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Russia-Ukraine War – An On-The-Ground Perspective – Christopher Miller
182 Plays1 year ago
Ep 031 – Nonfiction. As a journalist, Christopher Miller was on the ground in Ukraine when the first Russian missiles struck and troops crossed the border. He joins me to discuss his fascinating new book, "The War Came To Us: Life and Death in Ukraine."
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Transcript
Early morning chaos at Kramatorsk
00:00:00
Speaker
It was, you know, almost five a.m. in the morning and dead quiet when four successive, extremely loud, building-shaking explosions happened. And these were cruise missiles that were striking the chromatorsk airfield and taking out some of the logistics and communications there, as well as the runway. And, you know, it shook the building and rattled the windows. There was this huge, you know,
00:00:30
Speaker
many flashes of light and then everything was a bit chaotic after that. And several journalists ran down to the bomb shelter. There were people talking in the bomb shelter about whether or not Russian troops would come rolling through the streets, down the street in tanks toward us. There were planes flying overhead and we could see them and we could hear them when we stepped outside. You know, we weren't sure whether or not they were Ukrainian or Russian.
00:01:00
Speaker
and whether or not those would fall on the hotel. It was a really terrifying moment. And like I said, there was this great uncertainty, which I think in many ways was more terrifying than seeing troops on the street. Because at least then you knew what was happening, where they were coming from, and you had a sense of where you could go.
Interview with Christopher Miller
00:01:32
Speaker
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 am extremely excited to have on the show Christopher Miller, talking about his new book, The War Came to Us, Life and Death in Ukraine. Christopher Miller is a writer and journalist based in Kiev, Ukraine, in Brooklyn, New York. Since 2022, he has been lead correspondent in Ukraine for the Financial Times.
00:02:02
Speaker
His writing in journalism has been published in The Atlantic, CNN, Vice News, and The Times. His coverage of Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a Missouri Honor Medal winner for Distinguished Service in Journalism. Chris, how you doing today? Doing all right. How about yourself? I'm great. Thanks for being here. We were just talking before we started recording. You're in Kiev right now in Ukraine.
00:02:30
Speaker
What are things like in Kiev at the moment?
Rising naval tensions between Ukraine and Russia
00:02:34
Speaker
I would say tense at this particular moment. Just moments before we began chatting, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced that it would start, it would from midnight tonight, consider any Russian ship or sorry, any ship going to Russian ports in the Black Sea or to occupied
00:03:00
Speaker
port cities in Ukraine as carrying military cargo, and it would treat them
00:03:08
Speaker
essentially as parties to the war on Russia's side. This was this was a decision that was made and sort of mirrors the Russian move that was announced just a couple of days ago. So it's a bit tense at the moment. I feel like there's a little bit of an escalation happening and. You know, this has largely been an air and land battle, but now
00:03:37
Speaker
Maybe things are moving a little bit out to sea. I heard that, and I didn't know about the Ukrainian response, but I had heard on the news about Russia's threat to sink any ships coming into port. And I'm also, one, that's a real escalation.
00:03:58
Speaker
very strange timing. I'm, I'm reading right now the book Dead Wake by Eric Larson, which is about the sinking of the Lusitania. And I was like, oh, wow, like, oh, no, that's like the the the the chances of of escalation seem enormous. And especially since like history has seen situations like this happen. I'm curious what your what's your take on that? What are your thoughts on on where that could lead to?
00:04:27
Speaker
Well, I think, like I said, there's been a lot of fight. I mean, the fight has been mostly, I mean, contained to the battlefield. The only air war really happening is Russia's missile and drone attacks. The Ukrainians have attacked using naval drones, which has been of
00:04:46
Speaker
you know, more of a recent development. Last year, they used some of their own developed missiles here in Ukraine called Neptunes to sink the Moskva cruiser that you might remember, which is the Russians flagship battleship in the Black Sea. This obviously stems from Russia backing out of this really important grain deal that allows grain to be exported from Ukraine despite the war.
00:05:13
Speaker
and Turkey had brokered that deal and would obviously like to keep that in place. And so would Ukraine, but Russia backed out of it. Then announced that it would treat ships as parties to the war, of course. So we're seeing this escalation at sea at the same time that Ukraine is conducting its counter offensive. So this could be a way for Russia also to distract from what's happening on the battlefield. But I feel like
00:05:42
Speaker
this is an escalation that we're seeing the war spill out into other various sort of like spheres that haven't really been the focus of it this far.
00:06:00
Speaker
And I'm curious in, you know, not to like draw too many like Lusitania connections, but I mean, are there ships? Are there a lot of foreign ships coming in and out of Ukrainian ports?
Merchant ships under threat
00:06:10
Speaker
And are those like if an American ship sailed into a Ukrainian port, what realistically, what are the chances that Russia would sink that ship or any NATO country sending a ship into a Ukrainian port? Well, I think, I mean, mostly the ships that are that are coming into ports are merchant ships, you know, with various
00:06:33
Speaker
flag carrying states. I think the risk of them being attacked now has risen significantly. I haven't heard of any, there have been no reports of any ships being attacked up to this point, but this now probably will keep
00:06:55
Speaker
ships away from both Ukrainian ports and Russian occupied Ukrainian ports, potentially Russian ports in the Black Sea as well. And all of this could have a pretty significant impact on the markets and on Russia's economy. Certainly Ukraine's economy is already struggling because of
00:07:18
Speaker
the war and the two of its key ports in the cities of Mariupol and Berdyansk being occupied by the Russians and the Ukrainians being unable to use them. Right now, these are threats, right? We haven't seen
00:07:38
Speaker
any movement in the Black Sea on the part of the Ukrainian Navy or the Russian Navy to signal that it's prepared to fire on ships. But let's see how things develop in the next hours or days and after midnight when this deadline from Kiev comes into place. And then you have both sides saying we're prepared to take measures if we need to.
