28 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
Photo: Reporters inside Kyiv’s Buena Vista Social Bar
There’s always a bar. In Kyiv, in 2022, it’s the Buena Vista Social bar, bang next to a Ukrainian police checkpoint which is both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar because there is a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol. Sssh. It’s a joyful shebeen, Cuban-themed, run by Maks, and you never quite know what’s available to drink and who’s going to be there. All the women have a past; all the men have no future. You get the vibe.
Early on in the war, a fellow regular was a big bloke with a thick moustache and a mane of bubbly, curly hair, often seen with his fixer, a Ukrainian freelancer. I never spoke to him but I clocked him as someone who had presence, who was an interesting character, who I had probably seen in Sarajevo or somewhere like that. He was Pierre “Zak” Zakrzewski, she Sasha Kuvshynova, and they were both killed on 14 March 2022 when their vehicle came under fire in Bucha – pronounced Butcher – to the northwest of Kyiv. British journalist Ben Hall was wounded in the same attack. They were working for Fox News, something Zak, 55, who had been brought up in Ireland, had mixed feelings about. But he knew the risks of war too well and made a decision that working for a big corporate was better risk-management than being freelance. His co-workers at Fox loved him, giving him an award as “Unsung Hero” after he helped get Afghan freelancers out of Kabul.
Sasha was 24, bold and fiercely smart. After her death, her dad said that she learnt to read at the age of three and picked up English from reading restaurant menus while on family holidays. She was a fanatical photographer with five stills cameras, had founded a music festival for up-and-coming jazz musicians, worked as a DJ and wrote poetry. She wanted to make movies.
If you don’t like free expression in a democracy, you blow up the TV tower. The Kremlin’s first journalist victim was Yevhenii Sakun, 49, a camera operator for Ukraine’s LIVE station, on 1 March. The Russian army sent in four missiles in the evening, killing a worker in the TV tower complex and four civilians. The next morning I saw the people from the morgue take away the bodies of a middle-aged man and a mother and her child with my own eyes.
The most dangerous area of Kyiv is the northwest suburbs, where the Russian army’s offensive, driving down through Chernobyl, has come closest to the capital. Reporters seeking human stories, of refugees fleeing with their dogs on a lead or their cat in a box, went repeatedly to Irpin. Fearing further Russian advance, the Ukrainian army flooded the river plains near the suburb and blew up the most southerly bridge, leaving people to pick their way across the skeleton remains. Once beyond that crossing, there is a second bridge. That’s where US film maker Brent Renaud, 50, originally from Little Rock and formerly of the New York Times, found himself, filming refugees running for their lives. Brent knew what he was doing, having filmed and reported man’s cruelty to man in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya: all the nice places.
At Irpin, at the second bridge, the Russian army shot him in the neck and he died of his wounds.
Oksana Baulina was one of those intensely brave Russians who were on Team Navalny before their champion was arrested on fake charges and the organisation broken up. Oksana, 43, was declared a “terrorist” by the Kremlin and had to flee Russia. She set up as a reporter and film maker in Poland and reported on the war. When Russian artillery smashed into a shopping centre in Podil, in the northwest of the city, she was killed.
To be honest with you I have done my best to avoid writing this piece for days now because it can only fill one with gloom to think of these brave truth-tellers sent early to their graves by the mobster in the Kremlin. But my pals and I in the Buena Vista are buoyed up the thought that we are in Ukraine exactly because Vladimir Putin does not want us to be here. And on that point, Mr Putin, do fuck off.
And the rum is good.
There is, also, the line from Tom Stoppard’s great play, Night And Day, which I quoted on Twitter while hurrying back from the bar just before – well, actually, just after curfew – had fallen. This, from memory, is how it goes, how the lover of the dead young journalist, played by Diana Rigg, killed on the frontline denounces the false romance of journalism, “it’s not worth the heart-break beauty queen or the crossword and it’s definitely not worth the leader.”
And the old hack, played by John Thaw, replies: “Yes, you’re right. But also the other thing. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.”
RIP Zak, Sasha, Yevhenii, Brent and Oksana.
25 Mar 22 | Czech Republic, Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, Ukraine, United States
“We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism.” — Madeleine Albright (1937-2022)
This week one of those special people passed away. A woman who broke glass ceilings, whose leadership inspired so many others, a woman who knew what she stood for and was determined to fight for what she knew to be right. She had a life well lived and has left her mark on the world. The reality is our society is lessened by her passing, but we were lucky to have her, and we so nearly didn’t.
Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Photo: Fiona Hanson/PA Images
Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelová, in Prague in 1937, to a Jewish family. Her family fled to London in 1939 when the Nazis invaded. They converted to Roman Catholicism and hid their true identity for decades. The first female US Secretary of State only discovered the truth and the fact that 26 members of her family had been murdered in the Holocaust as an adult. At the end of the war her family chose to return to Czechoslovakia, but this proved short-lived and they were forced to flee the Communist regime in 1949 and seek asylum in the States.
As traumatic as her early life was, Marie Jana Korbelová did more than most to shape the future, to find hope and to cherish the democratic values that were stolen from her and her family. Her personal story and her impact were exceptional. But reflecting on her life has caused me to think a lot about the Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum.
