The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Has the West Forgotten the Ukraine War?

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Journalist Tim Mak was there on day one of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He was NPR's war correspondent and most recently returned on his own as an independent journalist, founding the newsletter, "The Counteroffensive." From Ukraine news fatigue to how the human stories of the war need to be told, and the recent U.S. aid package, he gives us a glimpse into life in Ukraine.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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He was National Public Radio's war correspondent and most recently returned on his own as an independent journalist founding the newsletter The Counteroffensive. He's here to give us a glimpse into life in Ukraine over the last two years of war and where we're at today. And Tim, we're so grateful you made some time for us here at TVO tonight. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Let's go back. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, you were sent by Kiev, to Kiev rather, by NPR. When did you arrive? I arrived just hours before the full-scale invasion started. I arrived on one of the last commercial flights into Kiev, and little did I know that the country's history would be written before my very eyes. I presume you were anticipating an imminent invasion. Well, you might

remember that at that time, Western intelligence agencies were just screaming from every hill they could find, saying Putin's going to invade, there's going to be a full-scale invasion. A lot of people, including folks in Ukraine and in Kyiv, didn't take that super seriously. And I remember kind of when we landed, there was even a sense that it was all hype, that it wasn't going to happen. And that changed awfully quickly. There was like an aura of disbelief that this could actually happen in the 21st century in the heart of Europe. And yet it did. Did it shock you when it finally started?

It really did. I mean, it shocked me on a geopolitical level, but on a personal level too. I remember getting up, my editor calls at three o'clock in the morning saying, something's going on outside, you better get downstairs. I remember being so personally shocked by this. I did the only thing I could think to do when I woke up, which is to stand in front of a mirror and brush my teeth. You know, we were worried about all sorts of things like evacuating the city safely and then doing the journalism we needed to do. But I was in such shock that I just stood there and brushed my teeth for a good period of time and tried to figure out my bearings. Make you feel better? I don't know. It was something to do. It was just, you know, maybe it was kind of part of the normalcy of it.

I'm sure I wasn't the only person in Kyiv trying to grasp the reality of the situation. When the invasion started, how long did you think it would probably take Moscow to take over Kyiv? Well, the conventional wisdom at the time was that Kyiv could fall in 72 hours. And I remember talking to, I'd spent, you know, well over a decade covering national security in Washington, DC at that time. And so I was talking to folks at the Pentagon and people in Western intelligence who are sources of mine. And I was saying, you know, should we stay in Kyiv

or should we leave? And basically, you know, my reporting from Western sources was if you stay in Kyiv you're going to die in Kiev. You should leave as soon as possible. And so we began trying to both report out the situation. I mean, already within the first few hours of the full-scale invasion, Russian troops were landing at the airport right on the outskirts, right in the suburbs of Kiev. So it was a really dangerous and uncertain time. And we decided ultimately to leave the city. The city did not fall in 72 hours or 72 days

or ever yet. Why do you think that hasn't happened? Well, there are a couple of things. Putin really did underestimate the resilience of the Ukrainian people and their willingness to the resilience of the Ukrainian people and their willingness to fight and resist authoritarianism. There's a kind of another moment that maybe some of your listeners and your watchers will remember, which was that moment very early in the first 24, 48 hours where Zelensky did this Instagram post. It was this kind of selfie-style video where he was with senior members of his cabinet on the streets of Kyiv at night when the attacks were happening, saying, I'm still here. And it was a message to a lot of people that they ought to fight on, and Ukrainians did. In those early, frantic hours, the Ukrainian military was just handing out rifles to people.

People were just rushing to where they thought Russian troops would be taking potshots at elite Russian troops. It was a very chaotic time. But what that did was it bought the Ukrainian military time and it convinced the public that Ukraine was not going to fall, that there was a strong national identity behind resistance, and that there would be value and importance to continuing that fight. As of a couple of months ago, Ukraine says it's looking into more than 122,000 suspected cases of war crimes. And you have spent eight months investigating one in particular. Tell us about it. Yeah. So while I was working for NPR, one thing we really wanted to do was at the end of the first year of the full scale invasion, come away with a kind of capstone project, one in which we could really say we sunk our teeth into an important topic.

