The Situation in Ukraine From Our Man on the Scene: ‘Sages of the Sun’ (Episode #3)

In this episode of “Sages of the Sun,” we sit down with our correspondent in Ukraine, Caleb Larson, to get his reflections from the past month in Lviv, Odessa, Mykolayiv, and Kyiv.Episode 3 – 3/24/2022 – Our Man in Kyiv, Caleb LarsonCaroline Vik: Caleb, I’m eager to hear. You’ve been there for about a month. You’ve traveled to a bunch of different cities. I’m sure you’ve met a million people. I’m very eager and interested to hear what it’s been like. Why don’t you just tell us your reflections thus far and we’ll take it from there.Caleb Larson: Sure, sounds good. Thanks. Today marks one month. What is today? March 7th, I believe. So I got here exactly one month ago. I’ve spent about a week and a half in Lviv in the west. I went south to Odessa for probably five or six days. I took the train over there, the night train, which is a pretty interesting experience. It was an old Soviet Express type of train. [I spent] one day in Mykolaiv next to Odessa. That was a city that was being actively hit while we were there. It’s a little bit hard to put into words. Today we’re in two satellite cities of Kyiv, the capital. They’re called Irpin and Bucha. They were under Russian occupation for roughly a week. Russian troops left a couple of days ago. It seemed to be kind of a hasty retreat. It seems like some went north to Belarus, to the Kyiv region that borders Belarus. Some went to eastern Ukraine. But yeah like you said, there’s a lot of youngsters here who have chosen to stay. There’s a lot of older people who don’t really have a place to go or aren’t physically fit to leave. You know, they’re pretty attached to where they live so they’ve chosen to stay. Yeah it’s been very interesting. A lot of sad and heavy days, but there’s also been some pretty lighthearted moments as well which we can probably talk about once we get into it.Vik: So currently you’re speaking to us from a car on your way to Kyiv. Where are you coming from?Larson: That’s right. I’m sitting in the back seat of a car. I’m with a couple of photographers and we spent a day in Irpin.Vik: Who’s in the car?Larson: Just a couple of photographers that I’ve met on the journey. One guy that I met in Lviv and another guy that the two of us met a couple of days ago in Kyiv. We kind of teamed up, put our resources together, put our noggins together, and found a fixer. So yeah, we spent the day outside of Kyiv and these two satellite cities. We took photos and talked to different people. We walked around. Vik: Tell us what you saw. One of those places is where one of the massacres happened recently, correct?Larson: Yeah. I think details are still kind of coming out. It’ll probably change day to day but it seems like — so both of those places were under Russian occupation for I think about a week or a couple days less and we talked today to a bunch of people. We went to a church in Irpin. There’s a big church ground there that the priest has turned into a sort of makeshift, kind of mass grave for a lot of people that have been killed. So we got to go there. There’s basically a couple of long trenches just dug into the church grounds. There’s body bags in there. Some people don’t have body bags, but it’s full of people. There were a couple of older women that we talked to. They were sitting outside and they told us, you know, about their experience. One lady we talked to, she turns 82 this month — she was pretty active and mentally sharp — she couldn’t really make a big journey and get out of there so she just related her experience of what it was like when the Russians were here. A lot of people have kind of said the same thing that they kind of had a party, they got drunk, they shot things up. There’s a lot of people it seems who have just kind of been summarily executed. Vik: Sort of without purpose and just as part of some sort of rampage, or in a methodical way? What are the indications? Larson: A little bit of both. There were a lot of people who didn’t want to talk to us, which is totally understandable. They’re trying to put the pieces of their life back together and I can totally relate to that. If I was in their situation and some journalist walked up to me I would want nothing to do with that. But the people who we did talk to, it was kind of a mix of military-age males and just sort of random, possibly drunken nonsense. It was a little unclear. I think there’s just a lot of drunken chaos going on. Vik: Were there stories of sexual assault from anyone you spoke to? What else did they say?Larson: Not from the people that we talked to. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There’s reports from other parts of Ukraine and there are reports from Irpin and Bucha of that happening. We didn’t run into any younger females. It’s mostly older folks and a lot of soldiers that are there at the moment. I think most people who are young and mobile decided to leave and probably haven’t returned yet. We didn’t personally talk to any people who have experienced that, but I know that that has happened.Vik: You came from Odessa two days ago, is that correct? Take us backwards on your journey.Larson: Sure. We’re In Kyiv right now. We arrived late 2 days ago so not last night but the night before. And we were in Lviv. We’ve just been in Lviv for a couple of days. Prior to that we had been in Odessa.Vik: What’s the mood in Lviv these days? Has it changed since you were originally there?Larson: Yeah, Lviv is way far into the Ukrainian west — I think it’s about 40 kilometers from the Polish border which in miles is, gosh I don’t know. Don’t quote me on this, but it’s probably 20 or 25 miles from the border — so for the majority of this conflict it’s been a very safe area. There’s air raid sirens pretty much everyday. Most of them don’t amount to anything, but there are occasional