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Russia-Ukraine War – Ukrainian Life During Wartime – Danielle Leavitt
112 Plays7 days ago
Ep 056 – Nonfiction. Historian Danielle Leavitt discusses her new book, “By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine”
‘An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Americans have identified deeply with the Ukrainian cause, while others have cast doubt on its relevance to their concerns. Meanwhile, even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and a unique trove of online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Among others, we meet Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb come to naught when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she meets online; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles with her American husband to organize relief. To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy―a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag. Writing with closeness and compassion, Leavitt has given us an interior history of Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years.’
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:01
A.J. Woodhams
Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I'm extremely excited to have on the show Daniel Levitt for her new book, By the Second Spring, Seven Lives in One Year of the War in Ukraine.
00:00:21
Danielle Leavitt
Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
00:00:22
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah, absolutely. um I'll just read your bio real quick. Danielle Levitt holds a PhD in history from Harvard University, where she has been a fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute.
00:00:33
A.J. Woodhams
She grew up in both Ukraine and the United States and currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. um Danielle, how are you doing today?
00:00:39
Danielle Leavitt
I'm doing great. It's great to be here. appreciate being on the show.
00:00:41
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for for for coming on. Like I was telling you before we got rolling, I saw this book.
Significance of the Ukraine War
00:00:50
A.J. Woodhams
um And um i'm like a lot of people, ah military history people included, um the war in Ukraine is is it's like the war of our time right now.
00:01:00
A.J. Woodhams
and you know It's such a huge topic. So whenever I see really interesting books about Ukraine, I'm always... eager to have those authors on the show. So thanks for coming on.
00:01:09
Danielle Leavitt
It's my pleasure.
00:01:10
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
Book Overview: Personal Stories
00:01:11
A.J. Woodhams
So my ah first question I like to ask people about and when they come on is, what is your book about?
00:01:18
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah, well, you know, by the second spring is really a story that delves far beyond the headlines. It's um It's an intimate portrait of the lives of seven ordinary people caught up in the most extraordinary circumstances.
00:01:42
Danielle Leavitt
We follow these seven people through the first year and a half of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And through that, we get a chance to truly see what it looks like to live daily um in a brutal modern war.
00:01:58
Danielle Leavitt
And these are people just like you and me. you know There's middle-aged man who had dreams of opening a coffee shop.
00:02:01
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:02:06
Danielle Leavitt
um And he did that just three weeks before that coffee shop is destroyed. There's a middle-aged woman, Julia, whose leg is shattered to bits during a missile attack um while she is waiting at a train station.
00:02:23
Danielle Leavitt
um and there's a young woman who falls in love with a soldier online, moves across the country to be closer to him.
00:02:35
Danielle Leavitt
We're learning about these people. We're also learning about their personal histories, their childhoods, their families, um in order to untangle the deeper histories, ah the you know the deeper historical threads between Ukraine and Russia going back to the Soviet Union and beyond in order to gain a deeper understanding of the contextual realities of what we're seeing today.
00:03:01
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. And um you know this is, ah in my opinion, just a ah really unique perspective. Because like you just said, you know life continues to go on yeah during war.
00:03:14
A.J. Woodhams
um there's at At one point in the book, like somebody's kid joins a metal band. ah like There's you know these things, and you just mentioned, you people are falling in love. They're theyre um trying to to do all these things while You know, you've got bombs falling around you and you know you're your country's being invaded and stuff like that. And it seems to me such a ah unique perspective. And i'm I'm glad this book's coming out.
00:03:38
A.J. Woodhams
Now, you write, or it has already come out. um You write at the beginning, you have a a personal connection um to to Ukraine. ah Can you talk a little bit about that?
Danielle's Background and Inspiration
00:03:48
Danielle Leavitt
Sure. ah My family moved to Ukraine when I was 12 years old. My parents, yeah i grew up in Utah. My parents took a job um with the American Bar Association working on legal reform in Kiev.
00:04:06
Danielle Leavitt
And they moved our family to Kiev in the early 2000s and began working in legal reform. and ah Basically, we began moving, we began going back and forth between the United States and Ukraine nearly every year from the early 2000s until, but i mean, i I was there um almost every year you know,
00:04:32
Danielle Leavitt
um the full-scale invasion. um And it was just so hugely formative for me to kind of toggle back and forth between the United States and Ukraine as a kid, an adolescent, a teenager.
00:04:48
Danielle Leavitt
um And having that comparative experience going back and forth between the United States really shaped my worldview.
00:04:58
Danielle Leavitt
i grew up there in many ways. And i made friends, I went to school, spent summers there, played sports.
00:05:14
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. Well, um let's let's talk a little bit about um the the accounts that you have chronicled ah in your book. um First, I'm interested just in, and you do actually at the very end of the book, you acknowledge you know how you came across these people, but how did you find these people? How did you get them to share their story with you?