And so what we ended up doing was trying to solve a war crime by ourselves to illustrate how difficult investigators had it, as well as put a human face on what is just a statistic, right? Tens of thousands. At that point, it was 50,000. Now it's, as you say, well into the six figures. And how that evolved was I just got a tip, like any prosecutor might or any investigator might. I was having lunch with someone in the town of Dnipro, and they said, you know, we heard this rumor about a guy with ties to France who had been killed on the fourth day of the full-scale invasion. You should take a look into it. All I knew was the village in which it happened, a small village called Nova Bassan.

We went out there. We canvassed the village. We spent months and months and months interviewing people, trying to look at open source intelligence, building sources in the Ukrainian military and in Western intelligence agencies, as well as the geeks that follow all the different kinds of Russian units, their military equipment,

and so on. And what we were able to do was we were able to find out the story of this guy named Alexander Breus. He was a 28-year-old. He loved basketball and cycling. He even put out a really awful rap single that we played on the radio. He was much beloved by his fiance and his sister and mother. And on the day that he was killed, he was trying to evacuate his fiance and sister to Western Ukraine. He had the misfortune of entering this village that he wasn't from,

he just happened to be passing through, just as Russian troops, that column of Russian troops that was trying to encircle Kyiv. He entered this village of Novy Pisan just as they were entering. He got out of his car and according to an eyewitness and the evidence that we put together, he was shot in the back of the head and left to lay in the road for more than a month during the period of Russian occupation. And his body was only retrieved and we were only able to investigate the circumstances of his death after ukrainian forces liberated that area through a lot of reporting and digging we were able to find a video

of um the russian troops entering that village on the morning right after alexander breus was killed and we were able to find two things in that video from a woman who videotaped this column entering her village that morning. One was there was a marking on one of the armored vehicles that was an O marking. What that told us was that these troops were from what's called the Central Military District of Russia. And then looking at the outline of that vehicle,

you'll remember I mentioned those geeks that track all sorts of Russian military vehicles and that sort of thing. Well, it turns out that in the Central Military District of Russia, there are only two units that have that kind of vehicle known as a BTR-82A. So we're able to find the commanding officer responsible for the units that killed Alexander Breyos, as well as bring down to just a few dozen people the possible suspects for that war crime. All of that is to say we spent months and months and months and months to illustrate the human cause, but also to kind of show how difficult it's going to be to get justice and accountability long term for a case,

for a single case, let alone now more than 100,000 cases. Well, this is the thing. First of all, you did an excellent job reporting on that story, and the world would not have known about it had it not been for your efforts. Having said that, this is one story of hundreds of thousands. And I wonder how do we get our heads around that much tragedy and injustice? I think you have to build it one story at a time. I mean, the statistic itself doesn't give enough color and meaning and impact when it comes to how many. I mean, 100,000 sounds like a lot.

But then you think about the reverberating and the cascading impacts of each individual case, what it means for families, what it means for people, loved ones, what it means for the economy. There's all sorts of implications on each single case. And unless we build these stories and start telling them on a human level, I don't think it really affects us nearly as much. And I don't think we really get a sense of what the costs are for that many atrocities. You know as well as anybody what the business of journalism is like these days. It has shed tens of thousands of jobs, this profession, over the last decade. And yours was one of them. NPR downsized and you got downsized.

You decided to go back to Ukraine anyway to further your reporting. And you went back alone. How come? Well, one really quick thing is that, yes, NPR did downsize. What happened is, although I wasn't chosen to be part of that layoff, I stepped in and replaced a friend and colleague who had been chosen. And that way, in that sense, I was part of that downsizing. I couldn't step away from Ukraine. That I had kind of become attached to the story in ways that I guess journalists are expected not to,

but I couldn't help but become so. I mean, I have a really complicated relationship with war correspondents. For one, I'm a former soldier, former US Army combat medic. And so there were a lot of expectations that I'm a former soldier, former U.S. Army combat medic. And so there were a lot of expectations that I should just be able to handle it. But after doing this investigation into Alexander Breyos and the war crime, as well as close to a year, well, more than a year of covering the full-scale invasion, I had developed