strikes in the city. I think a lot of people at this point are kind of realizing that the war has shifted gears from a focus on Kyiv and parts in the northeast to a war in the southeast. It seems like a lot of people are leaving Lviv to come back to Kyiv or wherever they are from. People are pouring into the city. The mayor, the other day, kind of made an announcement. He said, “Don’t come to Kyiv. It’s still not safe.” It seems that people are coming back to where they’re from. Long story short. People are kind of trying to live a normal life again.Vik: Tell us about Odessa.Larson: Odessa is great. They call it the “pearl of the black sea.” It’s kind of a resort area. There’s a lot of temperate climates. I believe it’s Ukraine’s biggest port city so there’s a lot of traffic that comes in and out of Odessa. Ukraine is a big agricultural country so something like 80 percent of Ukrainian grain flows out of Odessa to other parts of the world. It’s been a cultural mixing place for a long time. There’s a lot of French and Greek and Italian influences. You see that a lot in the architecture and street names and different monuments and things. That being said, it’s under wraps. It’s kind of a wartime situation. There’s a lot of sand bags, a lot of checkpoints, barbed wire, tank traps, soldiers, and camouflage netting. In the beginning, people seemed very nervous. We were told over and over again “no photographs, no photographs, no photographs.” I think lately it’s kind of loosened up a little bit. When I left some of the defensive fortification, fortifications were being taken down and moved around. It seems like the city is maybe trying to have some sort of resemblance to normal life. That being said, there were a couple of missile strikes the other day. It’s a little bit unclear if that was just to terrorize the city or if those portend to maybe a greater offensive later. I’m not quite sure. It’s a little bit too early to say.Seth Lipsky: There’s a naval blockade in Odessa, right?Larson: Yeah, there’s Russian warships. They’re just over the horizon. You can’t see them, but they’re there. They fire off missiles occasionally. The Ukrainians have also mined the area surrounding the harbor so they both sort of have each other by the throat. The Russian ships can’t get in, but Ukrainian ships also can’t leave so it’s kind of a stalemate.Lipsky: What happened to the commerce? Isn’t there a lot of grain and stuff moved through Odessa?Larson: Normally. yeah. Something like 80 percent of Ukrainian grain flows through there, but there’s nothing moving there. The port is not in operation. There is nothing happening there.Lipsky: So what’s going to happen to all that food?Larson: I don’t know. It’s a good question. When I was there I talked to a couple of guys who have different import-export businesses. One of the guys, a pretty sharp businessman, was able to kind of transition to overland shipping via truck, but you know, that doesn’t work for everything. It’s a heck of a lot more expensive than by boat. If you’re shipping grain to the Middle East or Asia, you can’t just ship it by truck. It has to go by boat. So a lot of European imports from Ukraine, it seems like, could potentially be met at least on the agricultural side if things [are transported] via truck. Things elsewhere, further, seem much more difficult.Lipsky: We hear all these reports about war crimes. What is your sense of that? Do you think these killings that have taken place in some of the Russian occupied neighborhoods of Kyiv and its surroundings were a premeditated war crime like a soldier killing an unarmed person with hands tied behind their back or firing onto a crowd of civilians, or is it killings in the fog of war? What’s your gut reaction? I’m interested.Larson: I think a lot of Russian soldiers came in genuinely believing that they were going to be fighting a bunch of Ukrainian Nazis. Obviously that’s not the case in the towns we were just in, Irpin and Bucha, the satellite cities of Kyiv. They’re not particularly large. There’s just not a lot going on there. They’re small, sleepy, residential towns. I think when some of these Russian troops realize there’s no uniformed Nazi Ukranian soldiers, they just turn to “Well they got to be here. We’ve been told they’d be here.” We’ve heard that some military-aged males, so 18 to late 50-ish, were sought out to interrogate, beat up, shoot, and kill. One lady we talked to told us that some Russian soldiers basically occupied her house and called up her husband who was in that age range and shot him. It’s a little unclear, but seemingly just because he was in that age range. War crimes are certainly happening. There are unarmed civilian people that have nothing to do with military affairs. They’re just living their lives and being shot for being Ukrainian and in some cases being of military age.Vik: What’s your sense of the mood, Caleb, of most of the people you meet? What’s their mindset? How are they thinking of the future? Are they kind of surviving day to day or are they following peace negotiations or discussions? Do they want to see an agreement? Do they want to fight until the end? Any color on that?Larson: My strong impression is that people are not focused on anything besides the doors of their house or whatever they’re living in. A lot of people don’t have houses. They’re not really thinking about anything except tomorrow. We went earlier, there was a really large neighborhood Kindergarten and the basement had been turned into a bomb shelter. Something like 400 or 500 people had been living there. There was an older gentleman, probably 55 or 60, and he was still living there. He had a little candle and there’s no electricity, or gas, or power in the town. He’s just sitting there and he was just kind of telling us, you know, “This is where I live.” A lot of people did not want to talk to us, which