Witness to terror, witness to truth
A Ukrainian journalist on the war through her eyes
Tanya Kozyreva is a veteran Ukraine reporter who worked with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s investigations team over the past year on a series of stories that showed how Ukraine oligarch Igor Kolomoisky allegedly stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from his country’s largest bank and secretly laundered the money through the US steel industry. Now covering the war in her native country, she wrote this article for the Post-Gazette.
We drove towards the rolling black smoke on the horizon, past the shelled cars and flattened houses and bombed out storefronts.
The road is one of the only drivable routes — and the deadliest — leading into the city of Lysychansk, which has Russian forces pushing toward it from three sides.
For weeks, they have been trying to seize the city in eastern Ukraine, and now it could finally happen.
“Why are you here without the military?” asked the Ukrainian soldier at the city checkpoint. “It’s very dangerous here.”
For the last three months, I’ve been driving around the country covering the war — a native Ukrainian watching the destruction of my home — and passing through thousands of checkpoints.
At times, it’s just small talk, even laced with dark humor. “Do you have a weapon? If you do, you need to share.”
Other times, guns have been pointed at me.
The longer I cover this war, the more I realize: Life is like a round of Russian roulette, where nearly all the choices are deadly.
For months, citizens have been rushing for shelter in their basements without power, water or heat, not knowing when the next Russian bomb will explode and turn their makeshift homes into their own graves.
If they decide to flee, they give up everything.
Eighty-four-year-old Ludmilla Rodichkina had just minutes to fetch her elegant, fur-trimmed coat before escaping. “This is all I have left, the clothes I am wearing,” she cried, her eyes flushed with tears. After living her entire life in Mariupol, she had now seen it destroyed.
“The Second World War was
easier than it is now,” she cried. “We have nowhere to live and nowhere to go.”
On the way to the meeting point of the first convoy from Mariupol, my phone rang. It was the middle of March. “Maks is missing,” the voice told me. “Where?” I asked. “On the outskirts of Kyiv,” the voice replied.
This is not the first time our friend, Maksim Levin — one of the bravest photojournalists I’ve ever known — was risking his life to bring the images home to people a world away.
In 2014, he was fortunate enough to witness and survive the bloody siege of Ilovaisk, where more than 1,000 Ukrainians died. This time — eight years later — Maks disappeared during a full-scale invasion on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Weeks later, his body was found lying face down just north of the capital when it was liberated from Russian troops. The cause of death: two bullets in his body and shrapnel in his head.
“Every Ukrainian photographerwants to make a photo that will stop the war,” he once said. The irony is that war ended his life and the fighting continues. None of the brilliant photos he took ended the conflict, but he brought everyone who saw his work to a greater understanding of the war and what it can reap — body and soul. Brave, honest, with a high sense of justice, he was one of few Ukrainian journalists who never stopped covering Russian aggression over the last eight years.
Maksim’s funeral turned into a family reunion of Ukrainian journalists who brought their own internal scars from the conflict into the service. His wife, his friends, his colleagues — all war correspondents. Some witnessed the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol; some were among the first to document the war crimes in Bucha; some just returned from Kharkiv and Mykolaiv. We hugged in the city center of deserted Kyiv.
For the last several months, I’ve been to funerals countless times. And though I hate them, especially those services for fellow journalists, this one was far worse and harder for me: the funeral of a friend.
He left a wife and four children and many others whose lives he touched in a remarkable way.
A couple of weeks before the service, I went to a mortuary in Mykolaiv, a city near the Black Sea in southern Ukraine, and I saw Iryna, who was searching for her missing son.
Bodies were laid out on the bare ground, some placed on top of each other. Some shelled and mangled, some looking untouched. Some in torn battledress and some in civilian clothes. Some in thick black body bags and some naked. Iryna approached slowly. Inside, somewhere among the other bodies, she stared through the flesh and bones and found her son, Eduard.
The attendant took her to his unclothed body. She hesitated. “Yes, yes, yes,” she suddenly called out.
“My child is gone. There’s no granddaughter or grandson. There’s nothing. Life is empty now,” she wept.
As the family waited for Eduard’s coffin to be loaded into the back of a van to be taken to a church, the occasional rumble of artillery was clearly audible.
By the time I arrived in Lysychansk, it was still under the control of Ukraine, but 80% of the surrounding region was occupied. The
The longer I cover this war, the more I realize: Life is like a round of Russian roulette, where nearly all the choices are deadly.
streets are deserted, a surreal scene in a place once bustling with shops and restaurants.
Now, it’s deathly quiet — mostly elderly people who decided to stay, hiding in basements.
At first, we went to see how the first responders were coping. One of them had gone to buy bread and was hit by shelling that penetrated one of her legs, which she lost.
Some had to flee their homes and were now camped in the first responders’ office.
“We are working around the clock. We have a limited number of people to help right now. Some people here are working every day, those who live here are working every day…” Mykola Lytvyn says.
“We are taking the risk to go out if there are casualties. Many people left the city.”
Within just a few minutes of meeting Mr. Lytvyn, we hear the thuds. The artillery impacts a mile or so away. Then a much closer explosion.
“Now you can hear — this is close. Now we have to take care,” he says.
I feel like all of us not only see unlimited pain and document endless horror; we live it through.
Every story is equally grim for us. And they come one after another. The wife who buried her husband in the backyard of her house. The mother whose son is missing. The sister who will stay behind to search for her missing husband.
It’s not only stories of strangers we witness: Sometimes it’s stories of our friends and family. A lot of us are casualties of this war.
Who knows how many more times we will have a funeral “reunion” by the end of this fighting? How many more of us will die? How many will be kidnapped, tortured or raped? How many of us will be forced to leave the country? How many more of us will survive? How many of us will resist the state propaganda, when the time comes?
I don’t know the answers to these questions.
What I do know is we don’t want to let go of the freedom we gained over the last years: the freedom of expression, the freedom of Ukrainian journalists, who have the courage to tell the truth no matter what. To tell the truth about Russian atrocities in Ukraine, to tell the truth of survivors of the Russian war crimes and witnesses of Russian dictatorship.
Russian journalism lost the battle with its own government and, as a result, lost its freedom. It’s our time to step in. None of us can make it alone. We can only make it all together. Only a critical quantity of free and independent voices can win the battle against the lies.