The other battle in Ukraine: To feed the flame of resilience

Episode transcript

[PHONE RINGING]

Scott Peterson: Hello?

 Clayton Collins:  Brother Scott. It’s Clay in Boston. How are you? 

Scott:  Brother Clay! How are you doing? 

Collins: OK. You find yourself in another conflict zone. 

Peterson: Carrying Monitor satphone, R-BGANs, dusted off flak jackets, the whole thing....

Collins: That’s The Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Peterson, speaking to me via WhatsApp shortly after his arrival in early March 2022 in the Black Sea port of Odesa, Ukraine. Russia’s war on Ukraine was only weeks old, but Scott was already picking up on something. 

Peterson: What has surprised me most coming here is that, you know, from the outside, it looks like things are so inevitable. But I’ve been surprised at the level of desire to resist on the part of the Ukrainians. You know, kind of the sense of community that they have pulled together. And, you know, that has helped them calm the fear, calm the panic, feel like they’re doing something constructive.

Collins: What Scott went on to describe, for me to recount in [an intro in] the next day’s Monitor Daily: a sewing club that was turning nets and scraps of cloth into tank camouflage, children helping to fill sandbags, a civilian welder crafting traps to slow the invaders’ armored vehicles. Resistance, resilience. 

Scott has made six reporting trips to Ukraine so far. He also stopped by our Boston newsroom, and he joins me in the studio today. This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Welcome to headquarters, Scott!

Peterson: Thank you. Very good to be back.

Collins: Scott, besides on that WhatsApp call we just heard, you and I also spoke in February of this year for an episode of this show. We talked then broadly about your Monitor career in conflict reporting. So, mostly this is going to be an encore presentation of that show, but since you’re in town, I wanted to take the opportunity to refresh that episode just a bit. 

You were still describing that remarkable civilian resilience a few months ago. Now, Bakhmut appears devastated. In horrifying drone shots, it looks like Aleppo from another conflict. And you spoke off-mic earlier today at a staff meeting about the significance of voices. And that includes those of civilians in the middle. What we’re now seeing is something very different from the Crimea annexation in 2014-15, which you also covered. What are you seeing in terms of how Ukrainians are holding up as this war grinds on, and amid atrocities?

Peterson: I think what Ukrainians are finding is that they are surprising themselves every single day. No one expected that they were going to be, after more than a year of facing down Russian invaders, that they would still have a chance at winning. And in fact, that is the way the trajectory of this conflict has been going and looks like it’s going to be going in the coming months.

I’ve seen people coalesce around the fact that they have been able to resist in the way that they have, the fact that they don’t just have a chance, but that they also have the support, lot of support now military support coming from the United States, coming from the Europeans, all of whom recognize and state that victory for Ukraine is a critical aspect of their foreign policy and something that really affects all of Europe. I think the Ukrainians, they now know what Ukraine’s strengths are, and they also have a much better understanding of what Russian weaknesses are.

Collins: There [has] been [this] ongoing series of big moments in the war. Armaments flowing in from the West, as you say; a Ukrainian counter offensive that may already be getting underway. You mentioned hope, which seems like something that’s nurtured alongside resilience. But on the ground, do you think this really translates for hope to a war that can be won, or for a shooting war that might subside and become … something else?

Peterson: It’s counterintuitive, but the way that the Ukrainians argue it, is that if they receive more weapons now, they will be able to make this war shorter by ending it sooner. That will prevent a much longer and much more costly war, both in terms of Ukrainian and Russian lives. Their aim is to push the Russians back, not just from the territories they’ve taken since last year. And now I think overall it amounts to about 17% of the country. But also that includes the territories that were taken back in 2014 and 2015 and annexed by Russia: the Crimea of course, and then large portions also of the Donbass. So I think the Ukrainians, their calculation is that they will not be secure until the Russians are pushed out of those places. They’re asking for weapons and it’s not because they are war mongers. They argue that this is necessary to end the war with the least amount of human cost.

Collins: Mm-hmm. A question ... on the process piece of this: You’ve been through a half dozen times. How does it change from visit to visit?

Peterson: So the extraordinary thing about this war, compared to a lot of other wars that we’ve covered in recent years, is that the scale of this is vast. The front line itself is 600 miles long. When I was there in February, for example, I visited six different specific points on the front line. And it’s just incredible to see how many Ukrainians are pushed all up against that front line. And of course on the other side, Russians also all along that front line. So this is a very manpower intensive conflict.  From what we’ve seen there is definitely a certain trajectory that’s going on. And for journalists, we also have begun to get a much better sense about places that we can go, what we can cover, how we can do it. It does change every time that I go in terms of access.  Something that was perfectly fine to photograph, during one visit is next time completely off limits and of course the front lines are adjusting, as well.

We check back with a lot of the people who we spoke to in the course of this last year plus, to see how they’re doing. And those yield intriguing, evolving human stories as well, on really fascinating levels. 

Collins: How do you manage to cover both the logistics of warfare and these human stories that you’re talking about?