There is a single candle surrounded by mirrors. The reflection of each flame represents a life not born – a story not told. It highlights, in simply imagery, the lives that were extinguished, the families that were destroyed and, heartbreakingly, the children never born because their parents had been murdered. We have no idea of what the world lost because of the Shoah. The poetry and books not written, the art not created, the scientific discoveries not made.
Which brings me to the horrors we see every day on our news. The images of the death and destruction in Ukraine. Lives of every Ukrainian citizen have been turned upside down. We see daily reports of war crimes. Of children being killed, of journalists being kidnapped, of humanitarian aid being blocked.
In Ukraine today, the daily horrors shock and upset us all but for me it is also the devastation of the lives not lived. The talent that is being brutally removed from our world. Our collective society is being lessened because of their deaths and those that will now never be born. We will never know what we have lost. We can only hope that among those that survive there will be someone as inspirational as Madeleine Albright.
24 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
A Ukrainian journalist detained by Russia’s FSB while reporting on the invasion of the country has been forced to record a video saying that she had not been held captive and that her captors had actually saved her life before being released.
Victoria Roshchina, who works for the hromadske news channel, was released on 21 March, nine days after she went missing in the occupied city of Berdyansk en route to Mariupol. Four days after she went incommunicado, hromadske learned that she had been detained by Russia’s FSB security forces.
She has now returned to Zaporizhia, an area controlled by the Ukrainian government, where she will rejoin her worried family.
After her release, pro-Russian media and Telegram-channels shared a video in which Roshchina denied she had been held in captivity and that the officers had saved her life.
Her employer said that the video was filmed under coercion of the Russian occupiers and that the reporter would tell the true story in due course.
We reported about Roshchina’s reports from the front line and how she had been forced to hide from Russian tanks.
Although Roschina has been freed, the whereabouts of other journalists reporting from the front line is uncertain.
Renowned Ukrainian photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Maks Levin disappeared on 13 March in the Vishgorod district, near Kyiv. There had been intensive fighting in the area and it is assumed he has been injured or captured by Russian troops.
Levin has worked for the BBC, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and new website LB.ua among others.
Index on Censorship calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all journalists held by the Russian forces and for all parties to ensure the safety of media reporting on the war.
22 Mar 22 | News and features
My nine-year-old granddaughter Lucia is a miracle. She speaks Russian fluently, without any taint of foreign accent. Paradoxically, she has never been to Russia. She was born in Covent Garden, London, and now lives in Bethnal Green. You can detect in her Londoner’s English a trace of a Yorkshire accent picked up from her father.
It’s not difficult to explain this miracle. Her Russian came to her, first, from her Moscow-born mother. My daughter arrived in England when she was the same age as Lucia is now. She has managed to retain her Russian despite her schooling in the UK. Lucia has also learnt her Russian while frequently spending time with me and my wife – we both emigrated from Russia when we were in our late twenties. The decision to emigrate four decades ago had cost us our Russian citizenships.
And so, since her early years my granddaughter not only heard Russian spoken at home but also learned to read – from the books that we ourselves used to love in our childhood. She fell in love with Pushkin’s poems and Chekhov comic stories, gothic tales of Gogol’s and absurdist children’s poems by Chukovsky and Kharms; she became a great fan of Winnie the Pooh not only in English, but also of its brilliant Russian version created by Boris Zakhoder. Later Lucia was introduced (through YouTube and other channels) to witty, funny and inventive children’s movies produced by independent Russian filmmakers. In short, she immersed herself in the world of images, vocabulary and ideas that have been shared by generations of children of the Russian liberal intelligentsia who used to regard the independent spirit of Russian literature as the best defence of their children’s consciousness against the onslaught of corrupt officialdom.
Lucia couldn’t describe the exact image of this dreamy Russia she had formed in her mind. What kind of mental construction could a child create out of the avalanche of words, pictures and ideas she had avidly been absorbing from books and films in Russian? Is it a fairyland with witches’ gingerbread huts on chicken legs or the one with Stalin’s skyscrapers looming grimly over old Moscow?
Each time when I heard Russian words streaming out of the mouth of my English granddaughter I felt as if I were present at some spiritual seance. Was she possessed by some Russian speaking ghosts? Should she be exorcised? But if it were a ghost, it was a benevolent one. The image of her fictional Russia was surely bright, enchanting and intriguing. For Lucia, it was the ideal country, because it was the place of her beloved mother’s childhood. It had also incorporated a dream of my sweet youth about Russia as the land of the free. Lucia was cherishing this dreamy land and wanted to see for real all that she had heard and read about. There were family plans for a trip to Russia, to celebrate New Year’s Eve in snowy festive Moscow.
And then, when Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday 24th February something disastrous happened. On the Friday Lucia came back home from her primary school in Columbia Road in tears. School children were shown documentary shots depicting the brutality of the Russian invasion in Ukraine. She hasn’t been prepared for the shock. She hasn’t yet learned to separate the nation and its spiritual manifestations from the national government and its apparatus of suppression. What she saw was just the outright destruction of her fictional ideal Russia by the Kremlin’s dream murderers and mother-tongue abusers.
Zinovy Zinik is a Russian-born novelist, short-story writer and essayist. His fiction includes the novels The Mushroom Picker (1987), History Thieves (2010) and Sounds Familiar (2016)
