Dispatch from Ukraine: "The War of Information is even More Important than the War on the Battlefield"
“[The Russians] always claim to free us and to help us. They free us from our houses, schools, hospitals, from our families, from everything. They want to make us completely free, and maybe even from our bodies.” - Oksana Hutnyk Nancy here. It is the 29th of September, 2024, and I'm going to take us back a few years to, February 24th, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine and started a war that is ongoing. We are going to hear from two people in Lviv, Ukraine, and by way of introduction, I'd thought I’d tell you how I know them. I wound up in Ukraine on March 4th of 2022, a little over a week after the war started. I got over there simply because I wanted to go. Michael Moynihan of The Fifth Column podcast was then at Vice News. He was going to be heading over and I said, Hey, can I tag along with your crew? He said, sure. But then his trip was delayed. I had already bought my ticket, so I headed over alone. I'm not a war correspondent, and I was only in Ukraine for about a week, so I'm not telling you some super-secret anything, but it is the case that you learn very quickly what the fog of war means, because nobody really knows what's going on. Modes of communication had been cut. I don't speak Ukrainian. It was a tense time, obviously; the country's being invaded. I wound up in Warsaw and had no idea how I was getting into Ukraine. You can't take a bus, you can't take a plane, you can't drive over. But I got a DM from a woman on Twitter; I'll call her T. She was from the area around Lviv, Ukraine. She lived in Portland, Oregon now and had been following my reporting from that city in 2020 and 2021. She contacted me and said, Listen, I have a friend in Lviv. If you can get there, I'm sure you can hook up with her. I'm like, that sounds great. I bought what I thought was a bus ticket to the border, to Przemyśl in Poland. It turned out to be a train ticket. On the train, I met a Ukrainian who was coming from Holland. Vitaly had been working there and was going back to Odessa. He had to. All Ukrainian men between certain ages were being called back to fight, and those in-country were not allowed to leave. The elderly and some women and children were allowed to get out. Anyway, Vitaly was also going back because he had family in Odessa. They'd been staying in his house; his sister and nieces and nephews. He's got to go back, first of all to fight, and also to see how they were doing. So we met, he spoke pretty good English, and we get to Przemyśl and it’s a madhouse. We're not very far from the border, probably about 10 miles, but it's pretty much the middle of the night, and while there are some cabs, it’s a bit sketchy and what are they going to do? Take you to the border and drop you off in the woods? This doesn't sound so smart. Anyway we get off the train and walk past all this stuff that's already been donated. There are baby carriages, there's food, there's clothing, just piles of it. We walk past it all and to an area where there are a lot of people waiting, mostly men, mostly Ukrainian, coming from different parts of Europe. They've been working in Spain and other countries. There are a few Americans, these guys with an attitude like, We're going to go over and we're going to help the Ukrainians. I don't think things worked out well for a lot of them. My friend Antonio Hitchens wrote a really good piece about them for the New York Review of Books, you can read that here. Anyway, I don't know what's going on, nor does Vitaly, and we are just waiting in this line of a couple hundred people. It's getting really cold, too. I went to Ukraine with just a child-sized knapsack, it had my computer a warm jacket that folded to about the size of a deck of cards and a tiny bit of clothing; I didn't pack much because I didn’t know how I was going to get around, if I were going to be on the back of a motorcycle or something. Anyway, I'm freezing; we're all pretty much freezing as we watch hundreds of people come out o
