Radiolab - Ukraine: Under the Counter

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

In the weeks following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a young doctor in Germany sees that abortion pills are urgently needed in Ukraine. And she wants to help. But getting the drugs into the country means going through Poland, which has some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. So, she gets creative. What unfolds is a high-stakes, covert-operation run by a group of strangers. With everyone deciding: who to trust? In collaboration with NPR’s Rough Translation (https://zpr.io/9UpCwb2Smjzw), we find out what happened. Part 1 of 2 episodes.Special thanks to Wojciech Oleksiak, Katy Lee, Maria Hlazunova, Valeria Fokina, Sara Furxhi, Noel King, Robert Krulwich and Sana Krasikov, and our homies over at Rough Translation. Thanks also to Micah Loewinger and Laura Griffin. Illustrations came from Oksana Drachkovska.  And thank you to the many sources and experts we interviewed who asked to remain anonymous. Episode Credits:Guest hosted by - Gregory Warner and Molly WebsterReported by - Katz LaszloProduced by - Daniel Girma and Tessa PaoliMixer - Gilly Moonwith mixing help from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Marisa Robertson-Textorand Edited by - Brenna Farrell CITATIONS: Videos Watch Deutsche Welle’s Abortion in Europe documentary (https://zpr.io/YHctj4bZQwHM). Podcasts Listen to Eleanor MacDowell’s A Sense of Quietness (https://zpr.io/eHhcHusxrhfE) on the BBC. Listen to NPR’s Joanna Kakissis’s story This Secretive Network Helps Ukranian Refugees Find Abortions in Poland (https://zpr.io/LsQw9V6ByfFg). Our reporter, Katz Laszlo, reports on European current affairs and reproductive health, and produces for The Europeans (https://zpr.io/sHAvrvqU2m8t) podcast, which features stories across the continent, including in Ukraine.  Our collaborators, NPR’s Rough Translation (https://zpr.io/9UpCwb2Smjzw) Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  

Hey, just a heads up, this episode deals with some sensitive issues like sexual violence and war. If that's not something you're ready for right now, or you're listening with some younger listeners, you might decide to skip this one. Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W and Y. To C. C.

Yeah. This is Radio Lab. I'm Molly Webster sitting in for Lulu and Lutth. Today, we have something super special for you. It's a collaboration with our friends at the NPR show Rough Translation. When we heard about the story, we were like, we have to be a part of this. And so I joined up with Gregory Warner,

the host of Rough Translation, to report and edit and argue and travel so that we could do the story together and then share it with all of you. Ready? Ready. So here we go. Hey, do listening to Rough Translate. Wow, man, this is Rough Translation. I'm Gregory Warner and that voice is Molly. Molly Webster. Molly Webster of Radio Lab

is here with me in the studio because we have been working on this collaboration. It's been months in the making that kind of sits at the intersection of both our shows. Yeah. But I won't say anything more about that. We'll find out why. Just a heads up, this episode does deal with some sensitive issues, including sexual violence and war. And it comes to us from a colleague to both of us have worked with. A colleague who was telling us a number of stories about Ukraine and one of them just left out to us. It starts with this woman, if Gennia, she's Ukrainian, and she moved back to Ukraine two

days after the full-scale invasion, so late February. She moved to Ukraine? Yeah, and within days of being on the ground in Ukraine, she had set up an NGO. And the NGO was all about getting supplies to Ukrainians during the war. A lot of times, it had to do with medical supplies And so she would use Facebook here's the list of meds or generator or whatever and people is like yeah Let's help and she throw out these requests and she would just see like donations would come rolling in and it was amazing to her and Then one day they made a post we're looking for money to buy bodybecks

than one day. They made a post. We're looking for money to buy bodybecks. We just understood that it's not enough bodybecks in Ukraine. For Ukrainian soldiers. For anyone. Every human being have to be passed in a normal way. But this post, it's like a two or three, two and a half likes.