00:05:14
A.J. Woodhams
You
00:05:38
Danielle Leavitt
You know, in the first months of the war, my parents became involved in a humanitarian aid project um that was providing aid to several hundred Ukrainian families that had been displaced.
00:05:52
Danielle Leavitt
And part of what they set up, you know, in addition to this aid project was ah space, an online space where Ukrainians could record their experiences if they wanted to in the form of a diary.
00:06:09
Danielle Leavitt
And um many Ukrainians responded to this very enthusiastically. They were excited to have an opportunity to record their experiences, to potentially have an outlet, to potentially have people that were interested in listening to them.
00:06:30
Danielle Leavitt
um and I had just had a baby in the summer 2022. And so I was often awake in the night as you are after you have a baby.
00:06:47
Danielle Leavitt
And I began reading these diaries in the middle of the night, one night, and I was, you know, the diaries took me by surprise. They were staggering.
00:07:01
Danielle Leavitt
daggering um They were insightful and unguarded and raw and evolving over time.
00:07:18
Danielle Leavitt
And as I followed them over several weeks, I was surprised to see how invested I became in certain stories, especially certain stories that people were contributing to kind of actively.
00:07:34
Danielle Leavitt
And i a couple of those ended up becoming people in my book, Vitaly was one of them. And as I read over time, i started to feel like these stories
00:07:56
Danielle Leavitt
somehow really matter. They're, they're really important. Like maybe they are somehow fundamental to understanding this war at all, you know, somehow they're fundamental to, or, you know, central to making sense of any of this.
00:08:18
Danielle Leavitt
And they're like the pulse of this conflict. And, um I decided at some point that I,
00:08:29
Danielle Leavitt
that maybe, you know, if other people could hear these voices, it was a chance to influence potentially how those unfamiliar with Ukraine and its people might eventually come to understand this war.
00:08:47
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:08:47
Danielle Leavitt
And to me, that felt extraordinarily, imperative. And as soon as that all kind of clicked for me, I felt like, um, I had to write this book.
00:09:04
A.J. Woodhams
yeah
00:09:04
Danielle Leavitt
And, um, so I ended up contacting a few of the diarists and asked if I could follow them in real time for many months.
00:09:17
Danielle Leavitt
And to my surprise, you know Even more more people than I could feasibly follow agreed to be interviewed. um In the end, i settled on seven people.
00:09:32
Danielle Leavitt
who allowed me to correspond with them for the first and second years of this war. um Four of them, I found the diary project. Three of them were introduced to me by friends.
00:09:45
Danielle Leavitt
um One of them I had known since childhood. Two of them were people that i had never met before, but were introduced to me through acquaintances, essentially.
00:09:55
A.J. Woodhams
Well, first on the project itself, I love that project because in fact, just, so just last week I interviewed um a a journalist who wrote a book, An Oral History of D-Day.
00:10:07
Danielle Leavitt
Mm-hmm.
00:10:07
A.J. Woodhams
And to have like those oral history accounts of people who are like on the beaches, you know, soldiers during the beaches. It's so interesting to read something from like the, like ah a primary source, like a first person perspective, because, you know, now 80 years after World War II, we all think that you know there is like Everybody was storming the beach, like waving an American flag in the air, and just like so excited to be there to you know defeat um the Nazis.
00:10:34
A.J. Woodhams
and Then you read these accounts and you're like, oh, wow, some people were actually scared and some people didn't fully believe in what they were doing there.
00:10:38
Danielle Leavitt
Thank you.
00:10:41
A.J. Woodhams
and you know Similarly, with ah you know a war like what's going on in in Ukraine, And maybe even especially because like we're in, may I would say a ah more, there's definitely more disinformation now than I think there was during World War II. I think that could be ah a fair assessment, but you can go a lot of different ways with that.
00:11:00
A.J. Woodhams
Point being is in the age that we're in i think the project itself is an extremely valuable project.
00:11:06
Danielle Leavitt
thank you
00:11:06
A.J. Woodhams
And um I love that, you know you had had taken it a step further by following these people and and, uh, and chronicling them.
War's Impact on Daily Life
00:11:14
A.J. Woodhams
Um, your book is, so so the book is divided into, so it's one year, but you divided into two seasons.
00:11:22
A.J. Woodhams
Um, tell me about that choice. And then I'm curious if you could just kind of categorize, um, how the war is evolving and in all those different seasons.
00:11:33
Danielle Leavitt
I'm glad you picked up on that because the choice to break the book down by season was very deliberate. I feel like so much of this war has been lived seasonally and so much of the lived experience of this war is tied directly to the experience of the seasons.
