The Decibel - BONUS - In Ukraine with the Globe’s reporters on the ground

Episode Date: February 25, 2023

In a special bonus episode, The Globe and Mail’s Senior International Correspondent Mark MacKinnon and Europe Correspondent Paul Waldie join The Decibel host Menaka Raman-Wilms for an in-depth conversation on the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine. Mark and Paul share their perspectives, personal stories and insights in a year of covering the war. This episode was recorded as a livestreamed broadcast on theglobeandmail.com and YouTube on February 24, 2023.

It's been one year since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began. Millions of Ukrainians are displaced around the world. More than 300,000 Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded, according to the UN. And the war shows no signs of stopping. Today, we wanted to bring you a bonus episode featuring a live streamed conversation recorded on Friday, February 24th with two of my colleagues. Mark McKinnon is the Globe's

Senior International Correspondent and he joined us from Kiev, Ukraine. And Paul Waldie is our Europe correspondent and he was in Warsaw, Poland. We talk about the people that they've met this year, what it's like to be reporting on the war, and where things are headed now. I'm Aina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. And today we're talking to two of our international correspondents. We've got

Paul Waldie, our Europe correspondent. He's in Warsaw, Poland. Hi, Paul. And we've also got Mark McKinnon, who's our senior international correspondent. And he is in Kiev, Ukraine's capital today. Hi, Mark. Hi, Monica. Mark, your sound is a little rough, but we're going to get that sorted out. Of course, we are doing a live broadcast from Kiev, so we'll iron these things out. But Paul, let me ask you now. So you're one country over, you're in Poland in the capital Warsaw. And Poland is a country that's taken in a lot of Ukrainian refugees, actually 1.5 million refugees in the last year. So what is Warsaw like today on this anniversary? Well, today, surprisingly enough, I think they expended all of their energy

on President Biden here earlier in the week. So there actually has not been a lot. There is a big demonstration going on right now outside the Russian consulate, and then people are going to move up to the Polish parliament. There was also a plaque unveiling off the street here. And so people gathered at 4 a.m. this morning

for lights of bonfires, kind of marking the first hours when the missile struck in Ukraine. So there hasn't been a lot of Warsaw this week. There is a lot going on across the country, though. In other cities, there's marches, there's demonstrations, there's ceremonies, public ceremonies and that. So I think people here in Poland do feel this war very acutely, both on a sort of global context of Russia being so close and Ukraine being so close and the war being so close, and on a humanitarian level. So many people seek shelter, seeking help here in Ukraine.

And I think there are people still here waiting to find out when or if they'll be able to go home. And a year into this conflict, Paul, how willing is Poland to still support Ukrainian refugees? Obviously, this is a country that has done a lot already. But what is the sense going forward at this point? Well, it's really interesting because if you look at the history of Poland, it has not been a country that's been real receptive to refugees, let alone refugees from Ukraine. The history post World War II history between Poland and Ukraine was quite bad. And if you talk to all those

who they have a real almost hatred towards Ukraine is because of what happened during the Second World War, all the cases of massacres on both sides. And then, of course, when you saw the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe, Poland was very eager to keep them out of their country. And in fact, they've been putting up barriers and putting up walls along the border with Belarus because Belarus was funneling refugees across their border. So that the history here hasn't really been one of a very welcoming country. But all of that, you know, remarkably has been swept away when it comes to Ukraine. Now, this country has set aside its past antagonism towards Ukrainians, even elderly Poles are taking in Ukrainian families. I met an 84-year

old man who, you know, grew up in Ukraine and is hosting a family in his house. I think there's just a real sense that this war with Russia and this aggression by Russia trumps everything in this country. And if there's one thing they're very aware of, given the history here of communism, given the history of, you know, being oppressed by an outside force, the one thing they're very deeply aware of is the danger Russia poses to them. So that supersedes everything. And you're seeing that's why I think such an outpouring of support for people from Ukraine. Yeah. Paul, I'll just give you a few more numbers here. There, of course, there's eight million people who have left Ukraine since the in the last year. Latest data from the U.N. says over 7000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine. And that, of course, does not include Ukrainian soldiers or Russian soldiers. Paul, these numbers are staggering, really, but I think it can be hard to comprehend such big numbers sometimes. So I wonder if you have