It actually only gets like five likes and two sad tier emojis. And not enough donations. It's like people didn't donate just because they didn't want to be associated with body bags. Yeah, it's like you can't donate a body bag or even think about a body bag donation without thinking, oh God, we're out of body bags.

Like, you know, if someone's asking for 200 body bags, that's 200 dead. But somebody need to do this, you know, that's life. This is rough translation. Some kinds of donations are not made for Facebook. They have to be done in the shadows or in secret. We were not aiming to achieve something that was illegal. Today, a story about one such donation to Ukraine

of a lifesaving drug in a legal gray zone that everyone involved with has been worried about talking about until now. This is actually kind of crazy what we did there. I was very proud and in love that clouded my judgment. Just to understand what you're doing, but you're ready for the punishment. To protect people's identities, we're not using last names, or sometimes any names at all.

This story is a two-parter. We're dropping episode two next week. In this first part, a covert operation and a chain of strangers, where everyone would have to decide how far they could go and who of them to trust. At this point, I'm convinced we're getting screwed over. But what if the weakest link is you? Our story today comes from Katz Lazlo. She is a European reporter. She is, in fact, the colleague that first told me about the story of Evgenia and the bodybags. And today she's going to start in Germany with a couple and a question.

Yeah. Here's Katz. Where does this story start for you? Well, really, with the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, this is Vicky. I made quite a deliberate decision to tell you slowly. And this is her boyfriend Ari. Because I knew that your family was there. They live in Germany, but Vicki actually has roots all across the former Soviet Union, and she's still got family in Ukraine. Of course, then, you think, if some things would have shifted in my biography, it would be me or my mother there. This is the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe in 80 years.

There were young people all over Europe calling their grandparents asking, what do we do? And the only way I managed to handle it was to get active. Vicki walks down the street and there's this closed nightclub which has become this place where people are just scrambling to organize donations that are flooding in. And then I started sorting through boxes in the donation center. I ended up in the medication corner and most people who were sorting through it had no idea what these medications actually are. Vicki's actually a doctor so she knows what everything is. I like to make things more organized. She is someone who makes Excel spreadsheets that are beautiful. And after me like sorting through boxes for like eight hours or something,

somebody said, we are actually, we heard that you are a doctor and tomorrow we are going with a big convoy of cars to the Polish Ukrainian border. We're going to go, we don't know what's going to happen and then, oh, it would be good to have a doctor on board, but if not, we'll figure it out. So she calls a bunch of friends who actually work for international aid organizations and she asks, should I go? They said no, but we really strongly advise against this and you're just messing up with the official structures. If private people are blocking the roads and this just creates more chaos.

Hundreds of thousands of people are pouring over the Ukrainian border, which is only a nine hour drive away. And Vicki really wants to help. I decided the next morning under the shower, okay, screw it, I'm gonna go. But she feels totally unprepared. I had a bit of a stomach ache when we drove there thinking, God, like, I'm not driving

there, thinking I can do something here, and we are going to be traffic for the big guys now coming in. She's picturing the Polish-Iranian border. And what she's imagining is, like, food distribution tents, major NGO flags. Like, I don't know, UNICEF or UNHCR or just one of the big organizations or NGOs and they were not there. When she finally gets to the border, Vicki sees, there's no one. I spent a fair amount of hours at one border crossing into the night to really see some grandmother or mother like staring a pot and packaging it into

like warm soups, warm this, like these Polish women were standing there the whole night. And this was like all this warmth that the people fleeing received. All of these people, refugees who were just outside,'s below freezing and they're either stuck, waiting for transport deeper into Europe, or for family that's still on the other side, and they can't see them and they don't know where they are. And there's nobody official saying, you know, you made it, this is your next step.