00:11:54
Danielle Leavitt
And I wanted to reflect that in you know the parts of the book
00:11:57
A.J. Woodhams
Thank
00:12:00
Danielle Leavitt
I mean, that that kind of it just broke down naturally, basically, in the the interviews I was conducting with my subjects. um And so i you know, i needed to structure the book somehow. And as I was talking with my my subjects, this just kind of naturally emerged um because basically what happens is, you know, in this war, it's basically like the first winter the first winter when war began, it was like everybody was just living in chaos, trying to survive that the first, you know, those evacuations, the initial occupations, the, the bombings, the displacements, the first summer was a summer of, or the first spring and summer was a so ah ah spring and summer of liberations of resettlements, then of heat. So there was,
00:12:58
Danielle Leavitt
counter-offensives. um And so, so much, it seems, you know, you probably know more about this than I do. I'm not a military theorist or, you know, I'm a historian and a very human historian at that, but so much of how like military strategy operates has to do with just how like,
00:13:25
Danielle Leavitt
how the earth, um you know, basically how the earth is functioning at any given moment, right? um How malleable,
00:13:35
A.J. Woodhams
It's notoriously hard to fight a war in Russia during the winter, for example, is what you're saying.
00:13:39
Danielle Leavitt
right? How malleable the soil is or whatever.
00:13:41
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:43
Danielle Leavitt
um And
00:13:46
Danielle Leavitt
the seasons are also weaponized. So when, Russia so notoriously targets all of the energy infrastructure in the fall and winter, or I think primarily in the fall of 2022. And of Kyiv is blacking out all of October, November, and December, and people are terrified of freezing.
00:14:10
Danielle Leavitt
That was a very deliberate and targeted set of attacks. And it played on a very distinct psyche that Russians are aware of because they share it.
00:14:23
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:14:23
Danielle Leavitt
Um, one that is terrified of cold, one that is terrified of darkness, one that is terrified of loss of power. Um, and so it was very interesting to see how seasons, how warmth, cold, light, dark, all of these things came to bear on people's experience of this war.
00:14:45
A.J. Woodhams
yeah
00:14:49
Danielle Leavitt
i'm
00:14:52
Danielle Leavitt
And also how
00:14:54
Danielle Leavitt
it seems like especially the image of spring, the second spring, was a useful way to um at least the second spring. you know When I was attempting to end this book,
00:15:16
Danielle Leavitt
you know, how how do you end a book about a war that's ongoing? that's something I really wrestled with. Perhaps you were going to, perhaps this was something that was going to come up later. um But I'll just jump the gun here.
00:15:29
Danielle Leavitt
i I decided to end at the second spring because, um you know, spring is a natural moment of optimism. I knew I needed to provide readers some kind of closure.
00:15:41
A.J. Woodhams
Exactly what I was thinking, yeah.
00:15:44
Danielle Leavitt
um And following that really desperate winter when people had, people were really scared about potentially freezing, about making it through the winter, about it was the first winter of war and nobody really knew what lay on the other side.
00:16:02
Danielle Leavitt
um I think making it through that winter and surviving to spring was a huge triumph for them. And so by the second spring is meant to kind of insinuate um they had survived to the second spring and
00:16:23
Danielle Leavitt
they can all, i don't know, they reflect upon, we can all reflect upon who they had become
00:16:31
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. Yeah, well,
00:16:31
Danielle Leavitt
up until that point or something like that. um
00:16:35
Danielle Leavitt
Anyway, so the seasonality feels integral to um kind of making sense of the passing of time, the way that war um kind of like
00:16:36
A.J. Woodhams
yeah well
00:16:49
Danielle Leavitt
kind of imprints itself on every every individual human, you know,
00:16:55
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah, well, it's such a good point um that you made about and weaponizing seasons. It's not something that you think about in war. you know Oftentimes you think about you know who's got, and of course it's it's important in in war when you've got like a superiority in technology or force or anything like that, you know very important.
00:17:17
A.J. Woodhams
But you don't always think about the seasons and how that impacts the actual fighting of the war or the choice to not fight at certain times and and things like that. um i'm I'm curious if and if you wouldn't mind, so um if if you could share a few accounts from when the war breaks out um Right at the moment the war breaks out from any of these seven people that you followed, just share some stories of um what was going on in their life and then what happened when when Russia invaded.
Stories of Resilience
00:17:49
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah. Well, one of the stories that blew me away, the very, you know, from moment one was probably Vitaly, which was this middle-aged man, I mentioned him a little bit earlier, who lives in a small town, a suburb of Kiev called Boradyanka.
00:18:09
A.J. Woodhams
you
00:18:10
Danielle Leavitt
um And he's this he's such a character. He's someone that really kind of moved me from the beginning because he's this, um, really classic Ukrainian man in so many ways. He's kind of macho, kind of um, this mix of macho and sensitive.
00:18:32
Danielle Leavitt
um he dreamed his whole life of going to America to see the statue of Liberty and also of owning a coffee shop and
00:18:44
A.J. Woodhams
I too have dreams of one day owning a coffee shop, so that that resonated.