any specific stories over your time of reporting in the last year here that help you understand the human toll? Well, I think, you know, the people we met in the first few days of the war coming across the border, and again, as I mentioned, they were all, the vast majority were women because of the Ukraine government's decision early on to ban adult men from leaving. The people who left were women and children primarily. And of course, that meant that families were divided all over the place. That meant everybody was struggling on both sides of the border. So it was very, very difficult. But the people we saw in those early days really struck me in a lot of ways. You know, we showed us a pine cone he picked up to the border because she wanted a piece of Ukraine with her for the rest of her life. We saw other people who brought other personal mementos because photographs, books, other things that they

really wanted to keep with them because it was their only thing they had from home. And then we saw one woman, Natasha, on the second day, I think it was February 25th or 22nd, going back to Ukraine, tears in her eyes, dragging her suitcase back across the border because she had children in Ukraine. She'd been living in Poland, she had children in Ukraine, and she felt she could not leave them alone now that the war had started. So the stories we saw just in those first couple of days were very, very powerful. And of course, that just went on and has gone on in the months that follow. And even this week, we met a woman who is here with her four children, and her husband is being held captive in Mariupol. So, you know, the human tragedy just doesn't end.

Yeah. Mark, I'd like to bring you back into the conversation here. You're in Kyiv right now. You've spent a good amount of time in Kyiv and throughout Ukraine in the last year. But I wonder, Mark, what is the capital Kyiv? What is it like today, one year after the invasion began? Well, I think today has been surprisingly or thankfully very quiet. I know a lot of Ukrainians woke up early today, checked their phones, expecting news of an ominous sort.

The Ukrainian President Zelensky had forecast a few weeks ago that Russia would do something symbolic, as he called it, around the anniversary. And so there was a lot of concern that today would be one of those moments where we wake up to air raid sirens and news that a fleet of Iranian drones and Russian cruise missiles is heading for the capital. That hasn't happened. That said, the city is very quiet. There have not been any mass public gatherings of the sort you might expect.

The largest crowd I saw was a lineup to buy a new Ukrainian stamp that's been issued commemorating some graffiti that the British artist Banksy had done in the shattered town of Borodyanka north of Kiev. So there was an air of apprehension this morning. And then Mr. Zelensky has made some public appearances, as I said. And, you know, it's war. You can't predict what's going to happen from one day to the next. And thankfully, it's been a quiet one here in Ukraine. Mark, of course, as I said, you've been covering this for the last year. In your reporting and coverage of this conflict, has there been anything that surprised you? Or maybe I can say what

surprised you the most about how this war and this conflict has actually played out? Every now and again, and I did this today, I walk around Kiev and I remember the early hours and days of the war and how fearful everyone was that this massive Russian army was about to strike Ukraine. And I remember leaving Kiev a few days after the start of the war because we decided it was probably unsafe to stay. And we, you know, feeling I'm never going to see this city that I've spent so much time in over the past 20 years. This is, I'm leaving it and I'll probably never be able to come back here because I'm, you know, under Russian occupation.

I couldn't see us being allowed to report from here safely. And then, you know, the way this war has gone and how different it was from the idea that we would have, you know, a three-day war, that Russia would quickly knock down the Ukrainian army and install a puppet government here in Kiev. All of that proved dramatically wrong. And I think,

you know, we've gone from that prediction to seeing the U.S. president taking a train to the Capitol this week, to seeing Mr. Zelensky walking around the center of Kyiv today. That is all very, very surprising when we pause and think back to what we were expecting at the start of this conflict, or rather, at the start of the full-scale invasion. This conflict's been going on for much longer than one year, of course. And so that's the biggest surprise for you. I was just going to say, when you say it's been going on for longer than a year, you're referring to Crimea, which was annexed in 2014? Of course, and every Ukrainian gets quite annoyed

when people refer to this as the first anniversary, because this country has, part of it's been under occupation since 2014, not just the annexation of Crimea, but the conflict in Donbass. Now, for nine years, there have been Russian-backed forces controlling part of two other provinces of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, and 14,000 people died in that conflict over the eight years that preceded this wider invasion. Of course, things have gotten dramatically worse in the last year. The numbers of people who've been killed

has grown dramatically since then. Entire cities have been destroyed. So this is a different phase of the conflict. But every Ukrainian that I've met has always taken pains to point out that their country has been at war for nine years, not for one. Paul, I want to ask you the same question. In your reporting and your coverage here, what has surprised you about how this conflict has played out?