00:08:03
Speaker
Well, thank you for that, that perspective. You know, yeah, hopefully, I mean, you know, this is just like such a, this, this, the, the conflict itself is just, you know, every day it seems like more, more wild and out of control in the last. Well, I was going to say that, I mean, this is just another day in this war. You know, I mean, everything that we,
00:08:28
Speaker
didn't expect has, you know, many of these things have happened. And, you know, this was just another one that we didn't foresee. Another thing that we didn't foresee, that's happening now. What's next? I don't know. But yeah, you know, every day here, it feels like something new. Yeah. Well, let's dive into your book.
00:08:55
Speaker
So this, so your book is really fascinating to me because it is a very, it's a personal on the ground account of the Russia-Ukraine war and a lot of the books that I've read
00:09:09
Speaker
about the war and a lot of the guests, all of the guests actually, except for, you know, who've come on the show. Their perspective is a little bit different and they're great books and they're great perspectives for us to have, but it's not that up close in personal account like you've got right here. So you've been on the front lines in the war, you've been reporting, you're in Kiev right now. Since the war started, how long have you been in Ukraine?
A decade of conflict in Ukraine
00:09:37
Speaker
Well, that's exactly right what you said. I mean, and the point of the book was really to provide a ground level view of the
00:09:45
Speaker
last 13 years, which is how long I've been here. And in that time, the major events that have shaped Ukraine and modern Ukraine, because they have, I think, many of them have been packed into the past decade, right? The revolution in 2013 and 14, Russia's annexation of Crimea, the war in the Donbass in 2014, and now this full scale war.
00:10:10
Speaker
So yeah, that is important to note, which frankly, until I started reading books like yours about Ukraine, you know, I think most people think that 2022 is when things started, but really since 2014, you know, Russia invaded in 2014. Right, right. So that's an important distinction.
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So this book, it spans my time here. It begins shortly after I arrive in spring of 2010, and it ends early this year. And without giving away any spoilers, it begins and it ends in the same place, which is the city of Bakhmut.
00:10:51
Speaker
and some of your listeners and you yourself might recall that Bakhmut was the longest and bloodiest battle of this war. I'm glad you gave that spoiler too, because I'm totally going to ask you about all about Bakhmut. I'm not giving away too much. I think just the location and saying begins and ends here doesn't give away too many details. But Bakhmut was this tiny Eastern Ukrainian city
00:11:20
Speaker
of about 70 to 80,000 people when I arrived in 2010. It was actually called Artemovsk then, which is the name that the Soviets gave to it. Bakhmud is its historic name. It's a place that was founded actually in 1571. So it's one of the oldest places, oldest cities in Eastern Ukraine. And it actually for a while was the regional capital before Donetsk was
00:11:46
Speaker
I didn't realize, I think 2016 is when they changed their name back to Buckmoot. Yeah. Yeah. It was during this period of de-communization, really when it began in earnest here that the Ukrainians began changing a lot of the city names and road names to the names of Ukrainian heroes or significant cultural figures, or in some cases back to their historical name.
00:12:12
Speaker
So, Bachmuth was founded as Bachmuth, you know, hundreds of years ago. And then it was named Artyomovsk by the Soviets, as I explained in my book, for comrade Artyom, who was a close friend of Stalin's and a Bolshevik hero. And so there are towns, cities and villages all over Russia and Ukraine called Artyomovsk or Artyomovski or some variation of that with the name Artyom in them.
00:12:40
Speaker
And just around Eastern Ukraine, I think there's probably a dozen of these little villages with variations of that name. So when I arrived, it was Artemovsk. I first came there as a Peace Corps volunteer. I had actually been a journalist in Portland, Oregon
Christopher Miller's journey to Ukraine
00:12:56
Speaker
for some years and then graduated university there. And the financial crisis hit with a great recession.
00:13:07
Speaker
I grew bored with my low level cub reporter job and was ready to take a step up, but there wasn't a lot available. So I decided to do something else for a while. You were on the indie music scene in Portland, right?
00:13:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what else what else are you going to do? These other weird things like naked bike rides and, you know, India covering the music concerts. So I'd grown a little bit tired of that was ready to do something a little bit more serious.
00:13:38
Speaker
reporting wise and didn't have a lot of options. So I joined the Peace Corps, which was something that I had had in the back of my mind as something to potentially do because I had an uncle who I'm close with who had done the Peace Corps in the 90s and we had been pen pals when he was in Ecuador. And from that point on, I always thought, you know, this could be something that I could do down the line.
00:14:01
Speaker
And it seemed like the right time. And so I went into a recruitment office in Portland and said, you know, I would love to do this. They said, Where would you like to go? I said, Africa. And they said, Great, there's a very good chance we'll send you there. And then some time went by, my application was accepted.
00:14:21
Speaker
They said, we're actually going to send you to Ukraine. How does that sound? And I said, yeah, sure. I just want to get lost for a while. I knew nothing about the place. I ended up in Eastern Ukraine in the city of Artyomovsk, just a couple of hours from the Russian border and.
