian flag, which is a lovely gesture, but I don't know exactly what it's going to achieve. Is there anything we can actually do to help from over here? Yeah, is there things that we can do to help from over here to support Ukraine? That's a good question because it's very, very early sort of days yet. So there's a whole list of things you can do from, well, on the one, if you want to be very extreme Ukraine are accepting uh foreign uh foreigners with military qualifications so if you really really want

to kind of put your life on the line and come to fight for Ukraine you can I wouldn't necessarily really recommend that but there are a large number of sort of charitable organizations that are supporting Ukrainian refugees or ukrainian troops i know that some people are getting behind like a lot of people with like i.t skills are kind of joining hackers collective groups to destabilize you know russian um electronic and security systems and things like that but i guess also the very least people can do is just continue to raise awareness, continue to post about it, continue to talk about it, make sure that Ukraine doesn't go out of the world's news, as happened with countries like Syria, or it happened like

countries with Afghanistan, because this is something where the international pressure may actually be able to stop the Russian assault. We don't know if it will be able to, but it's certainly better than nothing. Well, Tom, take care of yourself over there. We can't but imagine what it's like to be over there. Take care of yourself and we really appreciate your time. No worries, no worries.

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