‘A ferocity of spirit’: Hope shines through grief in Ukraine

Episode transcript

Samantha Laine Perfas: Welcome to Rethinking the News. I’m Samantha Laine Perfas. 

This week, Ukraine has made somewhat surprising advances in its war with Russia, leaving many around the world in awe at Ukrainians’ resilience and ability to fight back against Russian military forces. Seven months into the Russian invasion, the effects of war – the grief, loss, and exhaustion – are being felt heavily by the country’s people. 

Today I’m joined by Martin Kuz, a longtime journalist who has written for the Monitor both as a staff writer and contributor since 2014, covering the war in Afghanistan. Most recently he has been writing for the Monitor from Ukraine, looking at everything that’s been happening there since the Russian invasion in February. What he found was a country deeply affected by war, but also people with an immense sense of hope. Here’s our conversation.

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Laine Perfas: You’ve reported in conflict and war zones in the past. But reporting on the war in Ukraine is personal for you. Can you share a bit about why?

Martin Kuz: That’s right, Sam. My father was born in Ukraine in 1923. Technically, his hometown of Lviv was part of Poland at the time of his birth. He grew up in a time of extreme hardship, famine and an oppression of Ukrainian independence. When World War Two broke out, he ultimately took up arms on behalf of Ukraine, fighting against the Soviet Union and its Red Army. At the conclusion of the war, my father was in a prisoner of war camp and the British allowed those prisoners to go to England because they understood that if Ukrainians were sent back to their homeland, they likely faced exile, execution. And so for my father, he last set foot in his homeland in 1943. Ultimately he came to the United States. He had a family, three children. But he was never able to go back home and never saw his parents again, never saw his brothers again. There was, I think, this profound void within him because he could never set foot in Ukraine again, because of the Soviet Union’s harsh stance toward Ukrainians who had fought against the Kremlin. So because of the family connection, what is happening in Ukraine right now has had a deeply personal dimension for me.

Laine Perfas: You’ve been in Ukraine, reporting on the ground. In what ways has your experience been similar or different to reporting in other conflict zones?

Kuz: The similarities are numerous, and that includes the loss and the suffering of the Afghan people and the Ukrainian people. The dislocation from home. And the profound examples of resilience that you see in both countries. I think the West has been sort of amazed at the solidarity of Ukrainians. In the great fear that people experience, they haven’t lost their essential humanity. They have turned toward each other to try to help. And I know that was really explicit in the earliest days of the invasion. I went to the train station in Kyiv, for instance. The capital city was emptying out as the war began. And instead of people pushing each other down on the train platforms and attempting to get on before anyone else, people were deferring to the elderly, to women with children. They were helping them, carrying them up and down the stairs to get to the platforms. That is something, I think, that you see from conflict zone to conflict zone. These people are overwhelmed by their circumstance, and yet they somehow find the ability to show compassion to people they’ve never even met before.

Laine Perfas: I think it goes without saying that war is horrible and traumatic. But often in your reporting, you choose to focus more on values like hope. Why is that? 

Kuz: My experience in war zones has taught me how strong and vibrant the human spirit really is. In the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war is utterly senseless. I thought: How do you try to make sense of the senseless? How do you reconcile the loss of your loved one with your own passion for Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian independence? And I think within that are these themes of hope and dignity. I’ll give one example. I met a woman named Nataliya Lipska in Lviv, in western Ukraine, my father’s hometown. And she had recently lost her brother, Olexsiy, who had joined the Volunteer Territorial Defense Force and had been killed in a Russian artillery strike. She could really not talk for more than a couple sentences at a time without breaking down. But she very much wanted to talk. She told me that: “He gave his life to his country. So I am devoting mine.” And she now is helping a local organization that gathers medical supplies and first aid kits for frontline troops in Ukraine. And again and again, I met Ukrainians who in ways small and large, were attempting to honor the memories of those killed, and to remind people that each person is more than his or her death. 

Laine Perfas: How do you go about talking to your sources about things like hope without feeling like you’re forcing it somehow or minimizing the tragic aspects of their experiences?

Kuz: My experience has been that the theme often bubbles to the surface on its own. I’ll give another example of a woman I met named Ivanka Dymyd. And Ivanka lost her son Artem in fighting in the southern city of Kherson. Artem’s 27 years old. And he was fiercely patriotic. He had protested on the Maidan going back to late 2013, when Russian interference started to increase in Ukraine. And when Russian backed separatists attempted to annex portions of eastern Ukraine in 2014, he went straight to the front lines. He signed up to fight on behalf of Ukraine. He was in the United States when the invasion this February occurred, he rushed back so that he could again take up arms on behalf of his country. I sat in Ivanka’s home. And when I walked in, she had music on her computer from a composer named Hans Zimmer. She told me that it was Artem’s favorite music. It’s kind of haunting and dark, but in a beautiful way. And she told me about how the family is making every effort to retain the joy that Artem brought to their lives. The family is establishing a scholarship in Artem’s name at the university in Lviv that he attended. That I think is an act of hope. If you don’t believe that the country has a brighter future, you don’t make the effort to create a scholarship in the name of your son. And she was adamant in saying that we want him to be remembered for what he gave us, not simply what we have lost. That just sort of occurred in the course of my conversation with them, and I didn’t have to ask any questions that were sort of on the nose about hope. 

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In other cases, when I had met, for instance, the manager of a cemetery in Irpin, Petro Korol. He had had to go out with a team of cemetery workers and collect the bodies of the dead while the Russians were still occupying Irpin. Very, very dangerous work. In the moment, all I could really understand was what Petro had lost. He said something that really struck a chord with me later. I had asked him why he stayed in Ukraine. He said something like, “I’m here because I want the war to be over. That’s what will end the suffering. And that’s how we will live free.” Those were the kinds of moments where, I don’t think right then, I quite realized what had been said to me, and then later I recognized that it was this kind of point of light. You see that all of these moments actually form this larger picture that shows this sense of believing that there is a future for Ukraine in which it will emerge from this terrible war stronger, more united, and as free as ever.

Laine Perfas: That’s really powerful. And I’m wondering, Martin, as a reporter, is it difficult for you to talk to people who are grieving? How do you balance your own emotions with those of your sources?

Kuz: I’ve been a reporter for more than 30 years, and I still consider it a privilege to talk to each person that I meet or have a conversation with over the phone. In the case of war, you’re asking people to talk about unfathomable pain. You receive those words as a kind of divine gift. There is a sacred trust, I think, that develops between reporter and source. 

My desire to try to tell the story of Ukraine and Ukrainians, which is rooted in my own father’s loss – it is, I hope, an act of compassion to both those with whom I speak and also to those who read these stories. As odd as it may sound, when people provide that opportunity to then share that story with an audience, my sense of gratitude is, I think, what helps me balance my own sense of despair. We live in a time where people are so skeptical of one another, and yet here are people who have lost everything, and yet they want to share with a stranger their story.

Laine Perfas: Martin, I want to thank you again for sharing your experience with us today.

Kuz: Thank you again. I so appreciate it.

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Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. To find links to Martin’s Ukraine coverage, visit csmonitor.com/rethinkingthenews. 

Also, we want to let you know about an upcoming change to this podcast. In a few weeks, we’ll be renaming and rebranding “Rethinking the News,” updating the music, logo, and title – and going deeper on the stories behind our reporting. We’re excited about this change and can’t wait to share it with you. If you subscribe, you won’t experience any interruptions. This podcast will simply look a little different! Stay tuned. 

This episode was hosted by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was co-produced with Jingnan Peng, edited by Clay Collins. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2022.

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