00:14:37
Speaker
had a really great, albeit sometimes challenging time. And at the end of the two years that I spent there as a Peace Corps volunteer, I decided to, instead of coming back home to the US to stick around Ukraine and move to Kiev, get into doing foreign correspondent work,
00:14:56
Speaker
And I've stuck around and it's been, well, 13 and a half years almost. And I've tried to leave, I think three times now, but Ukraine has this weird way of pulling you back and not allowing you to leave. And, you know, I had spent actually quite a lot of time in 2021 back in New York, where my wife and I now have made a home and,
00:15:24
Speaker
and didn't have any plans to come back to Ukraine long-term. And then as the Russians began building up their forces around the borders of Ukraine in autumn of 2021, I was keeping a close tabs on things. I came back that December and have been here with a few breaks in between since covering the full scale invasion. Yeah.
00:15:52
Speaker
Well, let's actually, let's start off where you start off in your book, which is the night of the Russian invasion, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, because I thought you gave a very descriptive account. Just tell us, what did you see on that night? What did you experience? How did you feel? Give us your account.
00:16:18
Speaker
I was working with BuzzFeed News at the time and I had a photographer with me named Pete Keyhart and a second reporter named Isabelle and a driver named Anatoly. And we had this, you know, great for some that, you know, we were, we were, you know, driving all around the country, gathering reporting in the lead up to the full scale invasion and trying to, to get as, as, as
00:16:49
Speaker
much of a detailed picture as we could about what was happening. And Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, made this speech that was planned, and we knew about it in advance, so we knew when to tune in. And it was on, I think the first, there were two. One came just a few days or a couple of days before the full scale invasion, and he said,
00:17:17
Speaker
the quote-unquote Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, these Eastern Ukrainian regions that are occupied by Russia and were governed by the Kremlin's puppets for years since they invaded back in 2014, they were asking for Russia's help because they were being threatened by the Ukrainians, which was not true, of course. And they asked for the Russian military to be sent in. And I knew at that point
00:17:47
Speaker
that we were going to see some kind of military action. You don't put tens of thousands of soldiers around the border of a country and then go out and perform this charade on Russian television as the president of the country without being prepared, I think, to take some kind of action.
00:18:10
Speaker
With that in mind, I took my team and headed out to Eastern Ukraine to the city of Krematorsk, which is just about 40 minutes from Bakhmut, which I mentioned earlier. And the reason I did that was because there was this hotel that I had spent a lot of time in and used as a base in covering events in 2014 and after that.
00:18:37
Speaker
And I knew that we could be based there, we could move around easily, and whatever happened, we would be in a good position to cover it when it did. And I thought that the Russians, you know, there were these Western intelligence warnings of, you know, a possible attack on Kiev. And I will admit that I was very skeptical of that.
00:19:00
Speaker
I was convinced at that point that the Russians would invade. I just didn't know that it would be on the scale that we would soon find out it would be.
Invasion begins: Fear and disbelief
00:19:11
Speaker
I think nobody did. No author writing about Russia that I've had on the show has been like, yeah, I knew it was going to happen.
00:19:17
Speaker
You know, everybody was, you know, a part of you, a part of you doesn't want to believe that anyone is that insane to do that. So, you know, I thought, well, you know, regardless of what happens, something is going to happen in Eastern Ukraine. So we need to be there because Vladimir Putin had specifically said, you know, we are going to come to the defense of, of, um, you know, our, uh, essentially their puppets in, in, in Eastern Ukraine. So we head out to Kramaturk. Then there's this second speech that he gives.
00:19:47
Speaker
early in the morning on February 24th, around 4 a.m. or so. And listening to that, I knew that there was going to be an invasion. I think everybody who watched that knew, and that it was really just moments away.
00:20:06
Speaker
And with that in mind, I quickly threw everything into my bags that I had with me and made sure that I had my documents on my person. I actually, I had enough time to take a shower.
00:20:23
Speaker
I thought this could be my last time for a while to have a hot shower and I don't know for that, for some reason that just made sense to me. I might have a few minutes. I should do this because the next days could very well be crazy and who knows where I'm going to end up. So I did that and I got dressed. I lied on my bed. I had a conversation with some friends and then after Putin finishes his speech,
00:20:53
Speaker
It was almost 5 a.m. in the morning and dead quiet.
00:20:59
Speaker
when four successive, extremely loud, building-shaking explosions happened. And these were cruise missiles that were striking the crematorisk airfield and taking out some of the logistics and communications there, as well as the runway. And it shook the building and rattled the windows. There was this huge, many flashes of light, and then
00:21:27
Speaker
everything was a bit chaotic after that. And several journalists ran down to the bomb shelter. We were putting on our helmets and vests and obviously, you know,
00:21:44
Speaker
swiping through Twitter and social media to see what was going on. And I felt at that time that I had made the right decision. I knew that there was something happening in Eastern Ukraine and that we would be in a good position to cover it. I was a little bit concerned that it was about it being so close. And I think there was also a great feeling of uncertainty.
00:22:12
Speaker
There were people talking in the bomb shelter about whether or not Russian troops would come rolling through the streets down the street in tanks toward us. There were planes flying overhead and we could see them and we could hear them when we stepped outside. You know, we weren't sure whether or not they were Ukrainian or Russian and whether or not those would fall on the hotel.
00:22:33
Speaker
It was a really terrifying moment. And like I said, there was this great uncertainty, which I think in many ways was, was more terrifying than, you know, seeing, seeing troops on the street, because at least then you knew what was happening, where they were coming from, and you had a sense of where you could go. But this uncertainty really, it can have, it can have a pretty great psychological effect on you.
