ENGThe Washington Post’s Isabelle Khurshudyan on her first year in Ukraine and calling Kyiv home

Towards the middle of February we got a feeling that it’s getting closer and closer. I remember I couldn’t sleep through the night then, I woke up every two hours and checked my phone. I was worried I was gonna oversleep the invasion.

Around February 23, when I was in Kharkiv, I decided it’s a good place for me to be – it’s [Ukraine’s] second largest city, it’s close to the Russian border, it’s also a majority Russian speaking city. So I thought it would be a kind of an interesting place. But that morning on February 23 I woke up and just didn’t want to do any work. I asked my bosses for a day off, I went and got a tattoo just completely spontaneously, I went for a lunch with champagne. I had a great day, as if I knew it would be the last good day for a while. [She laughs]

That night we got some information that it was probably going to start in the morning. I just remember going to sleep physically shaking, I think I probably had a panic attack. I was probably scared of… In your head you have a picture of planes flying over you and dropping a bomb exactly on your hotel, exactly where you are. And for some people it was the reality [when the Russian full-scale invasion started].

At that time I just had no clue what it was going to be. So I was awake all night, I saw that Putin was going to give a speech, I turned it on on my phone. All I remember him saying is “special military operation” and as soon as he was done you heard explosions outside, it was just seconds later. So I got up, went to the bathroom, closed the door and brushed my teeth.

And then I calmed down a little bit somehow. Okay, it started. I think this waiting and anticipation is something that can really drive you crazy, which is what happened with me. I think we were really confused in the beginning, there was a lot of misinformation: where the Russian tanks were, where there was shelling, where there wasn’t. It was really hard to know where to go, if it was safe to go there, all of that stuff.

– How much time did you spend in Kharkiv?

– The first week [of the full-scale invasion]. Then it got really, really bad at some point, and our editors wanted us to leave because they were afraid we could be encircled in the city.

– You’ve also mentioned the security protocol you went through with your editors prior to that.

– That was before the [full-scale] invasion, yeah. We talked with our security advisors. Kharkiv was so close to the border that we thought that the Russians could take the city within a few hours. It all seemed possible, because it’s only like 50 kilometers [away from the Russian border]. And our security advisor in London was like: Well, if you’re caught behind Russian lines we’ll probably have to negotiate your release. And I was like: Okay. [She laughs]

So then we went to Dnipro for a couple of days, and then from Dnipro we eventually moved down to Odesa, we mostly reported from Mykolayiv and the south.

I don’t know, there’s a certain solidarity when you’ve lived here for the whole span of the full-scale war basically. You feel this sense of community with other people here. No one in the world realizes what this experience is like, except for the people that are here. And there’s a bond that naturally forms, I think. Like, I can’t explain that to my friends in the US, whom I love dearly, but that’s a different thing.

– Can I ask you about that emotional piece you’ve mentioned?

– Oh, it hasn’t run yet, I haven’t written it yet, because it was hard to deal with. One of these days I’ll write it.

– How do you talk to your friends and relatives back in the US about the war? I understand it might be hard, because the foreign optics is basically that the whole Ukraine is an active warzone, but there are many levels to that.

– Some things we talk about and some things usually we don’t. I remember I was looking for an apartment in Kyiv and my friends were asking me: “Oh, how are you going to find an apartment? Isn’t every building there destroyed?” And I was like: “No, buildings in downtown Kyiv are not destroyed.” Or a couple of days ago I told my mother that I was going out for dinner with my friends and she was like: “Oh, are they getting products there?” And I was like: “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I eat better than you do.” [She laughs]

When I go to the east though I usually don’t tell anybody, I mean my family and friends. And usually they just see a story after the fact. [...] I’m just not someone who goes back to the US and tells these stories about a shell landing 150 meters from me. And my friends know better not to ask me how many dead bodies I’ve seen. A stranger I met in the US asked me that. And I was like: “Get away from me.” Me and my friends talk about my life here, the people I work with.

So yeah, sometimes there’s this warped perception. Some stuff is just misperception, I guess. And then there are some things that you should explain. Like, what it’s like to have no power when you live on a high floor, when you have to plan your entire schedule around this power outage.

– How does that influence your reporting? Because you guys are doing a lot of battleground reporting, but there are also some stories [about Kyiv] and other major cities. How do you find a balance?

– I think for us the most important thing in coverage is to write the stories that are of interest to our audience, [predominantly] the American audience. Ukraine is great, because a lot of these stories get translated, some pieces are picked up by Ukrainian media, so there’s a lot of interest here in Ukraine as well. But we focus on our English-reading audience in the US. So it is a lot of military, battlefield stuff, because American tax-payers want to know what weapons are coming in here, how they are being used, what’s going on, if that stuff is working. So we got to have this accountability reporting.