This was around like eight or nine days after the war. So I mean, you could say this is understandable. All the organizations are doing assessments. We are assessing, assessing, this is, you could say this is understandable. All the organizations are doing assessments. We are assessing, assessing, this is what you would hear. But it also made me really angry because, you know, I mean, this is a no-brainer to know that if it gets to minus 10 degrees at night at the border, that you need something to keep the people warm. And I think this was really one of the moments

where I thought like we're not traffic here, private people are not traffic, they're the solution at the moment. And so Vicki decides to step in, but all the way in. She kind of blows off her job. She throws herself completely into volunteering. After five or six weeks, she's completely wiped out. I was in bed with high fever, really shivers. She gets COVID. And I was lying a bed sort of scrolling through, I think 20 telegram WhatsApp signal,

Facebook groups, all volunteers. And this is also where all requests were sort of flying around. And then I read, they're urgently looking for abortion pills for women who were raped by Russian soldiers. This was a week after all the news broke about a butcher. These requests are coming the week that all of those really grim photos from Bucha came out of dead bodies being left in the middle of roads, stories of Russian soldiers using sexual violence as a weapon. Just in that week, at least 25 people came forward and shared first hand how they'd been raped while trapped in basements in Bucha.

Rape as a weapon has been confirmed in every occupied territory since. And Bouture's liberation, it was the first time that people outside of these occupied territories really found out. I mean, this was shock-ready for everyone right, like reading the news. Like, we had like faces to that. We were everyday in contact with Ukrainian women. These very proud and strong women, and I kind of like with their children, carrying them with like one little bag.

And so just to imagine that this is something that they are not granted, the access to the pills in a situation like that, like these women that I had a faces to, I don't know. If she hadn't been at the border, she would have read this news and thought big organizations. They will take care of these women. Why should it be me? But from the experiences that we've had before,

that actually that wasn't the case in a lot of places that governments and organizations are taking care. So, even though I was telling myself, I think I need to pull myself a little bit out of things. This was sort of the one where I was like, okay, what can we do about this? The idea even that someone from one country can get an abortion to someone in another country all came about because of the creation of something called the abortion pill or abortion pills which are really two types of medication, mithoprystone and misoprostal called mithy and miso. Taken together at any point in the first trimester of pregnancy, they can induce an abortion.

The trick with them is that they are very, very controlled. They're one of the most controlled medicines that we have, especially moving country to country or crossing borders. And so the notion on a practical level, on a legal level of donating abortion pills, is a pretty complicated one. I knew that through some context of my partner's family, there was a woman

rights activist, so I thought, maybe this is somebody we could ask. I immediately called her, this friend of the family, asked if she knew some people, is there a way, how do people usually do this? So she then gave us the number of suppliers she had worked with. So he reached out to him. Yes, hello. This supplier we are not using his name because he is talking about stuff that he could be arrested for. Are you comfortable with us calling you supplier? Yeah, but not...

Even his mom doesn't quite know what he does. Well, you know, I'm a missionary in Africa. The supplier is based in an African country. He is of European descent, and he has made a name for himself as being one of the main abortion pills suppliers to Europe. And honestly throughout the world. I had some passion for all these women who die unnecessary from abortion.

So what we try to do is to reduce unsafe abortions. He just said, I have somebody in Prague for 500 kids, one euro per kit. Which is very cheap. And a kit in this case is five pills. It's one meeper and four meesa. So the plan is they're going to pick up these 500 kits, drive them through the Czech Republic into Slovakia and across the Ukrainian border. The first plan was really straight forward and really not complicated. But then there was a little bit of a turn, the supplier calls them back. Like very quickly afterwards, two hours or something. Instead, he had a different proposal.

Instead of this deal, why don't I donate to you guys a lot more? Instead of like 500 kids? 10,000 kids. 10,000. instead of like 500 kids. 10,000 kids. 10,000. This is a big chance we have, getting women access to these life-saving medicines.

I mean, of course, it's, it's women being raped in need of that medication, but in the time of a war breaking out in your country, I can imagine myself and other women that are maybe just pregnant from even just their partner, deciding that this is not a good moment to bring a child into this world.