I think what strikes me the most is just how people adapt to circumstances. You know, when I was in Kiev early on, everybody was petrified of air raid sirens and, you know, was running to shelters. And even here in Poland, people were afraid that there was going to be attacks and missile attacks and invasion from the north. But then people just adapt

and people just become used to these kinds of things and they go about their daily lives. Here in Warsaw or in Poland, you know, I go to shelters, and I look at the conditions people are living in, and they're living their lives. They're carrying on. They're just, you know, they don't want to be there. They'd love to be back home, but they're making do,

and they're making their way through their lives. You know, we met a woman this week living in a two-room apartment with four children, another woman living in a two-room apartment with four children, another woman living in a two-room apartment with her two children. They share the living room and their daughter takes the bedroom. The other woman, three of them in the living room, two sons in the bedroom. I mean, it's just an impossible situation for them, but they make do. They work as a hairdresser. They're working at McDonald's. They're working as cleaners. They're doing the best they can to carry on. And it's just the adaptability, and I guess it's just the human drive and the perseverance that everybody has

deep down within them that really comes out at a time like this. Yeah. In case you're just joining us, this is our one-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine. We're talking to two of our correspondents, Paul Waldie, who's in Warsaw, Poland, and Mark McKinnon, who's in Kiev in Ukraine. And we were a little late getting started with the tech stuff. So we may end up going a little bit longer with Mark. I know, Paul, you have things to do actually to report on there. So you may need to drop off a little bit earlier, but we may end up going a little past the 45 minute mark that we set out initially. I also want to remind the audience, anyone listening, you can send in your questions,

and we will put them to our correspondents. So you can email them to audience at globeandmail.com. You can see that on the screen there. Or you can send them to us via Twitter, and we will ask those to both Mark and Paul. Paul, I want to ask you something else, just because I'm conscious of your time here. I want to ask you about, I guess, the act of covering the war as a correspondent, because I can imagine it must be pretty grueling, of course, to see the devastation, to speak to the

people affected by all of this. Um, but, but as a correspondent, you often have to put yourself in a, in a vulnerable position to do this job, uh, both physically in a dangerous situation, but also emotionally too. Uh, can I ask you what has been the most difficult situations that you've had to deal with in covering this war? Well, I don't think I'm not going to pretend to be some kind of a war correspondent on the front line or anything like that. We don't do that kind of reporting. So, I mean, it's basically been for me, myself, it's basically been more the human story. It's basically been going to places like Bucha, like Arpin, you know, months later and seeing how people are living and seeing them living in buildings that are still half standing, you know, apartment buildings that have basically been

blown apart. And there's still people living in there waiting for help, waiting for somebody to come and help them repair them. I mean, sure. Yeah. It's difficult to see these kinds of things and to report on these kinds of things, but nothing compared to what these people are going through. So I can't even begin to, to imagine living there all the time. I can come and go. I can go in and out of that country on my Canadian passport as many times as I want. Most of the men there can't, and a lot of the women who haven't left aren't going to. So it's very, very difficult. I think it's emotionally draining for all of them. I don't know how people in our heave who are living in buildings that are

half standing get through the winter, you know, and I don't know how people are still in some buildings in Bucha that have yet to be repaired in Arpin are getting through the winter. And even in Lviv, places like that, that are considered relatively safe, still, you know, there's power outages, there's water shortages, things like that. And I think it's just very, very hard. And even here in Poland, the border communities of Rzeszów and Seamus, as they deal with, how do we cope with 300,000, 400,000 children in our school system? How do we cope with thousands and thousands of new people registering with doctors and registering at hospitals? How do we cope with social assistance