Peterson: Often these two things are blended together. So when we go to a front line, of course we’re talking to the soldiers who were there about their experiences, about their expectations, about what they’ve already gone through to get to that point. Those are definitely valuable voices that we’re looking for. And at the same time, we have to spend time a little bit back from the actual frontline.

This last trip I did an extraordinary story. I was amazed to see that in the town of Lyman, which was only recently liberated a few months ago in the autumn, after three or four months of Russian occupation. And that is a very heavily damaged city. And yet for the first time, they’ve started school classrooms. They went to a few schools, 10 in number that had kind of the least amount of damage, and brought kids of all different levels into a single classroom. Remember, this was over the winter, so they had to heat those classrooms. They heated one classroom. They would have a teacher there or two. But they would also, for the older kids, they would be doing online classes. So they would be using Starlink internet, just for example. So all these things are happening in the space of a single classroom. 

The first days those schools were opening, the parents would literally wait outside all day long. They were reluctant to leave their children for the few hours that they’d be in the classroom. Because they’d just been so close during so much of this conflict for so long. So, They’ve begun to relax a little bit more about that as the situation becomes a bit more normal. And of course for the students themselves, they just can’t wait until there’s actually like a break in their studies, so they can talk to each other. Because they’ve, in many cases, been really isolated and even isolated from other kids in their own neighborhoods or other places. So having that kind of social contact is really, I think, what’s gonna be part of the building blocks, as Ukraine comes out of this conflict.

Collins: Thank you for helping readers understand this conflict. Now, here’s our conversation from the podcast episode that we did together back in February. 

***
Collins: Many news stories have conflict as a component. Some of those conflicts get “hot.” Wars of whatever size and duration are important to cover, with special attention to clarity, to fairness, and to correspondent safety. The Monitor’s Scott Peterson has reported – with stories and images – from many active theaters, from the Balkans to Baghdad, Afghanistan to Somalia, and more. He has, of course, been covering Ukraine. Scott joins us today from London to talk about covering conflict in ways that are a fit with the Monitor’s clear, calm, and constructive approach. 

So about 23 years ago in the preface to “Me Against My Brother,” your book about Somalia, Sudan, and the Rwandan genocide of the mid-90s, you wrote, “I don’t consider myself to be a war junkie, flitting from front line to front line.” Now, I’ve known you a long time, and I know that your work indeed has much more range and deeper motivations than that. But when you do end up near the fighting, what job are you hoping to do for Monitor readers?

Peterson: I always go back to what is the object of The Christian Science Monitor, which is “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” There couldn’t be a more noble aspiration for a journalist. And that’s something that’s really informed all of my reporting. I think if you start from that motivation you’re giving people a reason to share their voice with you. I think it also allows you to look at a conflict not just as a case study of human misery and despair, but also one where people are finding ways to persevere, where they are being resilient. And, this is really the real reason that I go into these places. Because you find people at the extreme edges of experience. And what they are producing in response is something that is unbelievable sometimes. And I think, as a journalist, you really need to be there to witness that.

Collins: We spoke via WhatsApp early last March, right after you arrived in Odesa, Ukraine, after having crossed into the country on foot, carrying, I think you said, 60 kilos of gear. You were reporting on civilian resilience and resistance – defiance, really, of the Russian incursions. And those human stories – and our foreign editor Peter Ford remarked on this in an earlier episode of this podcast – really are so central. Where do you begin to look for those, and how sensitive is that part of the work?

Peterson: In the Ukraine example, just everywhere you go, there are incredibly powerful human stories and stories about how people are resisting this Russian invasion. And ultimately, we work with translators. We work with what we call fixers. These are people who, you know, you share your story ideas with. You say, “Listen, I’m hoping to find an example of resistance in Odessa.” You know, to give one case, my translator knew of one man who was in a heavy metal band who also happened to be a welder. And he had just decided that he was going to donate his time to weld some of these tank traps. 

And usually, you know, we’re always putting out feelers and trying to find connections among different people. But ultimately, you know, your most important asset is going to be the translator or the fixer who’s with you, who themselves are key to interpreting certain aspects of their own culture. So I applaud every single one that I’ve ever worked with. 

Collins: You’re one of the Monitor writers, obviously, cycling through Ukraine as we hit the one-year mark there [in] the war. It’s a conflict in which most people, certainly in the West, see pretty clear good and bad actors. How do you find the nuance in a story like that? And do you have any expectations going back in?

Peterson: You know, I think Ukraine is one of those examples that is particularly black and white. I mean, I’ve been in a lot of other conflicts, certainly in the Balkans and, in the Middle East, where there’s an awful lot more gray in the spectrum. But certainly Ukrainian views are very clear in terms of what they’re trying to achieve. The fact that Ukrainians have been able to resist what was an initial Russian invasion, the fact that now they’re receiving so much military help from Western allies and that sort of thing, it really has changed people’s expectations and the picture of what the Ukraine war looks like. But as a journalist trying to cover that, it is important that we look for the nuance, even on the Ukrainian side. Of course, there are issues of corruption that should be written about, and those have recently emerged as big talking points. And there are a lot of factors that are involved there that we should be reporting on, irrespective of the fact that this is a conflict in which you clearly have one country that has invaded another.