The supplier tells them he's got an idea for how this can work, but they have to act quickly, because he happens to be putting together this huge medical donation for Ukraine with lots of different stuff, painkillers, antibiotics, and COVID medication, all kinds of pills, actually. And he doesn't actually have time himself

to get all of this stuff to Ukraine. But if Vicki and Ari can meet him at the airport and organize the transport over the border, then he can add abortion pills pretty much for free. We were so in this, like, okay, let's get it done. But he says, here's the thing. The airport that the supplier is going to fly into, it happens to be an airport in Poland. And in Poland, it's illegal to give anyone an abortion pill. At the moment, there's a

serious court case going on. This abortion activist, she gave one set of pills to someone, and she's potentially going to go to jail for three years. I mean, the court case hasn't finished, but that woman never even took the pills and that's one set of pills. I just think it's crazy to even think about trying to bring the pills through Poland, which has some of them strictest abortion laws in that region. I mean, like every year thousands of women are fleeing to other countries to try and get an abortion,

and then here they want to bring all these pills in. But then I guess I think, okay, wait, they're just bringing them through Poland. They're not stopping in Poland. So like that, I guess they could probably do. Well, the problem is they can't prove that they're not gonna hand them out in Poland, right? Like if you just get intercepted by customs or police,

you can't very convincingly say, oh, no, no, no, we're just driving on. Yeah, that. So then, how would you actually ship it through Poland? The supplier says, all you need is this form. The D1 form. A form and someone official who can help with logistics. He seemed really confident in this is super easy.

I've done this before. I will bring it. You pick it up. The only thing that did say, which made me a bit weird, said, well, maybe not just anybody at the airport, get somebody who can talk smart with the customer. Well, just... Yeah, yeah, somebody who can talk a little bit smart and smooth with the customer's people. So we thought, but why is it actually needed?

When rough translation returns, the doctor becomes a smuggler, or she tries to. This is Radio Lab. We're back with our friends at Rough Translation. I'm Gregory Borden. I'm Molly Webster. We're here with reporter Katz Lazlo, and when we last left the story, Vicki and Ari have agreed to the supplier's offer. They're going to meet him in an airport in Poland and pick up thousands of abortion pills and transport them to Ukraine.

And part of the rush is that they're racing against two different clocks. One of those clocks is biological, which is that in Ukraine you only have nine weeks to take this medication. But the way the weeks are counted is not from when you get pregnant, but from the date of your last period. So imagine you get pregnant at the beginning of the war. By the time Ari and Vicki are trying to get these pills to you, you're technically like eight or eight and a half weeks along and you really only have like three days left to

get this medicine to get a medical abortion. And the other clock that the couple is racing against is the supplier's plane. He's already booked his flight. The first time we got in touch with him was a Thursday and his plan was landing on a Monday. They realize they need all kinds of things that they don't have. Like a truck that can be officially sealed by border guards, a registered Polish logistics company that can attest for the shipment. We were trying to explain that his plan is not going to work,

but he was just in the madness of pecking and repacking. Meanwhile, the supply keeps calling them back. Every time we spoke to him, which was really every few hours, he would be talking about a larger quantity, not only 10,000 medical abortions, but 15,000 medical abortions, and on top of that 15,000 emergency contraceptives morning after pills. And on these video calls with the supplier, it's when the couple realized something new

about the supplier's method to get these pills into Poland. I didn't want to polish customs to find any Miffi Priston. He's like taking them out of the boxes and he's putting them in other containers. If these pills are labeled Maizor Proston and Miffi Priston, it's a big problem. He's putting them in these these big tubs of sport, nutrition, protein powder.

Put these plastic back, and then it also pills in little sandwich bags. What is your packaging there? How much is it? The numbers kept changing. The names, the package. Vicky's organization brain is going crazy. The Meezo 200 into white boxes,

and the Meefit 100 100 and it was just, la la la la la. He speaks really fast and really confusing and you couldn't really follow him anymore. And was this the first moment where you were actually conscious of like bending rules? Like this was not going to be legitimate actually? Yes, that was the first time. They could all go to jail, like you can't just walk around with thousands of unable pills, especially if you're a doctor.

