Madison man on mission in Kyiv
He’s gathering info from faith community — and he’s not afraid
Lew Nescott Jr. is not one to back down from a challenge.
There have been mountaineering expeditions to the summits of Mt. Mckinley, Mt. Kilimanjaro and others.
And there have been the parts of his career after working for Yale University for 20 years that brought Nescott to work in an atmospherics information-gathering role supporting the U.S. Marines in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, and then to work as part of an intelligence unit in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. After that, he worked as a senior intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East/africa Regional Center.
Now he’s in Kyiv, as Ukrainian forces work to stave off further brutal incursions by Russia’s military.
It’s part of Nescott’s goal to conduct interviews and gather information as a freelance journalist for the Religious News Service. While he is an independent producer and commentator, for this trip he supplies the information to writers who are stateside, he said.
Nescott, who also is an adjunct instructor in national security studies at the University of New Haven, said he has done other work for the RNS in the last several years.
“I am the correspondent who gathers the material,” he said, “It’s a great working relationship for me.”
Nescott said if he were able to get to the front, he would like to embed with a chaplain there, noting “I can think of no better place than to embed with the chaplains ... to see how these chaplains really operate,” to serve their troops in the field, on the battlefield.
But for now, Nescott, a Madison resident, said, he is setting up interviews and meetings with key and high-ranking religious affiliated leaders who work closely with the government in Ukraine.
For Nescott, the relationship between religion and politics has been an under-covered dimension in the Ukraine war. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, he was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, which became the independent Orthodox Church in America in 1970, he said. “Hopefully I might add something,” to the coverage, he said.
“It certainly captivated me; it captivated me because of my background of Eastern European (heritage) and Orthodox (upbringing),” he said, of covering the situation in Ukraine in a different way.
“We’ll see where the stories take us. I’ve worked hard to book these interviews and structure these questions,” Nescott said,
Nescott, who spoke to the Courant from the Intercontinental Hotel in Kyiv just after air raid sirens sounded, said he is not fearful,
“I’m old-school — I grew up in a hard scrabble (Pennsylvania) steel town — I always regret not serving
in uniform,” he said.
He said that he had visited a part of the city where people were out on a Saturday and was able to buy a kebab from a kiosk. While “Kyiv is struggling,” he did not observe nervousness, he said.
“The country is at war for sure, or course, but it is not everybody in uniform and ... on the front,” he said, noting also that he senses “a strange kind of silence each time the sirens go off ” but also that part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal “is to keep people guessing.”
“He may decide to simply strike west (in Ukraine) again,” Nescott said. “My point is he’s unpredictable.
“Vladimir Putin has a lot of missiles,” he said.
Associated Press reported Monday that Ukraine said it was holding off Russian offensives Sunday in the country’s east, and Western military officials said the
campaign Moscow launched there
after its forces failed to seize Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, had slowed to a snail’s pace.
Russian and Ukrainian fighters are engaged in a grinding battle for the country’s eastern industrial heartland, the Donbas. Ukraine’s most experienced and best-equipped soldiers are based in
eastern Ukraine, where they have fought Moscow-backed separatists for eight years, AP reported.
Nescott said he planned to visit Bucha, an area adjacent to Kyiv that has reportedly been hit hard with civilian casualties.
His plan was to speak to a clergy member to learn: was his church threatened, did he lose parishioners? He said more than 150 religious sites in Ukraine have suffered damage by design or collaterally.
“If you keep your mouth shut and ears open you might just learn something,” Nescott said.
“I am really going deeper here.”