for tens of thousands of people? Imagine if that was in Canada, if you're in Toronto, and you suddenly had 300,000 foreigners arrive in your school day one who can't speak the language. I mean, it's a huge challenge for a country at any level, and I think you're seeing it on both sides of the border, massive challenges that are going to go on for months and years to come. Mark, same question to you there. What's been, I guess, the most difficult situation that you've had to face in covering this war? You've been in a lot of different places. We spent those the first, I remember, 265 days ago

the war began for my colleagues and I with the first air raid sirens over Kiev and just sort of diving down into shelters and being very fearful when we emerged of what might have happened to the people who were there. And we ended up moving to a little dacha, dacha, like a country house on the outside of the Capitol, because we thought, you know,

as the predictions were, the Russian army is going to be surrounding key within 72 hours or what have you. And then we, our driver for very understandable reasons, uh, dropped us off at this country car, but an hour's drive from Kiev and said,

I quit. I'm that you guys are crazy. I'm going home to be with my family and you guys can, you know, carry on from here. So we were left at this country cottage outside of Kyiv, Adacha with food for about 24 hours and no car. And this country cottage ended up being located by, because not things that are not on tourist maps, between a military airport and an oil refinery, both of which got repeatedly bombed through the 72 hours that we were there. And just the number of times that we had to sort of dive to the floor and hug our luggage

and wondering what on earth we got ourselves into, while Anton Skiba, our photographer, shopped online for cars to get us out of that situation. So yeah, it began rather dramatically and in quite frightening fashion we had a couple of nights like that where you just you couldn't sleep uh this as paul says you know we can't compare the situations that we're into to ukrainians because we can come and go we do this even though i've been here a lot this year i do get to go home and sort of exhale and leave this behind on a semi-regular basis, whereas the Ukrainians are sort of living through all of this.

And, you know, most recently, Anton and I were reporting from Donbass, where it is really just a constant, the sound of artillery, the feeling of unsafety that comes with that, it's part of life there. And people, as Paul says, I have no idea how, some of these people who have just decided to stay in these cities, they're on the absolute front line because they think it's safer. Not safer, but they just can't imagine life anywhere else. And they think that somehow they'll be okay, whatever happens.

And so it's really remarkable, you know, the resilience of people to sort of keep living their lives in the face of, you know, absolutely terrifying events happening around them. And, you know, all you can do is, you know, salute the people who've got the courage to do that. Because as Paul said, we as Cor as corresponds, we can come and go. We do have an audience question that I'd like to put to both of you here. This is a question from John. He says, we've all heard the stories of how resilient the Ukrainian soldiers and people are having endured this war for the past year. Can each of you highlight a moment or an event that best epitomizes the resilience and determination of Ukrainians to see this war to the end at all costs. Paul, why don't we go to you here first? Is there something that comes to mind here? Well, I mean, again, I'd have to go back to the first few days of the conflict and the people we met. I've been working with a photojournalist from Poland for the last year, Anna Levinovich,

and we met people at a shelter that hadn't really been formed. It was a vacant, it was an empty storefront in the Seamus, which is a pretty right 10 kilometers from the border. All of these volunteers had shown up. They kind of put up some makeshift tables and were serving hot food and buses were arriving with people from the border. Nobody knew what was going on. And it was just that the handful of people we met who, all women, of course, and were saying to us just, you know, we're not going to stay here very long. We're going to go back. I'm determined to go back. I remember meeting one woman, she brought her house keys because I asked her, I said, what is the one thing you brought back with you,

brought with you to remind you of Ukraine? And she said, my house keys. And she showed them to me and she said, this is the key to my flat. This is the key to my front door. And yeah, I'm keeping them because I'm going back. And we met so many people like that who had brought not just mementos, photographs and things, but things that they really wanted to carry with them that would keep them connected to their country, but also something that they would take back with them because they were all, every single person was telling us that they were going to go back. And some have gone back. Many have gone back. Many have gone back to very, very dangerous places. We met people in Kiev at the bus station who were heading,

coming back from Poland, heading to Kharkiv and even further east because they just had enough. They couldn't stand living outside the country any longer and they were going home. And there's thousands, millions of people have actually returned to Ukraine, just some pretty dangerous places because they just cannot bear the thought of being outside of their country any longer.