Vicki could lose her medical license. Of course, there was a part that thought can we not take an official rule, because abortions are not forbidden in Ukraine, but at the same time, like with everything in these first weeks, there was no time to take all these official rules. I've never felt more sure that this is the right thing to do somehow. There are ready-getting additional requests for abortion pills from Ukraine. We would start getting messages from people saying, hey, we heard you guys are transporting something, could you get it to us? It was very clear that if we were not going to do this, then this shipment wouldn't go. If we pull out, then we're basically canceling this for everybody.

The things were packed, the flight was booked, and this was our best chance. Okay, so they're going to do this thing. What is actually the plan? Okay, buckle up. because by Sunday night, they have set up a relay race, which is, the supplier has gotten the pills from India where they're manufactured. He's taking them from his home base in Africa,

which we can't name, up to a Polish airport. At the Polish airport, he will hand the pills to the couple who are on the customs forms as like the receivers. They're supposed to spend as little time with the pills as possible. Because what's the word that I always like this like plausible deniability like you lose that in the moment that you have that in your hand right? They will then immediately give the pills over to a Polish logistics guy. He will then hand the pills to a driver who is taking the pills over to a Polish logistics guy, he will then hand the pills to a driver who is taking the pills along with the entire medical shipment

over the border to a hospital in Ukraine. At the hospital in Ukraine, if Genia, who we met at the top of the show, the Body Vags woman. The Body Vags lady, she will extract the pills and start distributing them to doctors and gynecologists who will then get them to patients. And the thing to remember is in this whole chain of humans, the only person who is being told that these are abortion pills is iggenia.

We've never met these people before, so we didn't know if we could trust them. So what does everybody else in the chain being told the pills are? This supplier system to kick these pills safe, mostly from the border guards in Poland, was to relabel them as vitamin C. Vitamin C plus was Miefer, and vitamin C without the plus was Miezo. Can you paint the airport scene? What am I imagining? They walk into the airport like where are they waiting?

Like, do they need to go up to anyone and say, Hi, we're here for a customs shipment. And this is our paperwork or... They don't really know. Like, they've never done anything like this before. And they don't want to mess it up. We didn't know if the situation is going to require that we would have to have some kind of discussion with the customs people.

So we thought, how should we dress? Like let's dress is like the most reliable, boring, proper people. I was wearing a beige sweater and underneath a button up shirt with the collar sticking out of the sweater and wearing my glasses. Because nobody's ever broken the law in a beige shirt. Exactly. It just doesn't happen. So they arrive early, they're in their boring outfits, they choose a boring bench. There's no better scenarios than just sitting it out now.

And so they wait. They scroll through their phones, they glance at the customs door, glance at the police. I'm feeling super calm, but I just have to go to the toilet every 10 minutes. Like nothing strange about that. I feel my lungs weirdly, my heart, I can just, I felt like my heart beat for like two and a half hours.

The logistics guy shows up and the three of them wait some more. And then suddenly my phone rang and it's a supplier. I landed. I'm here with customs. Can you put your logistics partner on the line? And the logistics partner gets on the phone. He speaks in Polish. Nodz laughs a little. Says okay. Hangs up. Looks at both of us. It says it's through. Oh my god. Suddenly the supplier walks through the door. Yeah, I see a man in a suit. He's like a guy in his 50s.

Quite tanned and he's wearing like a blue stripy shirt. Like somebody who would have this like littlecase, like with the wheels, where he just puts in his important documents for the meeting that he's flying into. But instead of this little slick briefcase, he's got one of his airport trolleys. Stack to the top with these bags. Just a huge amount of these plastic colorful bags

that you zip up that are super handy and you grab them in a panic because they're really light and you stuff all your clothes in them. Yeah, really, yeah. Visarly wrapped in plastic. And he was just like slowly pushing it in front of him, trying not to drop it.

These bags are like jam packed with antibiotics, with COVID medication, with anti-inflammatory medication. And then hidden between all of those pills, the abortion pills, Vicki is thinking, oh my God. Okay, if this now goes in one big package into Ukraine, is this really gonna work out? We thought, what if something goes wrong?