00:22:59
Speaker
It almost freezes you. You're not quite sure where you will be safe and where you can go. So a lot of us stayed in the bomb shelter of this hotel for a while, coming up to a street level to take a look outside and engage things. By late morning, I had decided that it would be a good time to head to Kiev because I was seeing reports of Russian troops streaming across the border.
00:23:25
Speaker
And we were seeing these tanks and armored vehicles and security camera footage coming across in northern Chernigev region from Chernobyl heading south toward Kiev. And I thought if, and as I say in the book, you know, if the idea of Russia's idea and goal is to take Kiev. I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but we should be there to cover it. This is a major, major development.
00:23:53
Speaker
So we got in the car and, you know, drove as fast as we could from Eastern Ukraine to Kiev, which was typically about a nine and a half hour drive. And I think it took us maybe 14 or so because the lines of the gas stations were, you know, one or two kilometers long. There was traffic. Was the general mood among people, um, where, where people, you know, like we mentioned,
00:24:22
Speaker
Russia's been, you know, they invaded in 2014. And so maybe this was on the back of a lot of people's minds, but were people generally in a pretty chaotic state where they, you know, describe kind of the mood, you know, as everybody's trying to flee this violence.
00:24:41
Speaker
I think there was a lot of disbelief. People in Eastern Ukraine and in Kiev as well didn't think that Russia would invade on this scale. People in Eastern Ukraine had sort of become inured to it all. I mean, they were used to the war being so close to them because they had lived for nine years with it just outside their door.
00:25:02
Speaker
Crematorus, there was a bit of a buffer between the front line and the city itself, but it had been under Russian occupation for nearly three months back in 2013, sorry, 2014. So residents in Crematorus and some of the nearby cities knew all too well what living under Russian occupation meant and the kind of terrors and horrors that it came with. But they didn't think that
00:25:30
Speaker
you know, they would be at risk because there was that space between the frontline there, I think.
00:25:36
Speaker
But everything happened so quickly and with such intensity, of course, that really jolted everyone into action. So people got on the road immediately either to get gas in their tanks so they could be ready to leave, or to immediately flee and start heading west where everybody believed they would be safer. Either west in the Carpathian Mountains, a very sparsely populated area of the country,
00:26:04
Speaker
that would not likely be targeted or even beyond that to the Polish border, the Slovakia border, the Hungarian border, trying to get to safety in the EU where they knew bombs wouldn't be falling on their heads. So there were a lot of people on the streets. The ATMs had lines that were 20, 30 people long. Pharmacies were packed. Everybody trying to get medicine.
00:26:32
Speaker
shops were full of people gathering water and non-perishable food items to stock up on. There was panic and a lot of, like I said, a lot of uncertainty. It was a really terrifying moment where people did not know whether or not
00:26:55
Speaker
you know, the country would stand another day.
Ukraine's fate amidst advancing forces
00:26:59
Speaker
When Russian troops were seen moving toward Kiev, a lot of people thought because they didn't believe that that would actually happen at first. But they began thinking that these Western intelligence assessments that we had seen and heard about that were saying there could be an attempt on Kiev, they were thinking, okay, well, now this is true. And if it's true,
00:27:24
Speaker
You know, some analysts were saying Kia would fall within, you know, if not, you know, several days, then a couple of weeks or a couple of months. And, you know, they were.
00:27:37
Speaker
they were really worried that that was a possibility. And we didn't know that the Ukrainian resistance yet would be as stiff as it was and that the Ukrainians would react in the truly incredible way that they did. These were the early hours and it was a really terrifying moment. So when you get to Kiev then, what's the first week, what is that like in Kiev? It was a lot of that same feeling.
00:28:05
Speaker
that first night. Are there a lot of, I mean, are there tanks, are there planes, are there helicopters? What are the signs that war is here?
00:28:16
Speaker
There were certainly Ukrainian armored vehicles on the streets. A lot of checkpoints had been set up around, well, first of all, on all of the main highways, arteries throughout the country, soldiers, volunteers from the territorial defense forces or local police were manning checkpoints and checking IDs, looking in the trunks of cars, scrutinizing our passports to make sure we were who we said we were.
00:28:46
Speaker
When we entered Kiev that first late evening, I remember we had to get out of the car and they looked around and they looked at us and asked us what we were doing and then we made it to our hotel. From there, I think I took sort of a walk around the block and I noticed that a lot of people were sandbaking their windows, doors. There were a lot of police on the streets.
00:29:15
Speaker
Not a lot of pedestrians. Civilians really were hunkering down or on the road still heading west. I spent the night with my team and several other foreigners and journalists at a hotel in central Kiev in its parking garage, which doubled as a bomb shelter. It was two stories underground. So we were certainly safe there, but it was all concrete. It was pretty cold because this was February.
00:29:46
Speaker
They were setting up cots and had little sandwiches and hot coffee for folks. They brought down pillows and blankets. They really didn't want us going up to our rooms. And my room was on the fourth or fifth or sixth floor, because at that height, it was easy for missiles to reach and to explode. And the risk was much greater than being at ground level or underground.
00:30:14
Speaker
But, you know, there were planes in the air. We could hear explosions in the distance. There were, you know, these were explosions that we were hearing out in the Bucher, Erpin, Hostomil area, northwest of Kiev, where the Russians were trying to break through these defensive lines and the Ukrainians were able to set up very quickly. But the interesting thing
00:30:43
Speaker
I think was that it wasn't the military that responded immediately because Ukraine's military and its National Guard were sent to the east and the south of the country because they believed that the Russians would either come up from Crimea like they did or push further east, sorry, from the east, further west like they did.