We just saw some of those images that you referenced there, Paul. Those are really powerful images of the things that you choose to grab when you can't carry that many things, what you do choose to take with you out of the country. Paul, I know it's getting to 45 after a minute. It's okay. I can stick around for a bit because I was in touch with my colleague, Anna, who's at the demonstration. So she's going to keep me up to date and I should be able to make it a little bit longer. Yeah. Wonderful. Okay. So we'll continue with both of you for about another 15 minutes

or so here. So Mark, I will give the same question to you here. Is there anything that comes to mind when you think about the resilience and the determination of Ukrainians? Absolutely. One of the projects that my colleague Anton

and I took on over the first year of the conflict, first year of the wider invasion rather, was we decided to track, we had about 15 or 20 characters that we ended up writing about eight of them, just to keep meeting the same people again and again. And some of those characters, of course, were soldiers, civilians, in many cases, who'd just become soldiers on the first day of the war on February the 24th last year. And what was remarkable is those who we were meeting repeatedly, the soldiers, of course, several of them were injured, as you'd expect,

and this has been an absolutely violent, incredibly violent war, something that we haven't really seen in Europe since the Second World War, or at least since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. And one of our characters, one of the people we met on the first day, the war man named Dimitro, he ended up with a piece of shrapnel embedded in his head. He'd been fighting in the southern Hereson region in June, and he and his colleagues, sort of their position became exposed and mortar rounds were fired at them and a piece of a mortar shell became embedded in his head and while that would allow him uh to get a military exemption he

can leave the military now he could go to poland he could go anywhere he wants basically um when i met him again in december at the end of the uh conflict what he was trying to do was figure out how, with his reduced motor skills, you know, how he could get back in the fight, how he could return to his old role as a sniper. And another, you know, person we met with repeatedly was Mashi Nayem, who's, you know, sort of a semi-public character here in Ukraine, because his brother was a journalist who played a key role in instigating the 2014 Maidan revolution that overthrew the pro-Russian government here. And Mashi, who was a lawyer, again, somebody who you would never think of as a fighter,

he'd actually lost his eye. Again, this time on the Donbass front where he got into a car that there was a mine placed underneath the car that exploded and he lost his eye. And so he's having repeated surgeries right now trying to restore as much of his face as possible. And while I don't think he'll ever return to the front line, he's in Germany or was in Germany getting surgery last time I checked in on him. His goal is to come back to Ukraine and to be here. And he wants to work with veterans to normalize the idea that this is how Ukraine is going to look going forward. Some of the people here are going to have injuries. He wants to make that normal.

He doesn't wear a patch over his eye or anything like that. But it's just this defiant sort of, our country is going to look different than it did beforehand, but it's our country and we're not going to be chased out of it, even by a grievous injury, even with, obviously someone with injuries like his is exempted from the military and can travel abroad, but he's going to be coming back here. Just to continue on with this idea of the resilience, the determination of Ukrainians to keep this conflict, to not lose any territory in this conflict. Paul, I want to ask you here, Russia continues to ramp up its weapons production. It's drafted hundreds of thousands

of more soldiers in the last several months. But Ukraine is standing strong. The war has gone on for a year, though, now. Is a peace deal or a military win, is that likely from either side in the foreseeable future? No, it's not. I mean, and I don't think anybody's kidding themselves. Certainly not here in Poland. Nobody would expect this war to end anytime soon. Certainly, the Russians are showing no sign of Vladimir Putin. If anything, this week we've seen a ramping up of defiance and the fact that he's pretty much eliminated any hint of opposition in that country. There's nobody, there's no check and balance on him anymore at all.

So I can't really see any end to this war anytime soon. And, you know, what I find fascinating, of course, the people that don't get a lot of attention are the Russians who left Russia and who were in Ukraine and left Ukraine, who are actually dissidents, who are actually opponents of the Putin regime and the difficulty they've had in Western Europe, getting around, accessing their money, even getting a job. I talked to one guy here in Poland. He's Russian. He's been living in Poland for a while. He lost his job. You know, they went around the office and said, you're Russian.