00:18:47
Danielle Leavitt
but you really identified with him.
00:18:49
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:18:50
Danielle Leavitt
I love that. Yeah. And he basically, you know, scrimped and saved all through the nineties and early two thousands rise up out of the poverty of, you know, the nineteen ninety s and um rent some modest commercial space on a highway in Borodanka and be able to open this coffee shop. And when I'm talking coffee shop, some people may be thinking it's like a swanky, fancy cafe with, you know, I don't know, like some downtown moneyed
00:19:35
Danielle Leavitt
establishment. That's not what we're talking about.
00:19:36
A.J. Woodhams
Sure.
00:19:37
Danielle Leavitt
We're talking about like corrugated metal roof. Like it is very humble.
00:19:42
A.J. Woodhams
Thank you. You're not walking in and ordering like a single origin pour over.
00:19:46
Danielle Leavitt
you Exactly.
00:19:46
A.J. Woodhams
have
00:19:46
Danielle Leavitt
This is like side of the road outskirts of like, this is the side of the road off a highway suburb of Kiev.
00:19:49
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:19:59
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah. um And it's run by this man named Vitaly who this is his life work at life's work and he's so proud of it and I'm so proud of it for him and he um has uploaded onto this diary database videos of video tours of his of his coffee shop and it's you know, a tiny little, you know, i don't even know how, a tiny little like 50 square feet room or something.
00:20:36
Danielle Leavitt
He's got a little counter and a little deep freezer for ice cream bars and this espresso machine that's like the pride and joy of his life and a little couch and outside he's got little tables and he's just so proud of it.
00:20:53
Danielle Leavitt
And Obviously, he knows this. He opens on February 1st, 2022, and he knows what everybody's been saying, which is that you know there are rumblings of a Russian invasion and doesn't believe it like most Ukrainians doesn't believe it Um, the days pass, clientele is good. Business is good.
00:21:17
Danielle Leavitt
ah weeks pass, business remains pretty good. He's got a pretty good business location right on the highway. So foot traffic is high. And, um, the morning of February 24th, he, else you know wakes up like everyone else to ah reality the realities of this invasion.
00:21:44
Danielle Leavitt
And he's horrified like everybody else, but he's like, okay, I can't just leave my coffee shop. you know i not to run away like everybody else is. So he goes to the coffee shop and he's like, well, I'm going to just serve coffee, I guess, today.
00:22:04
Danielle Leavitt
so he serves coffee. I think he probably, I don't know how much he sells. but He probably sells to people that are like leaving town, fleeing as fast as they can. And the next day, same thing. He goes back to the coffee shop and is, you know, business gets slower and slower. He tells, he writes, I think in in the diary or tells me later that he's doing a back flush of the espresso machine, trying to keep it in good condition. He's like washing the floor.
00:22:35
Danielle Leavitt
Um, and I'm reading this and I'm like, what kind of man goes to the coffee shop on the first day of war?
00:22:46
Danielle Leavitt
And then on the second day of war, and then on the third day of war, while people are are in bunkers, while people are fleeing for their lives. And this isn't a town where the war is far away. Buridyanka is,
00:23:02
Danielle Leavitt
is being invaded. Like, Bodhjanka tanks come to Bodhjanka, know, missiles come to Bodhjanka. At some point, I think on March 1st, tanks roll in past his coffee shop.
00:23:20
Danielle Leavitt
And i you know, i was so moved by um by this story. And I feel like to understand a man like Vitaly you have to understand just how far back his dream goes.
00:23:39
A.J. Woodhams
I was just going to bring that up. Yeah.
00:23:41
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah. To understand a man like Vitaly, you know, who is cleaning his coffee shop as tanks roll into his town, you have to understand just how far back his dream goes that he's telling us what his coffee shop means to him.
00:23:43
A.J. Woodhams
yeah
00:23:58
Danielle Leavitt
when he's cleaning the espresso sheet machine and going to work im on the first day of war. And that's part of what I'm trying to accomplish in this book by not just telling those stories on the first day of war and the second day of war and the first six months of war, whatever, but telling that story plus, you know, Vitaly in the nineteen ninety s and in the nineteen eighty s and Vitaly with his father Vitaly with his first love, really trying to contextualize these people as real people so that we can understand what the stakes are for them in this war.
00:24:42
Danielle Leavitt
think that really matters so that we can understand these people as you know complex complex human beings in a real war.
00:24:43
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. Yeah.
00:24:50
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. And I too was really struck by Vitaly's story. And i was I was thinking about this myself and you know he, um and the reader will learn ah quickly in the book, but you know he grew up in the the the shadow of the collapse of the Soviet Union where um capitalism and an American type of capitalism you know the American dream, that was something really to aspire to. um that that that was like you you know um There is and a light in the world now.