But yeah, humanizing the reporting helps. Especially with stories like the one I mentioned with the power outages. How do you explain what that does to one family’s life? You [report the Ukrainians’ experience]. And then you as an American can understand what the Ukrainians feel, what Russia’s tactics in this war are, the war crimes and things like that.

Sometimes you do have to correct the record a bit. I did have editors [say things] like: “Well, write about what life in Kyiv is like now.” And I’m like: “I don’t know, I live downtown, my power doesn’t go out that much. I bet if I lived on the left bank my power would be out all the time”. My colleague and I talked about a story about how these power outages showed this societal divide: who has generators, who doesn’t, who lives on the right bank, who lives on the left bank…

So yeah, pretty much everything that we write relates to the war. But everything in Ukrainian society now relates to the war anyway. Some things are a little bit lighter, some things are [focused] directly on the battlefield. Some stories are a bit more political and they have to be reported from Kyiv, and that’s also really important.

– I guess there will be a lot more politically-focused reporting now.

– I think so. The longer this goes, the more the politics of it will come to the forefront. I expect that at some stage the battlefield will kind of quiet down. And decisions will have to be made politically. And that’s where that part becomes really, really important.

– First of all, I think your team’s reporting on the battle for Kyiv is great. You get this sense of how close we were to the fall of the city, [and what could happen] if it wasn’t for the heroic actions of the Ukrainian armed forces. Is it surreal for you that Kyiv remains independent and free after this year?

– Yes and no. In reporting you realize, for lack of a better word, how much of a shit-show the defense of Kyiv really was. It was kind of amazing, but it was also incredibly disorganized. There were just a lot of people doing a lot of stuff. And somehow it worked. It could’ve been that a lot of things went wrong, and then Kyiv’s taken.

But what I’ve learnt about Ukrainians for the past year is the level of resilience and chutzpah, I guess you could say. Like, I’m also not surprised. I think [Kyiv] could’ve been destroyed but I don’t think Ukrainians would’ve just given it up. What the battle of Kyiv did was save the city and keep it intact. They kept it on the outskirts, basically.

We went really close to the city potentially being destroyed, looking a lot like what Kharkiv looks like now. But I don’t think Ukrainians would just give it up, if that makes sense. I think there would be babushkas in the street firing RPGs at Russian soldiers and stuff like that.

– So basically the type of war that the US was preparing for prior to February 24?

– Exactly, insurgency.

– Was Ukraine winning the battle for Kyiv the most decisive point in this war?

– For sure. No matter what happens, the battle for Kyiv changes the war, because Putin’s ultimate goal was taking Kyiv. That was the priority. Everything’s a matter of perspective, but no matter what happens from this point on he did not achieve his war goals.

And I don’t think Ukraine sees it as a victory, because 20% of its territory is still occupied. However, Russia basically lost the war for its health when it couldn’t take Kyiv, because that was its purpose. If you take Kyiv, you have the whole country basically.

– Was that series the hardest piece of reporting the bureau did this past year? It took a lot of interviews, specifically with Ukrainian military command.

– We did over a hundred interviews. That Zelenskyy interview caused a little bit of a stir. [She laughs] One interview we did [with a tank brigade commander] took four hours, the poor guy was on a four-day leave from the frontline and we had him on Zoom for four hours, running us through the details of the battle and stuff like that.

So yeah, there was a ton of reporting, and then you would hear a new detail and you would need to follow up on that, and then you would have to do five more interviews to get to that… And honestly there was so much stuff that we had to leave out. I hoped we could turn it into a book, but Paul [Sonne] left for The New York Times. We had a Georgian Legion [soldier] telling us that on the first day in Hostomel they ran out of ammunition, so they were just running Russians over with their [vehicles]. Amazing story, but we can’t prove it, so we had to leave it out. There was a lot of stuff like that, just too difficult to verify.

Paul and I were both on vacation when we turned in the story, I was in Georgia and Paul was in the US. We had so many edits to do on it, at one point we both pulled all-nighters. We worked on it for twelve hours straight, we just kept going, because there was a ton of work to do and it was a very tight deadline, we wanted to publish it on August 24.

But I’m glad people liked it, I was really proud of it. And I do think it’s the definitive story on the definitive moment in the war.

– You’ve mentioned the Kupol story. I do understand there’s a lot of complex issues there but what’s your outtake from the whole situation?