Time to go. And I think it's a very strange situation he found himself in because he's a complete anti-Putin, completely against the war. And yet he's caught in this crossfire. Another guy, George, who was in Odessa and left with his wife. He's Russian. Has a Russian passport. Crossed into Germany. Got held for seven hours because the German police said, well, we don't do it. You are a security threat. And he said, look, I'm a refugee from Ukraine. And they said, well, maybe not. So

there are so many other stories to this conflict that don't get told. And the other one I have to mention is that we saw an awful lot of Africans who had been studying in Ukraine, and when they left, and we saw a busload of men, old males from Africa who left Ukraine on the second day of the war, second, third day of the war, and they were treated horribly, frankly, by both sides, by Ukrainian officials and by Polish officials. And these are the kinds of things, the ugliness that... It was hard to imagine that at the peak of a conflict like this, that racism could still be that pronounced. And it was horrible. These guys were the Ukrainian officials for days on end. When they finally left, the Polish officials rounded

them up, put them on buses. They had no idea where they were going and they were taken to separate shelters. So there's been a lot of ugliness on a lot of sides to this thing. And hopefully that will end when this war ends, and that will come at some point, but not soon. Mark, I want to ask you another audience question. This one's from Richard. And he's asking about, so what is needed to isolate Russia, or is there hope in somehow cooperating with Russia? If the West thinks Ukraine can negotiate with Russia, why have they not been successful to date in reaching agreements? So I guess the question is around negotiating with Russia. Is that something that people are talking about? No, and Mr. Zelensky at his press conference

today was asked a few different ways about negotiating with Russia and whether, you know, there was a way to achieve Ukraine's aims peacefully. And I don't, like Paul, I don't really actually see any room for that right now. Mr. Putin has put himself in quite a box by last fall, declaring that he had annexed to the Russian Federation the provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhia, in addition to Crimea, because under the Russian Constitution, it's a criminal offense to concede any Russian territory. So now he has claimed territory that Russia doesn't even control. They only control a fraction of Zaporizhia and Kherson in particular. And so now he legally cannot negotiate away these territories. At the same time, Mr. Zelensky, the mood in Ukraine right now is, you know, especially after the success of the

counteroffensives last fall in the Kharkiv region and then in Kherson, he would be out of office the next morning, as popular as he is right now, if he signed a peace deal and negotiated away any Ukrainian territory. And I would include Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea in that, the territories that Russia's controlled for the last nine years. There's really, there's just no space on either side right now for negotiations, which makes this a war of attrition. And that's where things get complicated, because despite all of the West's efforts to isolate Russia, Russia is not being isolated by India, by China, by Turkey, by Brazil, by South Africa. These countries have increased their trade

with the Russian Federation and have allowed Russians to continue to live a fairly normal life, those who have not been drafted, of course. And the economy is faring much better than people expected a year into these sanctions a year into this full-scale invasion and so the idea that there's no pressure right now domestically on mr putin to make a deal um there is as paul said there is no domestic opposition

that's still inside the country and so what you have is um a war of attrition and russia has a population many times the size of Ukraine. It's starting to mobilize that population, draft soldiers, hand them weapons. Now, these soldiers are obviously not very well trained. They're not professional troops. But on the Ukrainian side,

I have met soldiers who have fought in the Battle of Kiev, in the Battle of Kharkiv, in the Battle of Kherson. They're now fighting in Donbass. These are the same troops fighting again and again and again. And they'reedison. They're now fighting in Donbass. These are the same troops fighting again and again and again, and they're getting

tired. No one's saying that out loud yet because the line is, we cannot stop fighting because this is our land, this is my family that lives here, and that's true. The motivation remains very high on the Ukrainian side, but after a year

of constant battle, even those who don't have serious injuries, the number of Ukrainians who talk about the concussions they've suffered from being near artillery, I mean, this is going to weigh in at some point, the sheer size of the Russian Federation versus the sheer size of Ukraine. And that's why I think Mr. Putin believes time is on his side.

