Part 1: My journey through Ukraine two years into its war against annihilation by Russia
This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.This reporting tour of Ukraine was conducted upon the invitation and with the support of the Ukraine Crisis Media Centera non-government organization based in Kyiv, with assistance from the Indonesian Association for Media Development, an NGO based in Jakarta.
Here, at last, I could sleep without my phone near my ear. No air raid alert would ring in the middle of the night and order me to rise from bed and run to a bunker. Poland is not a war zone. No Russian missiles criss-cross the Polish airspace. Only the moon and the stars traverse the sky here. Lying in bed, staring at the empty sky through the window of my room in Warsaw, I realized that nothing in Ukraine is or will be normal for as long as it is at war with Russia, and very few of us know what private sufferings its people endure and will have to endure in the meantime.
HOME NO MORE. An apartment building in Borodyanka, Ukraine, destroyed by Russian aerial attacks from February to March 2022. Photo by JC Gotinga/RapplerI know the smell of a burnt house because my family’s house once caught fire in December 2002.
In training to survive hostile environments, journalists are taught, when there are bullets flying, to get as low on the ground as possible and crawl until it’s safe enough to get up and run; find a wall to put between themselves and the source of the gunfire, if they’re able to tell where it’s coming from.
Their objective was to defend the town, but when that was lost, the objective became to stop the Russians from advancing further to Kyiv. Because if the capital falls, then all of Ukraine falls. In Moshchun today, war-damaged houses that could be repaired have been repaired; the only visible remnants of the fighting are the houses damaged beyond repair, which you find every few blocks. Those, and a patch of forest beside the road. Here, portraits hang on the trunks of trees, surrounded by the Ukrainian colors fluttering in the wind.
This was home to us, seven journalists from South and Southeast Asia, while we were in the Ukrainian capital. Across a roundabout from the Dnipro Hotel is the Ukrainian House, another brutalist behemoth that used to be a museum to Lenin. It’s now a convention center that houses the office of the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, our host and sponsor on this reporting tour.
It could be because they knew they were speaking to foreign journalists, but the guides who toured us around the old quarters of Kyiv, Lviv, and Chernihiv seemed to frame their spiels as arguments for Ukraine’s existence: This church was built in the 1100s; this monument honors a Romantic poet; this wall formed part of the rampart that defined the city’s limits a thousand years ago – see, we’ve been a country for a long, long time. We deserve to exist.
ANTI-PUTIN. Condom packets bearing images of Russian President Vladimir Putin on sale in the streets of Kyiv. Photo by JC Gotinga/RapplerRussian. The mass destruction of their eastern regions, the constant aerial bombardment, the incalculable loss of human lives, and Putin’s barefaced denial of these blatant atrocities have made him and Russia loathsome to Ukrainians.
True enough, days later in Kyiv, at one of the shops along the pedestrian underpass connecting the Dnipro Hotel to the Ukrainian House, we found a stack of toilet paper rolls with Putin’s face printed on every sheet, with Cyrillic letters that I didn’t understand. Myra told me the letters were the initials to “Fuck you, Putin.”
That’s what they told the 368 hostages they kept with scant food and water, without electricity and ventilation, in the 190-square-meter basement of a schoolhouse inThe survivors included Ivan Polhuy, the school’s former janitor. Two years later, he ushered us into the basement that served as a dungeon for him, his wife, children, grandchildren, and their entire village. Russian troops used them as human shields against the Ukrainian army.
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