00:31:06
Speaker
but they didn't have any defenses set up around Kiev. And so the people who responded were people from the Territorial Defense, which is a volunteer group. These are guys with hunting rifles who maybe they had done a stint in the military back in the day, or they had participated in 2014 and were out of shape.
00:31:31
Speaker
just ordinary people and police. And these people were largely responsible for stopping, or at least slowing at that point, the Russian advance until the military had time to respond.
Challenges of war reporting in Ukraine
00:31:48
Speaker
And I remember waking up after that night. Well, I didn't sleep much, to be honest. And I write about this. I slept in my vehicle that night.
00:32:00
Speaker
and really just tossing and turning. It was a very uncomfortable night and constantly scrolling through Twitter and messages and calling as many of my sources as I can to get whatever information I could about what was happening above ground. But that next morning, there were a lot of air raid sirens
00:32:23
Speaker
a lot of missile alerts and just the city, this city of like more than 3 million people that was always just so vibrant and busy, like humming with life was completely dead with the exception of, you know, the sort of reverberations of explosions in the distance. People with guns running from here to there
00:32:52
Speaker
The Ukrainians had opened up the doors to their armories, handed out rifles to anyone that showed them a passport. It was a real ad hoc response and totally surreal.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah. Well, now this isn't, so this wasn't the first, I mean, you, you've been covering the, the conflict in the Donbass for a while. So you, you certainly have seen violence before this and you talking about kind of your, you know, you were, you were texting friends and getting messages from family. What does your family think, uh, at this point, because, you know, you've been a war reporter for a while. What's, what's, what's your family saying to you?
00:33:38
Speaker
Well, first, about the war reporter thing. I don't like calling myself a war reporter because I actually came here, I mean, not because I was interested in covering a war. I just happened to be here when the war began. Hence the title of the war came to us. I mean, like my friends here and the Ukrainians and everybody else, this all, the Russians came to Ukraine to wage war.
00:34:05
Speaker
I stuck around because I loved the place. I ended up writing a lot about its politics, its culture, its people. The war was something that I learned to cover and I learned how to be a war reporter, just like I learned to cover the revolution. It's not like I didn't come here with a gas mask or a helmet or a Kevlar vest or anything like that. But all of that
00:34:34
Speaker
sort of prepared me for this full-scale war. And so when it happened, I knew how to conduct myself. I knew how to behave. I knew what I needed. I had a great team who also
00:34:53
Speaker
was experienced. They've worked with me in the past in covering the war out in Eastern Ukraine. We had everything we needed. We remain calm and talked over all of our decisions. We had a great security team supporting us from London and New York. So friends and family aren't like, you got to get out now, Chris. My parents and friends were worried. They knew that I would make good decisions.
00:35:24
Speaker
But of course, what they're seeing on CNN or NBC or they're reading in the articles that I'm filing or what I'm writing on Twitter was that Russian tanks were rolling into town and missiles were falling and exploding all over the country and that we really did not know what would happen not only the next day, but even in the next hour.
00:35:52
Speaker
There was a lot of death very quickly. A lot of Ukrainian soldiers, a lot of civilians were killed in missile strikes, artillery strikes as Russian forces pushed through and tried to get to the cities that they were looking to capture, Kharkiv, Kiev being two of them.
00:36:14
Speaker
Well, let's actually let's talk about maybe your first six months of the war. I'm curious how you would characterize that time and if you just share some of the experiences that you were seeing on the ground.
Ukrainian civilian resistance
00:36:27
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you look at the war in phases,
00:36:31
Speaker
I think the first couple of months or so, or maybe the first month would be sort of phase one, when Russia's focus was to get to Kiev and to take the capital to impose its own, to put its own puppet government in place, to either capture or kill President Volodymyr Zelensky
00:36:58
Speaker
to essentially control the country. And it became clear only a couple of weeks later that they were going to have extreme difficulty in doing this. The Ukrainians had managed to stop them. It was still a difficult fight at that point. I think some of the things that stand out are probably, I touched on it briefly, but the resistance
00:37:26
Speaker
the civilian resistance, not only the military, but really Kiev was saved by tens of thousands of ordinary people who volunteered, took up arms, made Molotov cocktails, erected barricades.
00:37:45
Speaker
uh, set up checkpoints and block posts. And, and that's how they slowed down and ultimately stopped, uh, the Russians. And then it was the military and the national guard that responded. And, and, and repelled them. How close were the Russians to Kiev? Was that how close were the Russians to Kiev? Uh, I mean, if you look at Erpin and Bucha, what is that? It's, I mean, by car it's.
00:38:15
Speaker
you know, 15 minutes to the western outskirts of Kiev. On the eastern side, because Kiev is bisected by the Dnipro River, they got as close as Brovary, which, yeah, it would be, you know, 15, 20 minutes to the city limits of Kiev.
00:38:35
Speaker
So what's that, you know, 15 kilometers or less? I don't know, maybe a little bit more, roughly. I mean, the force or the full force of Russia's military was a little bit further out, but they had some units that were relatively close. So if you were talking like, let's use like a New York City comparison, minus the travel times, but like maybe like Newark, let's say like, no, maybe even closer. I mean, I think, you know, maybe
00:39:04
Speaker
Red Hook to Williamsburg. Very close. Yeah, close, close. But in a city, and this is a city, and these were suburbs of the city, it's a very densely populated place. So if you are unimpeded, you can get from point A to point B very quickly. But there's buildings, there's roads, a lot of things standing in your way.