some PTSD as a result of doing all that. And I had actually told my friends and colleagues, hey, I'm not going back to Ukraine. I'm done with that. But sitting on the sidelines and after seeking the help that I needed, I kind of looked myself in the mirror, this time without brushing my teeth. And I said, I can't, I got to keep going

and trying to figure out how it is that this story ends. And in particular, what I wanted to do is, you know, some of the philosophy that, the reporting philosophy that I developed as a result of that war crimes investigation. sort of journalism, the storytelling in which you center on the person and then use that connection and that empathy that readers might develop by going deep into human-centered reporting, that sort of journalism, we don't have nearly enough of it. I think, you know, one of the reasons why we have so many problems in the journalism industry is that we live in a time of an incredible proliferation of content and this happened today type information. What we're missing is something

that artificial intelligence can't do, at least not now, and I don't think in the future, which is create a sense of connection and empathy, immerse ourselves into the human stories, get people to tell us the kinds of stories that no computer will be able to convince people to tell. And so that's why I started the Counteroffensive, which is a publication that just uses human-centered stories to tell the news of the war.

We focus on the people first and use that to illuminate what's happening. How do people see the Counteroffensive? I think, you know, well, we've gone from zero subscribers to 60,000, more than 60,000 now. We're now the largest international news substack. So we put out a twice weekly newsletter. I think that it's filling a need. I think it's filling a need for connection and a different kind. You know, one thing we don't do, we don't cover the booms and the bangs, right?

We don't tell you, hey, the fighting moved from this village you haven't heard of to this village you haven't heard of. What we really want to do is we want to tell, you know, deep stories of things like, you know, one of our most recent stories that was well read was the impact of the cumulative impact of more than two years of sleep deprivation for people in Ukraine and what happens and what the experience is of getting woken up in an irregular way almost every night because of missile strikes or the threat of missile strikes and what that does physiologically and psychologically to people. We profiled Kiev's leading sleep doctor in order to tell that story. These are the kinds of stories we're trying to tell. You've got a quote in that story from the well-known Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who apparently is quoted as having said, sleeplessness befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself,

to be his own I. This is the state that Ukrainians have been in for two years, yes? A state of sort of perpetual sleeplessness? Yeah, this is one of the hardest things for me to convey. People are asking, how are people doing? People here in Canada are asking, how are Ukrainians doing? And one of the things I find most difficult to convey, I tried to in this story, is just the level of physical exhaustion that not only soldiers on the front line, many of whom have had in the single digits vacation days since the full-scale invasion has started, many of whom have been fighting since 2014, not 2022, fighting since the annexation of Crimea by Russian forces. I cannot properly

convey to you how exhausted, the physical toll of stress, anxiety, injury, mental trauma over that long of a period of time, how much that takes out of people. And not just soldiers, but everyone, everyone who's experiencing it, everyone who's had their lives tossed as a result of this full-scale invasion. How old are you? I'm 36. 36. That is a fairly young age to be doing what you're doing. Have you considered the possibility? Well, you must have, of life ending at 36. And what do you think of when that goes through your head?

Well, I have a few more gray hairs now than when I got to Ukraine. They don't show, but okay. Well, maybe not on camera, but I can see them under the line. And I have a few people, close friends, have noticed, too. I don't think that much about it. I think that I'm trained to do a job, and I love to do that work. I mean, there are costs to it. I really do feel like the last year alone, I went back to do journalism.

I accidentally launched a news startup in a war zone. And with all the pressures and all of the learning and midnight work that that entails. But, you know, I have thought that if something bad were to happen, I wouldn't have any regrets about going back and doing that sort of work. I'm doing what I love. Are your folks still around? Yeah, they are. What do they think of this?

I think they long ago realized they couldn't talk me out of this sort of thing. You know, I've always been a very independent-minded person. I'm sure they wouldn't have, I'm sure they're proud of the work that I'm doing, but I'm sure they wouldn't have endorsed joining the military either or doing this sorts of thing. But I've always been a sort of kind of listless person looking for the next story, the next investigation.