The West has been incredibly supportive for a year. Can it do that for five years? Will it do that for five years? And that's why Mr. Zelensky spends a lot of his time trying to rally international support to make sure that the affection for Ukraine right now in NATO, in the European Union, in the West in general does not crack. Last couple of questions here, I think, before we wrap up. Paul, I'm going to ask you this one. When you think of all the things that you've witnessed and reported on in the first year of the war here, I wonder what sticks with you the most. So I guess if you can think about 10, 20 years down the line, what do you think you'll remember the most?

I think I'll definitely remember Tatiana, the woman with the pine cone. I mean, it was just such a remarkable sight because we were, I think this was on February 26th, standing in this shelter that hadn't even formed yet in this kind of grassy patch. And she came rushing over. She said, you know, she started talking about the war. She started talking about why are they trying to kill us? Why are they doing this to us? And she told us her story of leaving her city in northern Ukraine and walking the last few kilometers and picking up this pine cone. And she apologized for the cups of her sleeve that you can see there for being dirty. And, you know, Anna took that picture of her. And her story just really touched me because it wasn't a bracelet or a book or a photograph that she wanted to bring with her.

It was that plane coat. And, you know, we tracked down some of these people after that, and we kept in touch with them over the last year. But Tatiana is the one person I haven't been able to reach. I'm still trying. I'm still trying to find out where she went and whether she made it back home or not. She told me she was a music teacher. And I'm going to see her again. And I'd love to see her again to find out if she still has that pie cut. And I bet you she does.

Mark, same question to you. A decade, two decades from now, what do you think you'll remember most about this year? I think the story that sticks in my brain is the story of a little girl named Anastasia Khitsenko. And to put this in context, the day before, I had been covering what had happened in the city of Izium, which had just been liberated from Russian control after months of occupation. And Anton and I found ourselves at a mass grave or at least a very informal cemetery where they had 445 bodies were discovered. They're just these brown crosses. And, you know, to be, you know, not to be too callous about this, but I'd been to places like this before in Iraq and in other conflicts.

And it's always awful, but it's history that's being exhumed in front of us. And you're seeing these bodies come out of the ground. You think at least these families are going to find out what happened to their loved ones, their father, their sister, their brother, as awful as it is. But I think, you know, being there obviously took something of a toll because the next day Anton and I were working on, we were going to do a story about how Russia had been starting then in October to target Ukrainian

civilian infrastructure. And we'd heard about an explosion in a town called Chukhuev, and we'd been told that the Russians had struck an electricity station there. And so we drove there, and we found that the missile had actually missed the electricity station, and then it demolished a house right next to it. And there was one casualty. And that casualty ended up being an 11-year-old girl named Anastasia Hritsenko. And just the emotion, the weight of it all, I started talking to her father, Andri.

And as a journalist, sometimes you try and connect with the person you're talking to just to get them to open up and to tell their story and i told andre that my own little girl was 12 at the time and that i could maybe i that i couldn't imagine what he was going through and then andre started crying and i started crying for the first time in this war and um just looking at the pictures even now it's it's very emotional because you know anastasia her house when we went to go visit what would remain to it there was just a soccer ball there was some notebooks that could have been my little girl, could have been anybody's little girl. And it really just struck me that day. It was an individual death.

There have been tens of thousands of people killed in this conflict on all sides. It has been, there are so many horrors in places like Bucha, in Mariupol, in Izium, as I mentioned. And sometimes you just have to look in the face of one of those victims to make that number make a little more sense and to feel a little bit of what this country has gone through over the last year. Yeah, I can imagine that certainly would be a story that would stick with anyone. We'll have to end it there. We're almost at the top of the hour here. But I want to thank both of you for joining me, Paul Waldian in Warsaw, Poland, and Mark McKinnon in Kiev. Thank you both so much for

taking the time to be here and do this today. Thank you for having us. This event involved a number of people at The Globe, but special thanks to Patrick Dell, The Globe's Senior Visual Editor, Rebecca Zaman, our Audience Growth Manager, and Michael Snyder, Deputy Head of Programming. Thank you as well to the amazing audience and programming teams here at the Globe who helped make this event possible. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.