Imagine a new Ukraine

I missed my chance to have a beer with Valerii Garmash last fall, when he was in the U.S. talking with members of the media about what he and his colleagues had been through since Russia’s attempted invasion began last February. I had been on vacation.

That was one of the many ways in which talking with the editor of the Ukrainian news outlet Maye Sense provides a healthy reminder that the challenges facing the average American newsroom chief utterly pale in comparison to what Garmash and his colleagues are up against. When we spoke late last month, just two days after President Joe Biden’s visit to Kiev, I had a nasty cold; Garmash said he had just gotten over the same crud during a quick business trip — it was everywhere.

Regular readers of this column might recall that the Times Union’s association with Maye Sense, which runs 6262.com.ua, began near the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when the online news site served the people of Slavyansk in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

Slavyansk had been near the center of Russia’s earlier proxy attempt to take over eastern Ukraine through its support of separatist forces. After the 2022 invasion, it once again became disputed territory, especially during last fall’s fiercest fighting in the Donetsk. Right now, the hot spot is just east of Slavyansk in Bakhmut. The two cities are about as far apart as Albany and Glens Falls.

Garmash moved his base of operations to the relative safety of Chernivtsi in western Ukraine in the early months of the invasion, while maintaining a string of reporters in his hometown. He was back in Slavyansk most recently in December, and was pleased to see that his office and home were still largely intact. The sound of artillery could still be heard — but that’s “kind of a regular situation” across much of Ukraine these days, he said.

Here’s how he describes a day in the life of a Ukrainian journalist: Wake up and make sure you’re alive. Go to the basement if you hear the air raid siren. If you emerge and the city is standing and the electricity is still working, write your story. If your editor still has power and is also alive, file it. “Do what you do best,” he said.

A year ago, did he think Ukraine would endure as long as it has? “As a citizen, I never had any doubt that we would stand strong,” Garmash said. “But maybe a year ago we didn’t have a clear understanding of how long this war can last, and what would happen . ... I was hoping that we could win faster.”

He spoke of being on the “information front,” the journalistic analog of the actual front that slithers back and forth around Slavyansk and the rest of eastern Ukraine. “I was always told the word was a very strong weapon,” he said. His war involves providing the information that Ukrainians need, and making occasional forays outside of the country — he

caught the nasty cold during a trip to Germany — to tell the story about what he and his colleagues have lived through. He keeps the lights and laptops powered with scant ad dollars and slightly more plentiful grant funding.

Biden’s visit, I told him, had made the front page of the previous day’s Times Union and gotten similar coverage across the country. With the one-year anniversary of the invasion falling that week, the U.S. media was full of lookbacks on what Ukraine had endured as well as commentary handicapping how long Americans might be willing to offer military support and handle the economic impact of punishing Russia.

The president’s visit “gives the message to Russia that Ukraine is not left alone” by the U.S. or the other countries allied in its defense, Garmash said.

In the middle of so much awfulness, it was a good week — one in which the anniversary could stand as a testament to Ukraine’s endurance and a prominent middle finger to Russia’s early hopes to roll over its neighbor.

It seemed like a good moment to ask Garmash what he hoped would follow the war when, as we both hoped, Russia crawled back across the border under the combined pressure of Ukrainian advances, international opprobrium and the toll its invasion was exacting on its own people — a cost that’s chump change compared to its victims’ suffering.

“When we are optimistic, we think about how we will celebrate our victory day — how we will celebrate our heroes that gave their lives,” he said. “... But then reality comes, and we remember that there are a lot of cities that are fully or partly destroyed, and we will need to put a lot of effort and expense into rebuilding our country.”

Garmash hopes that Ukraine will be able to welcome back a large percentage of the refugees who have scattered across Europe and the rest of the world over the past year. But he also thinks that a liberated Ukraine could welcome refugees from other conflict zones to help in the rebuilding — an international polyglot nation drawn together in an effort to build a better and even more resilient nation.

There will be no rest, he said.