00:39:32
Speaker
you know, it's densely populated. And so, you know, in practice, it would take a lot, there would be a lot of resistance, you know, the partisan mentality in Ukrainians meant that the Russians were going to have to fight for every meter that they, you know, tried to take or would attempt to take toward Kiev at that moment.
00:39:59
Speaker
So you would credit then the repelling the Russians. I think a lot of people, I think there is a, and this is probably part of it, there is an idea that the Russians really, they blundered through the beginning part of the war, that they made a lot of mistakes. That's true.
00:40:18
Speaker
But you would say in this situation, it was more the resistance put up against the Russians. Both can be true at the same time. The Russians were incredibly stupid about how they acted and what they did. I mean, they were using maps that were made in the 1980s to navigate their way to Kiev. They were coming in these long snaking columns that exposed
00:40:44
Speaker
you know, dozens and dozens of their armored vehicles to partisan attacks and anti-tank weaponry that the Ukrainians were using, including the American javelin systems, which proved very effective in the early weeks. No, they made mistake after mistake after mistake. But at the same time, there was really strong resistance on the Ukrainian side.
00:41:10
Speaker
But it's the combination of those two things that kept the Russians out of Kiev. Also, there were Russian special forces on the ground already in central Kiev. So as I write in my book in the latter part about this period of time, there were agents paid by and coordinated by the FSB, the GRU, Russian special services,
00:41:41
Speaker
to work as saboteurs and agents on the ground that were providing information on what was happening in central Kiev and particularly in the government quarter to these agencies and the military outside of the capital to aid them and trying to get them here.
00:42:02
Speaker
but also with arms themselves trying to storm the presidential administration, parliament, key government buildings to destabilize the situation. And they did have this kill list, which included President Zelensky and several of his cabinet members, and they were trying to get in. And if we talk about them, they were also very close to not
00:42:33
Speaker
I mean, well, to seeing Russian agents and troops storm through their gates. The presidential administration, it's not like the White House where it's guarded with heavy security and there are all of these fences and layers of security that keep people away. The streets in front of it are open.
00:43:01
Speaker
And it's right in the middle of the city here. I was looking over my shoulder because I could sort of almost see it just over the hill behind me. But the leadership here in Kiev was asleep when the invasion started and they had to rush to get to the president's office or wherever they needed to be.
00:43:29
Speaker
the security at the administration was saved because they essentially used a bunch of their own vehicles to barricade the entrances on either side of it. And there were shootouts in the street between Ukrainian security forces and these Russian agents. And this is all information that was told to me from the security services here by Zelensky's chief of staff, Andrei Yermak,
00:43:58
Speaker
And so it was, again, this unorganized response that saved them, not defenses that were in place because they expected this to happen. I'm curious if you're thinking like day one of the invasion to this maybe like the six month mark, if you were talking on the street to like your average Ukrainian, how have their attitudes changed?
Morale shift as Russian advances falter
00:44:22
Speaker
Early on, there was a lot of uncertainty. There was a lot of fear. They didn't know if the capital would stand, if their country would be around. After a few weeks, when we saw that the Russians had failed in taking the capital, and not only that, but they had been pushed out and were forced to retreat back to Russia. There was great pride here, and morale was very high, and the Ukrainians
00:44:52
Speaker
believed then that they were capable of winning this war. And I think that carried into summer when they managed to, with great difficulty and significant loss of life, stop Russia from continuing its offensive action in eastern Ukraine, although we did see the loss of cities like Lisi-Cansk and Sivra-Danyatsk in the east there.
00:45:19
Speaker
But the Russian offensive really stopped that summer. They weren't able to do much more. And so morale remained really high.
00:45:29
Speaker
It was so through autumn, especially during this blitz on Harkiv region, where we saw the Ukrainians in their first counter offensive take back a significant amount of territory in dramatic, surprising fashion. And then also the city of Gerson in the south. morale.
00:45:53
Speaker
waned some in the winter. And winter is a really difficult period of time here. It's cold, it's dry, your skin cracks, you know, it hurts to go outside. And neither army made a lot of progress on the battlefield.
Ukraine's counter-offensive challenges
00:46:09
Speaker
And that's really when the Battle of Bokmuth became this
00:46:14
Speaker
just grueling war of attrition that was seeing thousands of casualties a week even. And then I think Russia trying its hand at another counter offensive and failing in January and February
00:46:32
Speaker
again gave the Ukrainians a little bit of a boost. And that's when Kiev and also Western allies, including the United States, began talking about sending a significant amount of more weaponry and ammunition to Ukraine. And we first started hearing about the potential delivery of tanks and other various weapons systems for Ukraine's upcoming spring counter offensive. So Ukrainians really were pumped up and excited about spring.
00:47:01
Speaker
But that kind of drugged out for not weeks, but excuse me, for months. And in that time, the Russians were able to dig in.
00:47:15
Speaker
to the territories that they occupied in the south and the east and build these extremely complex and dense networks of fortifications that have anti-tank ditches and trenches and miles deep minefields. And we're seeing that- Miles deep. Miles deep, miles deep, three to 10 miles of
00:47:40
Speaker
scattered mines, trenches, barbed wire, it's awful stuff. And without knowing exactly how much of a challenge those would pose, people here were pretty pumped about the counter offensive because expectations for it were very high. So we're at this moment now where the counter offensive is not going according to plan.
