The NPR Politics Podcast - What Natasha Romanenko Experienced When Russian Troops Occupied Her Town

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

In Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, Natasha Romanenko lived in her root cellar for a month to avoid Russian soldiers. In the final days of the occupation, Natasha says she ventured out to milk her cow when she was briefly held at gunpoint by a Russian soldier who accused her of scouting Russian troop locations.When Russian forces invaded and occupied her town, according to Ukrainian officials, Russia targeted civilian areas and left hundreds missing. Now, President Biden is accusing Putin and his forces of war crimes — including genocide.This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Scott Detrow, and senior political editor and correspondent Ron Elving.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It is 12.10pm on Thursday, April 14th. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, Editor-Correspondent. And today on the podcast, we're going to talk about the latest from Ukraine. We'll be talking about war as well as alleged war crimes. So a warning for anyone who might be listening with kids or is not in a place to hear this content. Scott, you just got back from a reporting trip in Ukraine. You were there for about two weeks.

Talk to us about where you went and the things that you were reporting on. Yeah, I was there with all things considered. And we really went all over the western part of the country. That was the original plan. We spent a lot of time in Lviv in a city called Ivano-Frankivsk. We weren't planning to go to Kiev because at the time, you know, the trip began, there was a lot of fierce fighting just north of Kiev in the towns north of the city. But as I was there, the Russians drastically pulled back. They ended up withdrawing all of the troops that they had been trying to get to the capital of Ukraine with. And that created a condition where NPR thought it was safe to go there and to get a firsthand look at the just total and complete devastation and talk to people who hid in their homes for a month about what it was like, and to be able to do that reporting in the immediate aftermath of fighting before things start to be cleaned up to just get a full sense of how terrible this all was. When you went to those areas that had been under occupation, where the

Russians had drawn back, you spoke to a lot of people there. What did they tell you? I spent a lot of time in a town called Boryanka. It's near the town of Bucha, which has gotten international headlines for just the alleged atrocities that have been discovered there. We actually did drive through, you know, just past Bucha on the way to Borodyanka. And when I got there, I saw apartment building after apartment building just totally destroyed, demolished by Russian tanks, Russian rockets firing directly on these apartment buildings. And it was this interesting moment. We got um, we got there, we were in a convoy. Uh, it was me, uh, and two producers from All Things Considered, Noah Caldwell and Kat Lonsdorf. And we were with, uh, an interpreter and fixer as well named Ross, who, who we would not be able to report without. And we pulled onto the main drag of the city and humanitarians were handing out food and they were in front of us, calling out the windows, you know, as soon as we pulled onto the main street of town saying there's

food here and people came to the truck to get food. And a woman named Natasha started talking to us. And when we told her we were reporters, we didn't even have to ask another question. She just started telling us what the last month of her life was like. And it was really upsetting to hear. You can see there are holes where they were shooting directly in our window while we were hiding there. Natasha has stuffed paper into the bullet holes to keep the cold out. The Russians arrived in Boryanka in the early days of the war.

Ukrainian forces were nearby, too. Natasha and her daughter's family spent a month hiding in a cramped, cold root cellar. What did we eat? Mostly potatoes. I had some spare oil, then I have a cow, so I had milk. And I went to my neighbor, I gave her some milk, she gave me some other things, some cheese. So this is how we survived. Our cow saved us.

Natasha searches for the key to the cellar. As she fumbles for the lock, emotions wash over her. She says it's hard to talk about, to find the words. She unlocks the door and takes us downstairs. The cellar is mostly filled with crates of potatoes. At night, Natasha says they'd lay a carpet over the crates and try to sleep on top of that, keeping warm under all the blankets they had. The Russians left Boryanka on March 31st. In the final days of the occupation, Natasha says a Russian soldier confronted her.

He thought she was scouting Russian troops' locations and sharing them with the Ukrainian army. I was in my garden milking my cow, and the guy, he shouted to me. He said, hey, old woman, come here. And he started to accuse me that every time you go outside, somebody is shelling, somebody is destroying our columns. He was saying that it was me who did that. But I said, no, I never spent time outside, except in that moment when I needed to milk my cow. I'm not spending my time doing anything bad. She says he took her out to the middle of the road and pointed a gun at her head. He was threatening me. And what did I say to him? I didn't wish him anything bad. I said I had just one wish, that he would see my face for the rest of his days, so he would never forget what he's

done here. The soldier spoke to someone else on the radio. Then, Natasha says, he let her go. Ron, one of the things that's so striking from this story, and we should note this was just a short portion of a longer piece that Scott did, is that it really illuminates something that we've seen in reporting over and over and over from Ukraine, in that Russian forces do seem to be targeting civilians, and that is outside of sort of the normal rules of war. That is a critical question. And we should be clear that the acts, the crimes, the killings, the destruction, that's what really matters. That's what is the reality of all this. But in terms of the international response, in terms of what other countries are going to do and say, there you do get a distinction that is important between merely opposing a war, opposing the brutality of any war, and being motivated by the crimes against humanity, as they have been called, that are entailed in direct targeting of civilians. So to be clear that the Russians repelled at the battlefield where they were unable to overcome the Ukrainian army and the united opposition of

the Ukrainian people, they then turned on civilian targets and said, well, then if we can't win on the battlefield, we're just going to force such a bloodletting that the leaders of Ukraine will have to surrender, will have to knuckle under. And that deliberate targeting of civilians, that is what triggers an entirely different set of international laws, not just the Geneva Conventions, but the precedents set by the Nuremberg Trials after World War II and others. All right, let's take a quick break, And we'll talk more about this in a second. And we're back. And Scott, one thing I'm curious about is how the Ukrainian people you spoke to talk about Russians in this moment, and if they see a differentiation between the military and the leadership of Vladimir Putin and the Russian people.