00:25:23
A.J. Woodhams
And if you set your mind towards this particular goal, um then you know you can have this really great life and you can have something of your own. And to to understand that mindset, I suppose,
00:25:36
A.J. Woodhams
in a way makes sense why he would you know still be in his coffee shop um the day that the war broke out because it had been ingrained in him for so long that this is kind of like the culmination of a life's work.
00:25:40
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah. yeah
00:25:49
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah. There's still an ideal. There's still a dream.
00:25:52
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:25:52
Danielle Leavitt
you know, if I give this up, like, what is there to believe in anymore?
00:25:57
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. Well, um so your your your book, it um so you're the the accounts, um so you just shared one outside of Kiev, but it it it the accounts, people are end up going all over Ukraine um in in the East, in the West.
00:26:14
A.J. Woodhams
um Talk about kind of like the the journeys that some of these people make and where they end up going.
00:26:21
Danielle Leavitt
One of the things that i really wanted to do with this book is, you know, achieve as, as much as I could kind of a,
00:26:36
Danielle Leavitt
cross section of modern Ukrainian society. And so I really did want this. I really did want people kind of all across Ukraine representing different age groups, different professions, different stages of life, whatever.
00:26:50
Danielle Leavitt
um And so, yes, I have Vitaly Borodanka representing kind of the Kyiv region, that experience. I have Yulia who's in,
00:27:02
Danielle Leavitt
um who's Konstantinovka, Ukraine, which is just, it's in the Donbass region e it's in the Donetsk oblast in the Donbass. um I have Anna, who is, um who grew up in Luhansk and then was displaced in 2014 and was in Starobilsk when the war started and then traveled immediately to Western Ukraine.
00:27:29
Danielle Leavitt
have Maria, and her young son who were in Mariupol, who left Mariupol to Western Ukraine, Mukachevo. um Then I have Tanya, a pig farmer, and her husband, Victor, who were in Kherson region, a small village just outside Kherson.
00:27:53
Danielle Leavitt
And then I Polina and her husband, John, an American, who began who began the book in Los Angeles, but then went back to Ukraine to help with some aid work.
00:28:11
Danielle Leavitt
Um, and we're based basically in Lviv, but also a little bit in Kiev. And then i follow ah man named Volodymyr Shovkushitny kind of as an interlude throughout the story.
00:28:27
Danielle Leavitt
um which perhaps we'll get to later in the in the podcast, but he's based primarily in Kiev.
00:28:32
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:28:33
Danielle Leavitt
um One of the things that was important to me in the book is to teach or to help um inform, I guess, American readers about Ukrainian geography, if I could, because um so much of this war
00:28:59
Danielle Leavitt
is so much of understanding this war hinges on understanding the layout of Ukraine's geography. And ah i i think that's, you know, really important for kind of just like a ah a lay American um audience. And so one of the things that I wanted to do at the beginning of each chapter, at the beginning of each section, was just have a small Ukrainian map showing the location of each person.
00:29:30
A.J. Woodhams
It's very helpful, by the way, as somebody who does not know Ukrainian geography.
00:29:31
Danielle Leavitt
I'm really glad to hear that. I thought that it would be helpful mostly because I thought that just saying where someone was is like nonsense.
00:29:34
A.J. Woodhams
yeah
00:29:39
Danielle Leavitt
Like who knows where Mokhachevo, Ukraine is and who knows where Konstantinovko, Ukraine is.
00:29:41
A.J. Woodhams
Right.
00:29:45
Danielle Leavitt
And so showing just kind of spatially how people are moving helps give people a sense of what it actually means um spatially for people to travel these distances.
00:29:59
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:30:02
Danielle Leavitt
And then also what it means when I say, or when people say, you know, culturally, this is what it looks like to live in this place. Culturally, this is what it looks like to live in this place.
00:30:17
Danielle Leavitt
um In terms of the war, this is what it looks like in this place, et cetera, et cetera.
00:30:21
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. Well, I'm curious if...
Contrasting Experiences in Ukraine
00:30:24
A.J. Woodhams
um So I think that... I mean, a lot has been written, I think, about the initial invasion for good reason, because um it's kind of a very heroic story, I would say. And um that not that it overshadows some of the other stuff, but I found myself, as somebody who's who's read several books about um ah the war, ah very interested just in kind of the difference between maybe towards the end of this year, you know living in Western Ukraine as opposed to living in Eastern Ukraine.
00:30:56
A.J. Woodhams
I'm curious if you wouldn't mind just sharing and or drawing upon a a couple accounts, maybe one from Western Ukraine and one from Eastern Ukraine, and what it's like and the differences and between ah the the differences between them and living so close to the front and fighting and maybe living a little bit further back.