00:48:08
Speaker
The Ukrainians have really struggled. They've not been able to break through these heavily defended, dense defenses that Russia has had a lot of time to build. And people are tired. There's a real feeling of exhaustion. This has been going on for a year and a half at this scale. And for more than nine years now,
00:48:37
Speaker
uh, in, in the Southeast and, and people are exhausted and, you know, they're worried that the rest of the world is going to also get tired and become less interested in helping. And that there will be a big election in the United States that could mean, uh, or well, could, it could impact Western support for Ukraine.
00:49:02
Speaker
And so there's great concern that without significant success on the battlefield in the next weeks or months, that people will see Ukraine's fight as essentially culminating. They've done all they can. Now it's time to sit down and negotiate. And nobody here wants to negotiate.
00:49:25
Speaker
when they've lost their homes, entire cities, towns, when they've lost loved ones. I think a recent poll said there were 78% of Ukrainians knew someone close to them who had been killed or wounded, had essentially been a casualty in this war. And that's an extraordinary amount of people when you have a country of 40 million people.
00:49:52
Speaker
They don't want a solution that sees nearly 20% of their country occupied long term. They don't want to be seen as capitulating.
00:50:06
Speaker
They want and they believe that, well, they want a victory and they believe that their close allies can help them achieve that, but that for some reason, they're worried about what a defeated Russia could do. This is to say that it's a really intense and difficult moment that
00:50:37
Speaker
that Ukraine is in right now. I think the only way to escape that is for them to have success. To have success, they need a lot more support. They've lost a lot of good units and soldiers. They've got some reinforcements, but these are a lot of fighters who are
00:50:59
Speaker
They're teachers and taxi drivers and IT workers and people who understand that this is an existential fight, so they need to step up and defend their country, but they're not trained soldiers. Overall, it's this feeling of exhaustion, but knowing that if they stop fighting, then that might be it. Well, two things actually.
00:51:26
Speaker
come to mind. The first is that's so interesting what you say about the fear of waning attention by the West. And I think we're at a, I don't know if we're, I mean, every moment's a strange moment, but I feel like I've been hearing more, more ideas that have been maybe more fringe ideas here in the US about Russia. So like, for example, I went into the DMV the other day, I'm here outside Washington, DC.
00:51:53
Speaker
And there was a guy camped out in front of the DMV with all these posters about praising Putin and how Russia is the real victim here. And this is NATO versus Russia and that kind of thing. And I feel like I've been hearing a lot more of that. But I don't want to say a lot more of that. I have been hearing more of that lately. So that's interesting that you bring that up as a fear that the Ukrainians have.
00:52:19
Speaker
Well, actually, what are your thoughts on that before I ask you my next question? I think, yeah, I have been noticing that myself that there is this discussion in the United States that seems to center around a desire for peace and negotiations to happen.
Negotiating peace in Ukraine
00:52:40
Speaker
But I think that
00:52:44
Speaker
You know, while that sounds all fine and great, I think what is missing is the understanding that a negotiated peace right now means a broken Ukraine with an uncertain future
00:53:05
Speaker
And I say uncertain, meaning will it ever become whole again? How long would the front lines remain frozen? Would Russia occupy these territories? What would it take in the future to fight back or negotiate back the rest of Ukrainian territory?
00:53:26
Speaker
And I think some of this seems to stem from domestic frustration and also be a part of this polarization that we see in the United States that's become, I think, very political. There are some more radical elements of one side of the political spectrum that
00:53:50
Speaker
seems to be more sympathetic to the Russian side because they might view
00:53:58
Speaker
the reason for this war being not Russian aggression and Russia's clear desire to destroy Ukraine and its people, but the misplaced idea, in my opinion, that it was the West and NATO encroaching further toward Russia that fueled the conflict and forced Russia to respond.
00:54:27
Speaker
I think I'm in a good place being here for the last 13 years to say that the latter is not the case, that Putin and his Russia has wanted to do this for a long time. They found what they believed to be an opportune moment to do this back in 2014, being invading the country.
00:54:50
Speaker
and then bided their time for a while when they saw that the West wasn't really willing to respond in a strong way before invading a new in 2022. Well, what do you think is, you're obviously on the ground in Ukraine. What do you think is something that people outside of Ukraine don't understand about the war?
Framing the war: A fight for survival
00:55:17
Speaker
I think there's a lot that people don't understand. I mean, it's all very, very complex. In some ways, well, let me back up. This is a very complex place, Eastern Europe, Ukraine in particular. I think in a way, this war could almost be
00:55:39
Speaker
viewed in a much more simplistic way than wars past. I really do feel like more than any war I can remember in my lifetime, and I won't tell you how old I am, but I'm in my 30s, that there is very much an idea here of who is good and who is bad, right? Good and evil. The Ukrainians did not provoke Russia. They posed no threat to Russia. Russia invaded anyway.
00:56:10
Speaker
using bogus justifications for doing so. And the things that they've done are horrific. You just need to look at Mariupol, Bucia, Bakhmut to know that it's monstrous stuff. I mean, war crime after war crime, you name it, they've done it. The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives here.
00:56:38
Speaker
That's why I say this is very much, you know, in a simplified way, you know, I think this is a fight, very much a fight against good and evil. But then if you break it down, there are all sorts of complexities. I don't know if we have enough time to get in in them, but I think, I think what people don't
00:57:00
Speaker
understand to the extent that it's clear to people here and let's say some of the other former Soviet satellites that are now and have been independent countries since the collapse. So I'm thinking of like the Baltics and Poland and the Czech Republic and a lot of Central and Eastern Europe.