And then these land and some hospital in Levyf and are used maybe falsely. Did something about the site of these pills make you think, oh my God, this plan we have, that's just not going to work. I did imagine some kind of doctor on the other side or a paramedic or somebody opening it and nobody knowing, oh, that there's what are these pills, suddenly these loose pills in bulk and a plastic bag. What happens if by some mistake, they wind up sitting in a vitamin C box and then they give them to someone and it's not vitamin C

and you really don't want to be taking me, fair or me, so, not knowing what it is. And even though she knows she's supposed to just hand the pills over to the next person on the chain, their role is done. We sort of diverged from our plan. Yeah, true. They decide they're going to go with the logistics guy to his warehouse in Poland and then repack the pills before he gives them to the driver. Let's go through it together to make sure that everything's separated properly. Everybody, even the supplier? The supplier is the only one who knows that all this stuff has been packed,

but he's got a connection flight in one and a half hours. So they're just like, okay, we're going to do this as fast as possible. We arrived there and then we thought, okay, let's sort of quietly start doing this. The two of us started doing this on the floor in the warehouse, opening the bag, getting it out. That's when we figured out. The markings he had put on the boxes was done with a whiteboard marker.

So all of the markings had disappeared. Every now and then you would see a smudge. You had to really dig deep into like take out half of the bag and until you find the first box or bulk package. We are really knees deep in these pills. Seeing that they are now very glad that they decided to take this detour and separate out all the abortion pills. We tried to be very organized, and then as we noticed, there was not that much time there. I remember I was getting really stressed, but two other people who were working at the warehouse start helping too.

By the end, there were like six people doing this. This was it. I thought the operation was of the utmost secrecycy and now a lot more people know what's going on It just doesn't it make it more risky? Yeah, I think initially they're worried about people knowing and as they're repackaging the pills They're worried more about like are we gonna find all of these pills in time to put them in the right place and ship them onto Ukraine And it's only when they've fished out all the abortion pills and tossed them into three moving boxes. Three cardboard boxes that they're finally ready to go home.

It felt like our thing is over. We're driving towards home. I mean, a lot of tension fell off and yeah, it was a really good feeling, even though super exhausted. We were super exhausted. But a couple of days later, I released the work and we got a message. You have Gennie us texting. All of the medication has arrived and that the only thing that isn't there is the abortion pills. While we are speaking to her about how confused she is, we kept calling the logistics guy where the boxes are not there and he kept insisting, no, no, they arrived, they arrived.

And they're talking to you, you have Gennia and you have Gennia is like, they did not arrive. So we are getting two conflicting messages about the same shipment from both sides of the border. At this point, I'm convinced we're getting screwed over. Then they start to think they've been tricked. What do they imagine? What are they playing out might have happened? Did it somehow the driver cannot be trusted and he is against abortion and is going to

throw these into the river? Or he could want itself them on the black market and make a lot of money off of them because they're hard to get. Yeah. It's all strangers. It's all strangers sort of joining forces. You never know if there's some hidden agenda on either of the sides. And they know that if they'd stuck with the supplier's chaotic plan and left the pills hidden among the antibiotics and pain killers, those pills would still be with the rest of the medical shipment in Ukraine. Like that's when they start feeling really stupid. They're like, what were we thinking? I'm just feeling so naive and defeated. Yeah, it was not nerves anymore. It was really frustration.

The whole plan is just crumbling and they're like, how are we ever going to tell these people that this shipment that we've been telling them is going to arrive in a few days with this essential abortion pills has been lost. How are we going to tell them? And they're thinking how are we going to tell the supplier who's donated a huge amount of money in terms of these pills that it just didn't work out. And also, why the hell did we take this risk to take all of these pills through Poland?