00:31:17
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah. You know,
00:31:20
Danielle Leavitt
i haven't lived in Ukraine during this war, so I can't say firsthand what I think the differences are. But I think both of them have experienced remarkable trauma um And very different kinds of trauma.
00:31:43
Danielle Leavitt
So people in Eastern Ukraine are kind of at the forefront of lost trauma, I would say. They have lost homes. They've lost
00:31:57
Danielle Leavitt
people, you know, like their towns have been attacked disproportionately. so they've lost people.
00:32:09
Danielle Leavitt
you know, people that they know, family members, friends, um, many of them have lost,
00:32:17
Danielle Leavitt
um, just infrastructure. And then even if they haven't lost infrastructure, they've had to flee. And so they've all been displaced. Um,
00:32:30
Danielle Leavitt
people in the East have suffered enormously and, There's such an incredible
00:32:40
Danielle Leavitt
ah perfidy, I would say, when Russia's justification for this war is to protect the Russian speaking populations in Ukraine, because the Russian speaking populations of the East obviously have suffered so much more than any other population in the rest of Ukraine.
00:32:59
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:33:00
Danielle Leavitt
um That being said, the populations, primarily Ukrainian-speaking populations in Western Ukraine, have suffered so much in other ways, meaning they've absorbed all of these other populations. They've been in charge of, i think, giving so disproportionately of their time, their resources, their space,
00:33:27
Danielle Leavitt
their skills.
00:33:28
A.J. Woodhams
Sure. Yeah.
00:33:29
Danielle Leavitt
think that's been a lot of work and I think that's been really hard. I think probably, I mean, I think they've been heroic, um but I think that's really hard and they're, you know, three and a half years in, what what do you do, you know?
00:33:44
A.J. Woodhams
yeah One of the accounts, I think it's Tanya's account, but I could be ah getting this wrong. um she She ends up in a Russian occupied town.
00:33:56
A.J. Woodhams
Is that correct?
00:33:58
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah.
00:33:58
A.J. Woodhams
And I thought that was very interesting because that's also something I don't hear too much about is you know what it's like to live in a town that is occupied by Russia. And we hear a lot about the fighting, um but but maybe not so much what comes after.
00:34:11
A.J. Woodhams
um Specifically, i I thought it was interesting. I wrote it down, um but i I don't have the quote in front of me but i'll I'll paraphrase. But basically, it's like when a a Russian soldier comes um to your house in one of these occupied towns, they'll knock on the door and they'll say, you know, we've now liberated you from the Nazi Ukrainian Kiev regime.
00:34:33
A.J. Woodhams
And if you collaborate with us, then your life will be much easier. If you don't, then consequence consequences will will follow. um ah and I think I paraphrased that accurately.
00:34:44
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah.
00:34:45
A.J. Woodhams
I hope I did.
00:34:45
Danielle Leavitt
and
00:34:46
A.J. Woodhams
um But I thought there was a that was a very interesting perspective. Talk a little bit, um if you want to talk about Tanya specifically, but talk a little bit about you know living in a town that's um that's been occupied by the the Russian forces. what What's the day in a life for a Ukrainian living in those conditions?
00:35:07
Danielle Leavitt
Tanya's story was so fascinating for me. You know, obviously I was speaking with Tanya primarily after she was liberated. um We started speaking, i think, basically in December. So um she was liberated in November and then we started communicating her.
00:35:26
Danielle Leavitt
soon after that, because I don't think she could have communicated with me as openly as she did um under occupation. But it was really interesting communicating with her when I did, because like I write in the book, life became even more difficult for her after um after liberation because they were bombed relentlessly. So, you know, she had a really difficult time keeping her phone charged, getting internet, cell service, whatever.
00:35:56
Danielle Leavitt
um But I would say the most interesting thing, which I tried to communicate in the book um about what Tanya communicated to me um about the, you know, life in an, ah life in a village under occupation was the way the social change kind of infrastructure of the town just dissolved in many ways, or um at the very least, fundamentally shifted depending on who was and who was not willing to collaborate.
00:36:38
Danielle Leavitt
Um, so people that were willing to collaborate suddenly became the new primary leaders. Um, you know, others who weren't willing to collaborate just kind of hit away.
00:36:53
Danielle Leavitt
Nobody respected those who were willing to collaborate. Then finally, once liberation came, all of those who did collaborate were forced to basically leave, leave um low level collaborators became beggars. Essentially. It was really interesting to see how people's willingness or unwillingness to collaborate became a very, very, um, a very, very clear type of currency.
00:37:30
Danielle Leavitt
And, um,
00:37:33
Danielle Leavitt
One thing that Tanya made clear is that collaboration often had to do more with desperation than anything else, either desperation or just a lack of principledness.
00:37:48
Danielle Leavitt
So often people who were collaborating were people that, you know, single mothers or destitute old women or, you know, people who just inherently lacked principle.