Collins: I did want to pivot and ask you about a very different perspective than that of noncombatants. In 2004, you were embedded with U.S. Marines in Fallujah, Iraq, at a critical moment in that conflict, [when there was] house-to-house fighting. How different is it reporting from inside that kind of “band of brothers” setting? How hard is it to maintain some distance?

Peterson: It was as you describe. I mean, it was literally window-to-window fighting. I mean, I still have shrapnel in my arm from an exploding RPG that was part of a battle that was fought between the Marines and some Al Qaeda fighters who were literally on the street across from us. 

You know, there was no access for Western journalists like me on the other side. So finding a balance is more of a fluid term, frankly, than an actual, concrete way of operating. In this case, of course, I was dependent on the Marines for everything. Actually I was No. 3 on one of their four-man teams that would go into these houses. And the Marines themselves were actually kind of shocked that I wasn’t armed. And I told them, “Well, I think you guys have got enough weapons, you know, for everybody. And with my job, there’s no way I could actually carry a gun while also photographing what you’re doing and everything else.” But of course, we as journalists, we never go anywhere, ourselves, armed. We sometimes work with armed guards, as I did recently in Somalia. But in Fallujah, it was a different game. 

In terms of working with the Marines and kind of keeping your distance, of course, when you get to know these people and they themselves are busy, you know, in quite excruciating circumstances in which they are fighting this conflict eyeball-to-eyeball, it is difficult. I wasn’t presented, myself, with any circumstances in which the unit that I was with kind of misbehaved. I know there were other journalists in Fallujah who actually witnessed Marines killing someone that they had detained inside a mosque. But my unit had a different experience. They were also completely professional. It was a remarkable story.

Collins: You’re a career journalist who’s also a spouse and a parent. And you mentioned shrapnel just now in Fallujah. I’m also thinking of you being on the ground in Mogadishu back during the 1993 U.S. military action, the one that’s memorably recounted in “Black Hawk Down.” In those situations, how do you balance a responsibility to do your work with all of the necessary risk-management?

Peterson: This will probably be a surprise to you and to a lot of our listeners. But, you know, I really am actually quite a cautious person. I’m making certain decisions based on having a much broader context of what the threats are. Recently during my trip just to Somalia, not only to Mogadishu, but also to Baidoa, which is kind of the epicenter of the current famine, the threat from Al Shabab, this kind of Al Qaeda-linked group of militants, they have a taste for suicide car bombs, suicide truck bombs, targeted assassinations, and kidnapping. And so I had to travel inside an armored vehicle with other vehicles that were loaded with armed guards. And when visiting a place – for example, to visit a feeding center or a camp for the displaced – for you can’t be on the ground for any more than 30 or 35 minutes at a time in any single location, because then that gives the people who do want to do you harm time to put together some kind of response. 

I have to say that the Ukraine war has presented a new kind of threat experience. In this case, we’re dealing with just full on artillery assaults and airstrikes and things that can really come from nowhere, from a very large distance, and with no warning. And that is the kind of conflict we haven’t had to deal with for a long time. But we’re careful, we’re cautious. I mean, I’m not saying I’m a homebody. But I certainly do take great care and make sure that no one gets hurt.

Collins: Scott, you work for a news organization whose brand is credible hope. I guess I’d like to know where is the needle on your, you know, your personal hope meter after having seen so much human anger and human ego … is it all just so much history repeating?

Peterson: Well, I do find reasons for hope. And one of the stories that has really shown hope to me has been a series that I’ve written about a family in Baghdad. This was a widow with eight children and no money. And the first time I met them, we were sitting on the floor because they had sold a couch to pay for school fees for one of the daughters. I would visit them at times when it was incredibly dangerous to be anywhere near the neighborhood that they were in. Every single time that I left their apartment, after hearing their stories, hearing how they were coping, listening and laughing, you know, with their black humor about how they were just managing every single day, I was just always buoyed by the level of resilience that they demonstrated on a daily basis. 

That daughter, later on, thanks to our stories, actually, ended up going to the [American University of Iraq, Sulaimani] in northern Iraq. She’d just finished her master’s degree in Ohio and is now back in Baghdad, doing quite a good job with the work that she’s [doing]. That is an example of where there is hope, truly, even in some of the darkest places.

Collins: That’s remarkable. Well, thank you, Scott, for your time today and for all of your important work.

Peterson: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

Collins: Thanks for listening to this encore episode, most of which was sourced from our February 17 show, “War Stories.” You can find links to more of Scott’s Monitor reporting, and to all of our episodes, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Alyssa Britton and Jeff Turton were our engineers. Morgan Anderson co-produced the February show. Our original music is by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.