00:57:27
Speaker
If Putin and Russia is not stopped now, like they weren't stopped in 2008, they weren't stopped in 2014, there is a very, very good chance this war will spill over further in Europe and cause greater instability, more death,
00:57:48
Speaker
And I think this is now the time where there has to be enough support to help Ukraine win, not only to settle the war, find a negotiation to stop or a solution to end the fighting. But actually, what needs to be understood is that Ukraine needs to win.
00:58:15
Speaker
And a lot of people I think are looking for a way to just end what's happening right now, not to find a lasting solution that keeps Ukraine a sovereign country, more or less whole, hopefully on the more side, and defeats Russia in a way that doesn't allow it to continue this type of aggressive behavior in the future.
00:58:44
Speaker
Yeah, well, just thinking about your experiences, obviously you spent in 2010 to 2014, you were in Bakhmout, thinking about your experiences in Bakhmout in Ukraine before the invasion. I wonder if you could just
00:59:02
Speaker
in the last few minutes of our interview, talk a little bit about Bakhmut. And obviously, it's known around the world now as an extremely fierce battle. And the destruction was, I think, unparalleled, maybe in Ukraine, but maybe not. But terrible destruction. But could you just maybe compare and contrast how it was before? And then when you returned, which you did do in December of last year, what did you see?
00:59:32
Speaker
Maybe I'll take it in reverse and say, you know, what everybody has seen in recent months is this hellscape where there's no life, there's no color, it's shells of buildings, rubble, you know, or entire city reduced to rubble and dust, which is not the city that I remember, is not the city that I lived in or 70,000 more people.
Bakhmut's transformation and war impact
00:59:59
Speaker
you know, Bach moved back in 2010, 11, 12, and even up until the full scale invasion was a beautiful little city that felt a lot like a city in middle America or say, you know, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, you know,
01:00:21
Speaker
people sent their children to school. They had families. They would spend the weekends at the movie theater or the cinema or this beautiful house of culture where they would show various operas.
01:00:40
Speaker
The embankment on the river was lined with roses and there was always somebody out there posing for a photograph to post on social media. It was a place known not for war, but instead for sparkling wine. There is an old famous winery that was actually created by Joseph Stalin.
01:01:05
Speaker
in the 50s and it's produced sparkling wine. They call it champagne. It was sparkling wine, but done in a similar manner as French champagne. It was shipped all over the Soviet Union and then later still all over Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
01:01:27
Speaker
And I had gone there several times and done tours and made friends with the people who worked at the winery and they would call me every once in a while and say, we have some foreigners in town and they want to go to the winery and we don't speak English. Can you come and help guide the tour and translate? And I'd say, yeah, sure. It was also a place known for salt, mining salt. They had these huge, huge salt mines that went for 20 or 30 miles underground.
01:01:57
Speaker
but also had this cavernous room where every October, Ukraine's elite would gather in this mining elevator with no walls on it.
01:02:12
Speaker
They'd go down 20 at a time and they would watch the national Philharmonic orchestra play. It was one of the events of the year in Eastern Ukraine. It was this place that was off the beaten path, but it was a beautiful city of its own. It was the former regional capital of the Donetsk region before the city of Donetsk was the capital.
01:02:36
Speaker
And unlike a lot of the rest of the region, which is a coal-dusted steppe, because there are a lot of coal mines out there, this was a place that was actually relatively clean. And people took great pride in their city, and it was just a lovely place. It wasn't a major metropolis, but it had its own charm about it.
01:02:59
Speaker
I fell deeply in love with it and I made some very close friends who I saw grow up and raise families and do some really great things before they were forced to flee or join the military. And unfortunately, the apartments that I lived in and the schools that I worked at and the library that I volunteered at are all gone.
01:03:29
Speaker
Well, Chris, this has been an excellent interview. Sorry to end on that sort of bummer note, or that more poignant note. No, I mean, that's why I saved it to the end. But there's a real, and one of the things about your book is that so valuable about it, I think, are those experiences that you've had with your own eyes on the ground.
Miller's personal insights into the war
01:03:52
Speaker
And it's just a very, I think it's a valuable viewpoint.
01:03:57
Speaker
I feel like the more that this war is, in all wars maybe, that this war is made more personal, the better outcomes will happen. That's what I wanted to do with the book. People know Ukraine from the reporting of the last year, which is great, but it's all about war and a lot of it is really awful, awful stuff.
01:04:23
Speaker
And in the book, I mean, 70% of the book is all written before the full-scale invasion. And the point being that I think it's important to get to know the place so you know what you've lost. Then and only then do you really understand the importance of the war, what has been lost, why it's important to support Ukraine, to help restore what's been lost.
01:04:51
Speaker
And it's just a fascinating, beautiful, funny, wild place as well. And so the book is packed with all sorts of various experiences and me bumbling along before I ever grasp this place. And then, of course, all of these incredible stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things that we've come to know in the past year, for example.
01:05:19
Speaker
Thank you for having me. It's been fun to chat. Yeah, absolutely. If people want to stay in touch with your work, how can they stay in touch with what you're writing? Are you on social media? I think my email is out there. I'm a working journalist for the Financial Times. A lot of my contact information is out there. I'm pretty active on Twitter for now.
01:05:41
Speaker
Threads is looking kind of good. Instagram I use and I post a lot of photos from my reporting out in Eastern Ukraine if you like images rather than words. And yeah, I'm around. Usually people are smart enough to figure out how to get in touch. Wonderful. Well, Christopher Miller, the war came to us, life and death in Ukraine.
01:06:04
Speaker
Go buy a copy, go check it out from your library. What an incredible personal story. Chris, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, AJ.