00:37:59
Danielle Leavitt
But, um,
00:38:00
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:38:02
Danielle Leavitt
The collaboration thing is really interesting. And I don't think we've, I don't think there have been many people writing a lot about collaboration in Ukrainian villages, Ukrainian occupied towns.
00:38:16
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:38:16
Danielle Leavitt
um
00:38:17
A.J. Woodhams
And also too, after a lot of time, I think another reason why these types of accounts while things are happening are important is because it it becomes a very and ah sensitive topic depending on who wins for, you know, when it, it when collaboration gets introduced into the picture.
00:38:30
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah. Absolutely.
00:38:35
Danielle Leavitt
Absolutely. So for example, i mean, it is extremely sensitive.
00:38:36
A.J. Woodhams
So I, yeah.
00:38:39
Danielle Leavitt
All of these people are real people. They're all presumably still alive. um Like we changed all the names of the collaborators for this reason, because, you know, we don't know where they are.
00:38:45
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:38:52
A.J. Woodhams
Sure. Sure.
00:38:53
Danielle Leavitt
we you know, have just enough identifying details about them that it could be potentially dangerous for them. You know, I just don't, you they collaborated, but they they deserve to be kept safe still.
00:39:04
A.J. Woodhams
sir Well, um before um I transition to some questions about ah current affairs type stuff, um are there any other accounts or anything else really important that um that you think is is worth bringing up? I mean, there's a lot. And to condense that into one question, it can be difficult.
00:39:25
A.J. Woodhams
But what else um really stood out to you in the writing of this book that you think is important for others to know?
Historical Context and Updates
00:39:31
Danielle Leavitt
Maybe i will, maybe I'll identify the interludes if that's okay.
00:39:35
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:39:36
Danielle Leavitt
um One of the things that i one of the things that I chose to do is um
00:39:47
Danielle Leavitt
include in between each part, I have five parts in the book and in between each part, I included what I call an interlude, which is basically just a break between the primary storyline um And in this interlude, I follow the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitny, which takes us back in time to 1989.
00:40:12
Danielle Leavitt
And we follow Shovkoshitny in 1989 on his quest rebury three Ukrainian writers, among whom is one extremely prominent Ukrainian poet named Vasil Stus who died in a in a Russian Gulag in 1985.
00:40:37
Danielle Leavitt
And so we're following Shovka Shutny on his journey, basically back into, back to this Russian Gulag, his attempts to get to this prison camp, to dig up the bodies,
00:40:54
Danielle Leavitt
to bring them back to Kiev, to get the bodies back into the ground. And then his experiences after the bodies are reburied, leading up to the present day, we end we end the book with Vladimir in the present day.
00:41:11
Danielle Leavitt
um
00:41:13
Danielle Leavitt
Basically, um when the war begins. And I chose to include this as an interlude for a few reasons. One, because first of all, I felt like the reader needed a break from, from war. I felt like it was getting a little too heavy handed here with, with the war story stuff.
00:41:35
Danielle Leavitt
And so I felt like this was a nice way to kind of like introduce a new story. But me the second thing is that,
00:41:44
Danielle Leavitt
you know, time kind of operates um on many layers, many levels, I guess, in my book. And um there's the time of war.
00:41:59
Danielle Leavitt
And then, you know, there's also this much older time. There's the Soviet past. There's the trauma of 2014. There's the 1990s. And wanted to...
00:42:12
Danielle Leavitt
there's the nineteen ninety s and i wanted to um I wanted to tell this story to kind of really drive home that
00:42:29
Danielle Leavitt
the past, first of all, that all of my subjects kind of carry this past inside of them. And also for me, one of the central tasks of this book was to connect all of these timelines and to really emphasize the fact that um that February 24th, 2022 didn't come out of nowhere, that, you know, that this is the culmination of a very long history.
00:43:02
Danielle Leavitt
And so part of these interludes, part of the the purpose of these interludes um was to accomplish that, to tell part of a much larger story. So including that story kind of allowed me to trace a lineage, you know, not in the official like state building sense, but in terms of, in terms of history and also in terms of conscience, you know, this, the story of Vasilstus, which if you read the book readers, you know, listeners, I guess um it's a story of conscience. It's a story of
00:43:44
Danielle Leavitt
It's a story of standing up. It's a story of um principle. And so it allowed me to trace this lineage of um of like principled defiance.
00:43:58
Danielle Leavitt
And I think what many Ukrainians consider a precedent of standing up either quietly or not for what matters even when it potentially costs you everything.
00:44:12
Danielle Leavitt
And um that felt important to me. It's kind of like a kind of like a spiritual origin story in some ways.
00:44:20
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. Well, transitioning a little bit to um and current day. ah So I'm curious if so obviously books, you know, it's not like you wrote this book last week. And, ah you know, it's, you know books take a little while to a few months to ah to go to press, sometimes like a whole year.