When rough translation returns, a chance discovery sends the mission into a whole new direction right after this break. This is Radio Lab. We're back with our story about smuggling abortion pills into Ukraine at the start of the war in collaboration with rough translation. Picking up the story, a few hours after the pills go missing. We heard from the logistics guy,

then he tells us we know where they are. They found the pills in the driver's private car. While the rest of the shipment is in his truck, already in Ukraine, honestly, to me, this part is super suspicious, but nobody really had time to investigate why, and it didn't really matter. They are just trying to finish this delivery.

And so the second they find the pills, the logistics guys are like, okay, I've got a new driver who has time to drive the pills to the border, but he can't take them into Ukraine. So, do you have someone on your end who can pick them up in Poland and get them to Levyv? We weren't really sure who to trust. In the end, they asked the one contact

who knows that these are abortion pills and who's in Ukraine. And the person who has experienced distributing medical supplies. If Genia. The decision was, okay, me and to my friend Girls, where it's just going by car, travel into Europe to pick it up. You have Genia called up her friend Maria. We're going to take a ride to Poland to take a couple boxes as a volunteer. She said, okay, that's fun. Side note, before the war in normal times, Maria was a fashion editor.

She says, in this war, you know, you're so stressed all the time. You're trying to eat, you're trying to sleep, you're reading news. So you're looking for something to do. So you can be useful. And we take some coffee, we smoke some cigarette, we just talk about whatever, then we cross the border. They get to the meeting spot, which is it's a band and gas station. Like in a movie, you know, when you're meeting some gangster or something, it's raining.

Like suddenly you're in the middle of nowhere taking something from car, from strangers, you know. And we didn't open the boxes, just for the men in car. They drive off back to the border and as they get closer we grab some food and I said okay maybe we'll check water in that boxes she said yeah okay maybe it will need to take a look. Wait you're killing me like do you know it's abortion pills at this point or does she not tell you. She told me but I thought okay abortion feels no problem and we just opened this box and there's black garbage bags. Like there's no packs or prescriptions, nothing.

They're just black garbage bags in a box. And you open it and it's full of pills. And especially when you know how vitamin C looks like, you know exactly that it's not it. I said, okay, we're going to be arrested. It looks like a drug spaking. I don't want to touch it. If Gettie at this point is dedicated to helping the war effort and getting to helping the war effort and getting medical supplies to Ukrainian people. If she is arrested or in any way compromised because of this delivery,

that all that's going to stop. It was like I was standing somewhere in other country with my car. I have to bring it and I have to go back home. And I can't stay here, but somebody need to do this and how to do this and why it's me. It was a feeling like how to just stop it. I'm definitely not against abortion, but it was like why we should bring it in this amount.

It's a large amount to you create, into you create, to take it. And the reason the first reason was rape cases. And here I became a bit set. I mean, I need to do this. They decide they're just going to keep driving. Night is falling, coffee is approaching, they have to get over the border. That very same evening, back in Germany, Vicki and Ari are also getting ready. We had our six-year anniversary of our relationship and we don't go to fancy restaurants often but that was a nice restaurant and it was a very intimate, like it just has a few tables. So it's not a very loud environment. Right? It's not that we can have a conversation about smuggling pills over the Polish-Ukrainian border and not have anybody here on on the table next door, because there's like four tables and a waiter that appears every 10 minutes. Both our phones are face up on the table.

They're just staring at their phones, waiting to hear from you, Fgenia. I think the waiter must have thought, like, what a strange couple. This relationship must not be going so well. Meanwhile, near the border, Maria, seeing all these bags of loose pills, turns to Yves Genia and asks, Do we have documents for that? So Yves Genia calls Ari.

Of course, he cannot have a phone call in this restaurant with five tables, so he goes outside. I'm left at the table, super-tensic, because I don't know what's happening. She wants to know what's up with these documents, where they're from, what do I have to do with them, what can I say about them? That paperwork, it doesn't make sense anymore, because the abortion pills have now been separated from the rest of the medical shipment.

So there's documents, but they no longer actually apply to any of this. We don't have documents that we are official volunteers. We don't have any prescriptions and we have no proof what kind of pills that is. This is serious, guys. I remember me getting really nervous that maybe something would go wrong.