And it's what I'm really passionate about. Well, let me ask you about one of those investigations, because this is a bit of an odd story that you did. On stand-up comedy in Ukraine, do people in the midst of this horrendous war still want to go out and hear jokes? Well, they need it. They could use a laugh, right?

That story was not just about, hey, look, there's stand-up comedy happening. It was our way, we were profiling Ukrainian comedians as a way to understand what was funny before the war and what isn't funny anymore, and what's funny now and wasn't funny then. We're trying to get into a deeper kind of undercurrent of culture and how humor has changed the result of all the stress. One of the things that's really interesting is that in some of the bomb shelters, kind of undercurrent of culture and how humor has changed the result of all the stress. One of the things that's really interesting is that in some of the bomb shelters, comedians have realized that they have a captive audience.

Yes, they do. And so they've been working on their stand-up in some of these bomb shelters. But, you know, things like a lot of comedians used to deliver their stand-up routines in Russian, in the Russian language. Now it's unheard of, except, you know, when they want to make fun of someone who they're portraying as a not particularly intelligent person, they'll deliver the lines in Russian or something like that. a kind of dark humor that's evolved, particularly among soldiers who are using that sort of humor to kind of get by, to kind of process the things that they've been going through over this time. Can you share a joke? Well, I mean, some of them don't seem all that funny to you and me, right? You know, there are just funny anecdotes that have been told by soldiers about, you know, barbecuing while under artillery fire or, you know, someone who had a limb amputated as a result of an explosion nearby.

And he's crying out for help from his friends. And he waves his severed arm saying, hey, if you guys don't pick me up quick, I'm going to start stabbing people with this. I mean, that's pretty dark. That's dark. Yes, it is. I don't I can't say that I exactly would find that funny, but it's the sort of over the top dark humor that soldiers tell themselves and stories that they tell each other that help them process, you know, their their their moments and their time. What's the great Ukrainian cheese heist? Well, so we wanted to...

So one of the big things about the counteroffensive is that we wanted to cover Ukraine not just as a place where violence is inflicted on it. We wanted to tell the stories of people acting in a time of war and to treat Ukraine as a place with a unique linguistic, cultural, culinary history. And so we really wanted to do a story about the dairy industry in Ukraine. It's particularly prolific in western Ukraine. But we wanted to describe how it almost felt like a heist in order to

get cheese out of the country to attend the International Cheese Awards competition and get Ukrainian cheese tasted out there. You know, it's a story, it's a story not just about cheese, but it's a story about border policy. You know, getting Ukrainian cheese into Europe is a huge problem because of all the documentation and tariffs and so on. But also a story about the resilience of an industry where cows may be stressed out as a result of the war. There are all sorts of interesting things, threads you can pull on in that story. And that's what we tried to do.

And how did Ukrainian cheese do in the European competitions? I think it got some awards. I don't think it was the ultimate winner. But I believe that Ukrainian dairy entrants did receive some gold and silver medallions as a result of their entry into the competition. Gotcha. Well, let's talk about what's happening right now. You obviously saw that the United States Congress, some might say miraculously, passed a huge aid package for Ukraine, 60 plus billion dollars. You would understand this better than most. What impact can that amount of money and materiel have on this war? Well, first and foremost, I think what Ukrainian and Western leaders will try to do is stop the bleeding, right?

And I mean that literally and figuratively. Right now, Ukrainian forces are reporting that Russian troops are making serious progress in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbass region. And they've been able to make much faster progress than they had been in weeks prior. And that's because the Ukrainians are simply put outgunned. They are firing a very small percentage in response in terms of artillery that the Russians are firing. They don't want to run out of ammo. They want to run out of ammo. And effectively, in many cases along the front lines, they have run out of ammo. So the first priority for them will be to stop the advance of Russian troops because the Russian troops have the initiative right now.