00:44:40
A.J. Woodhams
So I'm curious if, um so this is the first year of the war, if um personally for any of these seven accounts, if there are any updates since you wrote the book.
00:44:53
A.J. Woodhams
um And then also too, I'm just kind of curious in your overall um assessment um about how the war has changed since you you wrote this and kind of where we stand right now.
00:45:06
Danielle Leavitt
um yeah I think what's striking and maybe like, honestly, the hardest thing to accept is how many of the people in this book are still living in the exact same circumstances that we leave them in.
00:45:24
Danielle Leavitt
Um, Yeah, i I guess I think this is probably the most difficult thing to, for my, for me personally to accept and maybe to convey to readers as well, which is that um there are no, not just that there are no tidy endings, there actually just isn't an ending in this story, in this book.
00:45:43
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah.
00:45:45
Danielle Leavitt
I, I obviously, um you know, I ended the book, provided some, some nice closure for the reader at the end. But the the fact of the matter is all of these people are kind of still where we left them.
00:46:02
Danielle Leavitt
um Vitaly is still in Borodyanka. has, you know, he's still working on the coffee shop. Maria remains in Western Ukraine. There's been several POW exchanges, many just in recent Leonid has not been exchanged, although she heard recently from ah p a recently exchanged soldier who was with Leonid that Leonid is alive.
00:46:32
Danielle Leavitt
um And so that's great news, obviously, although we would want news of release. um Tanya and Victor are in Odessa, their home their home has been destroyed, I believe, um, in Mikilske.
00:46:53
Danielle Leavitt
Um, Julia and Oleg continue to live in Dnipro. She messaged me in February of this year So just about three years after she lost her leg,
00:47:10
Danielle Leavitt
um this is so unimaginable for me. Three years after she lost her leg, she messaged me that their home was destroyed. It's just hard to believe the,
00:47:22
Danielle Leavitt
like long durée of that kind of loss. um And you know, their home plays such a big role in this book, their attachment to the home, Ola continually going back to the home, checking on the home.
00:47:37
Danielle Leavitt
um She sent me photos of kind of the rubble of this house. um And so, yeah, it's um it's difficult. It's difficult to
00:47:52
Danielle Leavitt
to watch it get worse in many ways. And it's easy to crave like a narrative arc with resolution. um
00:48:05
Danielle Leavitt
But, you know,
00:48:07
Danielle Leavitt
it it gives me even more respect, I guess, for the people in this book who' who just continue to endure and to face all of these really difficult things with a lot of humanity.
00:48:19
A.J. Woodhams
And you as somebody who um obviously studies the region, ah do you see politically, do you see an end in sight?
Peace Negotiations and Closing Remarks
00:48:29
Danielle Leavitt
i
00:48:31
Danielle Leavitt
I see an end in sight. um I'm not sure what it'll look like. You know, i do think that they're you know, there will need to be pretty aggressive negotiations and what I will be looking for in the coming weeks and months is how involved are Ukrainians allowed to be in those negotiations and how seriously are Ukrainians taken in those negotiations? I think um something that has perplexed me
00:49:10
Danielle Leavitt
And something that I think is a ah really big threat to kind of the stability of the region in general is this sense that this fiction that seems to have developed.
00:49:22
Danielle Leavitt
which is that because Ukrainians are so proximate to the suffering, so proximate to the violence, they're like so traumatized that they're all now like too irrational to be able to make any good decisions about how to end this war or, you know, how to progress strategically.
00:49:50
Danielle Leavitt
um and so, basically all of those decisions should be outsourced to people that are further away from the violence and the action. and I think this is a really dangerous assumption and a really dangerous fiction.
00:50:04
Danielle Leavitt
You know, Ukrainians are the only ones who have kind of a lived clarity about what's at stake in this war, kind of a lived clarity about um what's really going on and what's really,
00:50:14
A.J. Woodhams
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:50:20
Danielle Leavitt
um what's really at stake for Ukraine and for the Western world in general.
00:50:27
A.J. Woodhams
yeah
00:50:28
Danielle Leavitt
um And so what I'll be watching for is how seriously Ukraine is taken add a negotiation table.
00:50:37
A.J. Woodhams
Well, Danielle, we'll leave it there. um If people want to stay in touch with what you're working on, um do you have a social media? Do you have a web website? Where can people stay in touch with your work?
00:50:49
Danielle Leavitt
Yeah, I have a website. It's levittdanielle.com.
00:50:52
A.J. Woodhams
Okay, great. Well, um Daniel Levitt, by the second spring, seven lives in one year of the war in Ukraine. um Go check it out from the library, go buy a copy. um What ah a ah an interesting um book and some really important accounts. And Daniel, I'm really grateful for your time today.
00:51:12
Danielle Leavitt
Thanks so much, AJ. It's great to be here.