You, did you feel responsible for her? Of course, yeah. For the pills and for everything. Everybody involved. At that point, so many people have put some risks. Let's not have something go wrong here. So, Evgenia and Maria are finally at the border. And it's a day when it's going really, really slowly.

They're actually stopping every car, searching the cars, taking out the packages. And they finally pull up to the border booth through the first car. The border guard comes out of her booth and she says get out of the car open up the trunk and so they open up the trunk of the car and there are the three moving boxes. The border guard is like can you tell me what's up with your tail light? And we were like, what?

And they look and the tail light is broken, it's not working. And the border guard, she's asking all of these questions about the tail light. She said, oh my god, you were driving like that for Poland, it's impossible. Who like allowed you to do that? You have Gennia and Maria like, oh my god, what, uh, and then the border guard sort of turns back to the boxes says, what are you carrying? We said, uh, appeals.

She said, do you have any documents for that? Yes, of course. She understood that, okay, it's medicine. And she just waves them through. And, um, basically that's it. They pile back in the car and then just drive off. So at 7.50 pm, we got the message. Friends, congratulations to all of us.

We are in Ukraine now. Wow, we'll be in the Viv at night. Tomorrow we will start unpacking and I'll call to understand where our vitamin C is and what to do with it. It was really like a firework explosion, sort of feeling. I think that was the best feeling I've ever had ever in this relationship. That was incredible. And you want to share it with everybody. You kind of felt like jumping up and screaming and like,

sort of like, oh, I want to scream at the top of my lungs and tell everybody, like, oh, we're getting married, oh, we're having a baby, but oh, we smuggle the portion pills. Now we're going to go dance all night long. The next day, they get another text from you, Afgania. It's a huge, huge, huge help and we are so grateful for the help. You're really beautiful, but I feel like a criminal. After that, we won't work together anymore. I'm sorry.

And that was it. After this moment, this sort of community of strangers just dissolves with different feelings of shame and success and a lot of questions. Because like what happened to these pills, and were they needed, and did pregnant women get them? Did doctors want them? So we decided to cross the border ourselves and find the Ukrainians, the doctors, the pregnant women, who were waiting for these pills. That's coming up on the next episode next week. That's episode two

on Rough Translation and on Radiolab. See you there. This episode was reported by Katz Laslow and produced by Daniel Gurma and Tessa Peoli, with help from our senior producer Adelina Lansianese. Our editor was Brenna Farrell. Thanks to the many people who listened to this piece and made it so much better, Voicek Alexiak, Katie Lee, Maria Khlozunova, Valeria Fokina, Sarah Forji, Noel King, Robert Krawich, Sana Krasigov, and our shining friends at Radio Lab. Thanks also to Michael Lowinger and Laura Griffin, and to the many, many experts in sources we interviewed who asked to remain anonymous.

The Rough Translation team includes Luis Treas and Justine Yan. Our intern is Liliana Torrek. Our supervising producer is Leonas Simstrom. Irene Nguci is the executive producer of the Enterprise Storytelling Unit of which Rough Translation is a part. Peter De Campo and Katie Dull are our visuals editors and illustrations came from Aksana Teraškovska. Thanks to Tony Kavan, John Ellis composed our theme music,

original music from Nick M. Nevis and additional music from Blue Dot Sessions and First Com Music. Mastering by Gile Mune, fact checking by Marissa Roberts and Texter, legal guidance from Michael Ratner and Dentons, and NPR Senior Vice President for programming is Anya Grunman. I'm Gregory Warner, back next week with Molly Webster, Radio Lab, and more Rough Translation. By the way, if you haven't had a chance to check out Rough Translation, please, please

go. Listen, it's a great show. They have so many good stories. I did a quick poll of our staff. Our executive editor said we should all go check out one of their most recent episodes called Hotel Corona. It's not about the beer. It's probably about COVID.

Go check it out. You can go to npr.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Beth from San Francisco. Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. The foundational support for radio lab was provided by the Alfred B. Sloan Foundation.