This is a logistics question. How does Ukraine get as much 155 millimeter artillery rounds right to the front lines as quickly as possible? That's the first step. But the second step is for the Ukrainian military and political leadership to develop a broader strategy of what does victory mean and how are we going to get from here to there? That's something that they haven't been able to do because they haven't been able to understand what kind of tools, equipment and resources they've been working with. So now the ball's back in their court. been working with. So now the ball's back in their court. And the Zelensky administration and his generals, they're going to have a really tough task for defining what are we going to do over the next year? We've got this aid package. It's probably going to be the last aid package from the United States for the foreseeable future. How are we going to use this in the best possible way to get the aims that we want to achieve in the near term. I still think people want to know

what constitutes victory or defeat in this war. You know, it's not going to be like we think of in a traditional World War II setting where they're going to meet in a train car and they're going to sign a document. And presumably at some point, somebody decides it's over. So apropos of your example there, how do we get from here to there? When you ask 100 people, you'll get 100 different answers of what victory entails. Some people will say that it means that Ukraine reclaims all of its territory, including Crimea. Others will say that it's a sort of just negotiation. One Ukrainian official said something really interesting, saying that he defined victory

as being able to get onto an aircraft in Kyiv, a plane, a commercial flight in Kyiv, and fly to The Hague, where he would observe war crimes trials at the ICC. So two elements there, the resumption of normal economic activity and accountability for the atrocities during the full-scale invasion.

You know, the Zelensky administration has taken a very hard line, which is to say this war isn't over until we've reclaimed everything. I don't know if reality is going to set in and force him to change his tune on that. Do you think that's just a negotiating position? Well, I think it's likely. I mean, right now we have very, very, very, very exhausted Ukrainian troops. They're going to need to make hard decisions like, are they going to mobilize hundreds of thousands of new soldiers, train them and use them? But right now, the military situation, strictly speaking, because of the deadlock on the front lines right now and how

slow progress is made, as well as how dug in russian troops are it's hard for you to see in the near term uh ukraine reclaiming all of the territory that it had gained to date right now what they have to do is stop the bleeding and then regain the initiative and then they can have a conversation about you know how far can they go i don't know how often it's the case that a war between two countries and the outcome of that war is dependent on elections held in a third country, but that could be the case here. Biden versus Trump. Does the future of the war in Europe depend on who wins the American election this fall? Not only the future of the war in Europe, but also what happens in the Indo-Pacific region, right? Authoritarians all across the world

are watching to see what the United States does, not only with the passage of aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan, but also whether the United States decides to elect Donald Trump and heads in a more isolationist direction. You know, the war in Ukraine is not just about the combat and the conflict in Eastern Europe. It's also part of an emerging Cold War between authoritarianism and democracy all around the world. It really does feel to me, I don't know if it feels like this to you, Steve, but it feels to me like we're entering a much more dangerous phase of global affairs. Can I speak to that for a second? I grew up during the Cold War when there were tens of thousands of nuclear missiles, Soviet

and American. And we were right in the middle of the two of them. We knew that if World War Three started, the missiles were going to go over Canada. Yeah. But we always had at least I always had the sense that there were sane people who were on either side of that of pushing the button. I don't get that sense here. I get the sense this thing could spiral out of control because nobody's sane in

this one. Is that fair? Well, I grew up in the sweet summer of the 1990s and a different kind of phase of geopolitics. So it's a new and unexpected and unwelcome shock to me. But it really does feel we're being, there are new rules and they're being written right now. We don't know who's writing them and they're being done in real time. Technology is developing. Disinformation is proliferating.

I mean, in Ukraine right now, let me give you just one example of how out of control things feel, is that, you know, drone technology is being developed and innovated in Ukraine at a dizzying pace. You know, well-meaning Western American, Canadian companies are sending their tech over to Ukraine to be tested. By the time it arrives, it's become obsolete, you know, because they're, both the Russians and the Ukrainians are developing new ways to control drones,

ways to give drones autonomy, and to counter drones in ways so quickly that by the time something is shipped from North America to Europe, it's becoming obsolete. That's a scary thought to me, as well as to all the legal and technical and technological questions about drone usage and how they could perform without humans controlling them directly. That's a scary question. And that's one of many, many scary questions that we're kind

of looking at right now. That's for sure. We are happy to remind people that The Counteroffensive is where they can read your work. And Tim Mack, we're grateful you came into TVO tonight and shared your stories with us. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. They can read it at www.counteroffensive.news. Amen. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you. Thank you for supporting TVO's journalism.