You know, one thing I did notice, and I think it got, it became a stronger sentiment as time went on when I was there, as all of the details of what had happened in Bucha and cities like Boryanka became clear, was, and it makes sense, just this deep, deep, deep times a thousand hatred of Russian soldiers and what they're doing. And something that I noticed a lot of people saying, whether I were talking to soldiers or just talking to everyday civilians, was Russians aren't human. They're inhuman. They're below human. And even President Volodymyr Zelensky said this several times. He said that in a speech to, I believe it

was Finland's parliament, and he said it again after this horrible news that Russian rockets had attacked a train station filled with families trying to evacuate a city in the east. And it just goes to show how quickly people's perceptions of each other changes in a time of war. to me in watching this story unfold and the U.S. response to it is just how important the precision of language is when you are talking about these matters, not just from a diplomatic sense, but also from a legal one. I'm thinking of President Biden when he made a comment about how Putin had to go and it was sort of sent these shockwaves like, is this an actual change of U.S. policy position, which the White House kind of had to walk back a little bit. Biden using the term genocide, which is a very specific term, the idea that Putin is a war criminal. I mean, these things carry tremendous weight when it's coming from the president. That's right. And it's extraordinarily unusual for a U.S. president

to use that kind of language. But it is not that unusual for President Biden. He is a person who is known for saying what comes to him, particularly when he feels passionate about it. And in this instance, I think there's also, let's bear in mind, in addition to the legal meanings and the diplomatic meanings, there's also a rhetorical issue here in the sense of being persuasive to people and staying in consonance with the language being used by Biden's Ukrainian counterpart, President Zelensky. He is calling these things genocide and war crimes. He has been using those terms before Joe Biden has. And to some degree, you could describe what Biden is doing as solidarity with Zelensky and with certainly

the desire not to be seen as contradicting him or in some sense, getting into an argument with him about the use of those words. So that's another consideration for the White House. But the White House and the State Department do kind of consistently say, well, you understand, that's the president expressing his feelings. And we have not changed our official position. We have not made a determination or done an investigation to see whether or not this fits the historic and diplomatic and legal definition of war crime or genocide. And Sue, I'll just say, as these twists and turns would happen, a lot of Ukrainians would conversationally ask me, I don't understand, is he in charge or not? Is he the president or not? If he said this, why are people saying, oh, he doesn't this. But Ron, you just wrote a column sort of looking at this question of, are people prosecuted for any of these types of crimes, war crimes? And there is some historical precedent here.

That's right. The Geneva Conventions go back more than a century. And after World War II, we had the Nuremberg Trials. There have also been other war crimes trials since then. Most recently, the International Court of Justice at The Hague, which is the United Nations highest court, commenced a trial just this month against the accused leader of the Janjaweed militia from the Darfur region of Sudan. That war that goes back almost 20 years now began in 2003. One precedent people are likely to look to would be the trials for the Serbian crimes that were committed in the war in Kosovo back in the 1990s. The national leader there, Slobodan Milosevic, was eventually

brought to trial. And though he died in 2006 in a trial that had gone on for years, he was brought to justice in an international court. There was Rwanda, there was Cambodia, and there were crime trials after those enormities took place in our recent history, but not always with what could be called even marginally satisfactory results. Oftentimes, the most responsible parties were already dead or not able to be brought to justice or brought to trial. So Scott, you said that there's some confusion when you talk to Ukrainians about the US posture here. What did they say they want from the US at this point?

More weapons. Yeah. More weapons. Well, they're getting some of those, right? Not enough when you talk to Ukrainians about it, though. And that was More weapons. Well, they're getting some of those, right? Not enough when you talk to Ukrainians about it, though. And that was just such a clear, clear trend from every part of the country I was in. And especially when people would find out that I'm a White House reporter, they would say, well, why isn't Joe Biden doing more? And I was like, well, you know,

here's what I report. I can't really tell you. Like, I don't have any information. He's not calling you and telling you. poor, I can't really tell you, like, I don't have any information. Yeah, yeah. But they I mean, Zelensky has been clear for months, he wants he wants a no fly zone. Biden has been clear that that's absolutely not going to happen, because that would amount to a direct war with Russia. You have seen the types of weapons that the US is providing both directly and indirectly, kind of get bigger and bigger and bigger. But what the Ukrainians I talked to said they want and need is tanks, is missile defense systems, is ways to go after Russian warships. And, you know, it does make sense, you know, when I say, well, the thinking

for the White House is they don't want to escalate this into a broader world war. When the war is happening in your country, when the the war is happening in your country, when the cities are being destroyed in your country, you can see how that's kind of more of a theoretical argument than it is for the rest of the world, even though there's obviously a major difference between a war in one country and the concerns of nuclear war that would be very real very quickly if this did become a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. All right, I think we should leave it there for today. Scott, thanks for your reporting and I'm glad you're home safe.

Amen to that. It's good to be back on the podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, Editor and Correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.