is totally, totally fine and totally understandable. You know, people are just trying to get food and people are just trying to live. There was a group of guys that we saw who were lifting the hoods of all the destroyed cars. All the cars in these neighborhoods were totally destroyed, but they were looking for batteries that they could use to charge cell phones, or to charge flashlights, or other kinds of electronics. I think people in these places don’t really have any awareness or interest in the bigger picture because, you know, they’re living the worst of it right now. A lot of people have had a lot of family members suffer or die because of what has happened.Vik: What’s the broader mood, shelter, electricity situation like?Larson: Do you mean in these towns or throughout the country broadly?Vik: Could you give us a sense of the country broadly as you’ve traveled around? Larson: In the places that I have been — the west, the south, and now in Kyiv kind of north-central of the country — I think a lot of people are taking a deep breath both literally and figuratively. People are kind of hoping this war is moving into a different phase, which it seems like it is. It’s maybe moving away from some of the places that have been harder hit, especially Kyiv, maybe moving to the east. A lot of people are returning to the capital. A lot of people who fled to Lviv in the west are leaving to wherever they’re from in the rest of the country. It seems like if we could call this the first round of the war, Ukraine has won this part of the war. So I think people are hoping, hoping against hope maybe, that maybe things will calm down at least wherever they’re from and they can kind of get on with life again. One thing that’s interesting as you know, President Zelensky has done a tremendous job reassuring people, and talking to people, and explaining what the situation is, and putting foreign countries and their response sort of under the spotlight. I talked to a lot of people about their opinion of him. A lot of people did not vote for him, didn’t necessarily care for him or his politics, but I haven’t met a single person who is not supportive of his response to what’s happening. A number of people have said “You know what? We’re in a crisis situation. This isn’t really the right time or right place to start playing politics and question what the President is doing.” His actions kind of speak, well I guess as loud as words, both of them are very loud. And people seem to appreciate him and what he’s doing. I think him and Ukrainian people more broadly are kind of apprehensive but maybe slightly hopeful for whatever comes next.Vik: What are people’s opinions of the United States? Of Europe?Larson: It’s a pretty mixed bag. A lot of people, when you ask them about foreign countries, they rank those countries based primarily on military aid. Then perhaps secondarily on humanitarian aid. So countries like the United States score very high with this metric. The United Kingdom scores very high on this metric. Both the US and UK as well as some of the Nordic countries and other countries as well have sent tons, and tons, and tons of weapons and ammunition and in particular anti-armor, and anti-tank weapons, and anti-aircraft weapons. People here, you know, Average Joe on the street is no military expert, but they understand that a lot of these weapons have kind of saved the day for Ukraine. I talked to one farmer a couple of weeks ago. He was a tea drinker. He not jokingly said that he drinks his tea with milk now because that’s kind of stereotypically the British way of drinking tea. And so that was his kind of half joking way to express his appreciation for what Boris Johnson and his government has done.Lipsky: That seems a lot to ask of a Ukrainian or anyone else.Vik: I like my tea with milk.Larson: It’s becoming more popular and probably will be postwar.Vik: Fascinating. So the sense is that they’re receiving help and not primarily frustration that they’re not receiving more?Larson: Well, yes and no. People have every right to be grateful for what’s given but also expect more. I live in Germany. I am not German, but I always have to tell people I’m an American reporter and I live in Germany. Then I have to explain that I don’t vote in Germany and I’m not necessarily supportive of what the German government has done. So they see Germany as really dragging its heels and not being particularly helpful. The flipside to this is Germany, Poland, and some other countries have let in tons, and tons, and tons of Ukrainian refugees which is great. It’s a very admirable thing to do, but that doesn’t necessarily help the people who are still here. So I think the people that are still here focus on what does help them. What helps them is more weapons.Lipsky: How do you think it’s going to go from here on out? I mean, are the Russians going back to Kyiv? Are they pausing or do you think this war is ending? I don’t really have a complete sense of this.Larson: I mean, predictions are best in hindsight so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I would be surprised if the Russians try to attack Kyiv again. If they do, I think it’ll be different than the first time. I think it would be kind of an overwhelming display of force first followed by a ground assault, which before it may be started in reverse of that. From what I’m reading online it seems like a lot of the forces that were here in Kyiv have been pulled back. Some are stationed now in Belarus and are probably licking their wounds. A lot seems to have been sent to eastern Ukraine. There were a bunch of medics that I was talking to earlier today. They work for an NGO. They couldn’t say where exactly, but they said that they were preparing sometime in the next week or so to go to the east. There was a guy I talked to yesterday. I just kind of bumped into him on the street. He’s part of a sort of Territorial Defense Force-like militia. He also said that they’ll probably be going to the east sometime in the next couple weeks. It was a little bit unclear when exactly. If you look at the map it seems like eastern Ukraine is now possibly the priority whereas before it might have been kind of a decapitation/regime change sort of strategy. Now maybe tentatively the plan is to consolidate the east to kind of scratch more territory together for these two republics, or so-called republics that have declared independence from UkraineVik: Have you gotten a sense from the Ukrainians you’ve spoken to about what their attitude is towards those republics and how much they want to keep them?Larson: Yes and no. It’s kind of like the leadership of the government of a country. You can hate the leadership. You can hate the government. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you hate the people who live there. I think people have a deep distaste for the “leadership” of these unrecognized self-declared republics, but I think their understanding, their hope, and their expectation is that these regions will eventually at some point return to the fold and become Ukrainian again. If that happens we’ll see, but yeah I think people would hope for that to happen.Vik: Have you met anyone with the attitude of like “Just make this end?” I spoke to someone who spent a few years living in Kyiv and he said people don’t like to say that, but there’s an undercurrent of like “We’ve lost them already. Let it go.” Does that resonate at all with people you’ve spoken to? Larson: I can see that being a line of argumentation or a line of reasoning. One interesting distinction that I picked up on a little bit is sort of the attitude you just described, but maybe in relation to Crimea. That area is historically, linguistically, culturally, sort of different from maybe the rest of Ukraine. And so I think because that place has sort of been seen as kind of part of Ukraine, but the “other part of Ukraine,” I think people might be more comfortable expressing the sentiment you just mentioned about Crimea. It’s kind of been different for a long time and maybe it will stay that way.Lipsky: The New York Sun was born out of this kind of schism or became a modern paper that way. Before the Civil War the leading editor in New York City was this horrible figure called Horace Greeley who was very eloquent in his opposition to slavery but was prepared to let the South secede and become an independent slave republic. He had a managing editor called Charles Dana who would not agree to that and got fired and eventually rode with U.S. Grant in the Civil War and then bought the New York Sun. Same kind of battle. New York was divided.Larson: I think your people would probably say that they’re more united than divided. Your neighbor invading your country does wonders for national unity. You see that everywhere, especially in Odessa. It reminded me a little bit of the United States right after 9/11. There were blue and gold flags everywhere. My impression was maybe flags were sold out or not as easy to get so almost every single building had a big blue and gold stripe across the facade. So yeah, there might be some divided opinions on those breakaway regions but, if I had to do a poll or take a guess, I would say this is probably the most united that Ukraine has ever been. It’s almost a national rebirth or something along those lines.Lipsky: These blue and yellow flags are streaming all over Georgetown, Washington. Larson: Yeah they’re in Berlin as well, everywhere, right before I left. Vik: What about attitudes towards the Russian people? Have you had any conversations along those lines?Larson: Yeah a little bit. I think it’s easier for people to relate or talk about what they know and so some people that I’ve talked to here have family members both closer and maybe more distant in Russia. Not everybody, but a number of people do. One lady I talked to in Odessa, her mom is Russian and her dad is Bulgarian. They live in Odessa. They’re Ukrainian. She said that her mom has cousins that just don’t talk to them anymore. They don’t really believe that there’s a war happening. They say that Ukrainians are all Nazis and they’re just not interested in figuring out the truth. There’s definitely some divide within families and their Russian relatives. I think now it’s maybe a little bit clearer than it was before that the Russian public is more for this war than against it. Not everyone of course. You see individual and group protests, but I think there’s just such a suppression of free speech there that maybe these kinds of stories don’t get out as much. I mean, I think people would like the Russians to do more. I think some people are doing a lot. Some people are just trying to escape which is also understandable. Vik: Fascinating. Well, Caleb, thank you for taking so much time to talk to us today. Any final thoughts you want to leave us with?Larson: Final thoughts? Good question. I think…no. I’m glad for the opportunity and glad for the questions you asked and keep reading The Sun.Sages of the Sun is a weekly podcast produced by The New York Sun. The Sun is committed to upholding the finest journalistic traditions and staying true to our motto, “It Shines For All.”Seth Lipsky is a seasoned veteran of the news business, and among the most revered American editors. He previously spent 20 years at the Wall Street Journal, launched the Jewish Daily Forward, and first revived the Sun back in 2002.Caroline Vik has more than a decade of experience in policy-making, with years spent on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at the Department of Defense, and on the National Security Council.

The Situation in Ukraine From Our Man on the Scene: ‘Sages of the Sun’ (Episode #3)

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