– The feedback – it is what it is, I don’t expect every single person to like something I write. I did hear from a lot of soldiers, whom I’ve met throughout the last year reporting, who told me: “This is true, thank you for writing it.”

The Khartiya press officer Illia [Koldomasov] asked me recently: “Where was the press-officer during this interview?” And I said: “There wasn’t one.” [Kupol] reached out to me through a person who knew me, he’s a 40-something-year-old commander, why am I going to ask permission from a press officer to speak with him? He’s a grown-up, if he wants to talk to me, he can talk to me. If he wants to do an interview, we can do an interview.

So we sat across the table and I said: “You’re going to get in trouble for this, are you sure you’re comfortable with that? Are you sure you want your photo taken?” He said: “Yes, this will not have resonance unless it’s on the record. Ukrainians do not go for anonymous sources, we’re not that kind of culture.” And I said: “Okay, as long as you’re clear you’re going to be in a lot of trouble for this.” And obviously that’s what happened. I think he felt that it was worth the risk to shine a light on this issue. And when we spoke after he told me that he cannot believe how big of a deal it became. I told him that basically everyone is talking about what he wanted them to talk about: training.

Does he regret it? I have no idea. Maybe he does. But certainly we were really clear with him. What he is allowed to say and what the army protocol is isn’t my business, it’s his business. That’s his responsibility, not mine.

– He did write afterwards, that his words were misinterpreted and that not all his comments got into the piece.

– We talked multiple times after the story was published, at no point did he voice his concerns to me about the story, what comments were used, what comments were not used. The entire interview was recorded and the piece accurately represents what he said, we stand by that. And obviously he was under pressure after he was demoted from his position.

– Can I ask you about the process of reporting here? Because part of the issue with it was that one negative comment does not reflect the big picture. For instance, there was a comment that no commander has an overview of the whole situation in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, so his perspective may be just that, [a partial perspective].

– We didn’t have just one commander there, we had multiple sources, we had another soldier who was talking about similar problems. But I was also talking to multiple military personnel: some commanders, some soldiers, company commanders, platoon commanders. I was basically asking: “We hear about these problems, do you guys have these?” And they were all saying yes. Now, not all of those conversations are on the record, but [there were] enough people, it was widespread enough that I was really sure of that reporting.

I was also talking to government officials here in Kyiv and they said similar things, not only the level of training being an issue and that the best and most experienced [Ukrainian soldiers] had died, but that the weapons deliveries weren’t coming fast enough, that all of this has lead to some pessimism about how the counter-offensive might go. [...] But you see what the culture is: whenever someone voices these concerns, he gets demoted. The culture is: we don’t talk about problems.

– There was this DW piece the other day about the new restrictions that the Ukrainian government has set out in war coverage, specifically reporting from frontlines and red zones. Is that something that changed the work of your team?

– Yes. I think that it could work. But there are several problems that cause it not to work at the moment. The red zone is probably too strict. Do I understand that Bakhmut and Avdiivka are red zones? Yes. Those places are probably too dangerous. But should all of Kherson be a red zone? [The south part of Kherson is in the red zone now.] I think they should be a bit more flexible with that.

To work in yellow zones you need a press officer, and there are just not enough of them. And usually the answer from a press officer is no, to whatever you ask, because they’re afraid of getting in trouble. And the other problem I hear is this insistence to check every word of the piece and the photos before it is published. I don’t know if the Ukrainian media agrees to that, but I can tell you that no Western media agrees to that.

The other thing is – no one in the military can talk, commander level especially, without approval from the General Staff. You have to write a zapros [request], blah-blah. And sometimes it takes three weeks for this zapros to be approved. How am I supposed to do that? Some of my reporters are only here for three weeks, they can’t wait for three weeks for the approval for an interview. I’m a journalist working for a foreign media, who writes a lot of stories that are helpful for Ukraine (whether they’re good [or bad], because keeping Ukraine on the page is in Ukraine’s interest).

So these are my biggest problems. The zones – could they work if there were more press officers? [They] could. But press officers should also be taught to not be afraid of the stories coming out. The more people you will let us talk to, the better the reporting will come out.

Because Ukraine should highlight its military. What’s the perception of it in the world now? These really cool men and women, fighting to protect their country. You should highlight these people. What’s going to happen, I’m afraid, is that the more restrictions there are, the more these big international TV outlets (NBC, ABC, CNN, etc.) – it’s going to get expensive for them to stay here without getting enough reward. If they can’t get to the frontline, they’re going to leave Kyiv and you’re going to see fewer reports from them on American, British or German television. I think that’s the danger here.