'People Are Fucking Pissed, And They Remain Pissed'

Talking to Jack Crosbie from Ukraine, a year into the war.

Photo: Jack Crosbie

The war in Ukraine is now over a year old, and the violence and chaos appear as far away from ending now as they did when Russia’s invasion began in 2022.

Ever since the conflict broke out, our own Jack Crosbie has repeatedly returned to Ukraine to cover what life is like for ordinary people in the middle of the war, and we have checked in with him about what he’s seen and how he’s felt. Over the weekend, Cros wrapped up his third reporting trip to Ukraine. I caught up with him just before he left Kyiv to begin a long journey back to the U.S. We talked about where things stand in Ukraine now, how Ukrainians feel about the war one year in, his relationship to the country, and what it’s like to get a speeding ticket in the middle of a war. — Jack Mirkinson

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This interview has been edited and condensed.

Hey Cros, how are you?

I'm good. I'm just hanging out at my friend's house until my train later tonight. I'm taking a night train from Kyiv to Lviv and then I'll get picked up at the train station at like 6:30 tomorrow morning and we'll drive to Warsaw.

So you're about to be leaving.

Yeah, I'll be home tomorrow night.

Oh, wow. Okay. So I really got you at the right moment then. Have you been in Kyiv the whole time? Or have you been roaming at all?

So I spent about a week and a half in Kyiv. And then last Saturday, I went down south to the Kherson region, which was the major city that the Russians captured really early on in the war, and then the Ukrainians liberated it in November. So I was down there for Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then I drove back to Kyiv on Thursday. And I'm leaving tonight. You can take a night time, like, overnight training from Kyiv to Lviv. It's like a seven-hour trip or something like that. It's like a sleeper car that costs like 40 bucks, and you just get the deluxe car where you don't have to share with four people. You just share with one person, hopefully, and you get a bunk and can just sort of pass out and then you wake up, and you're in Lviv.

In general, have you found it easier to travel across the country this time around?

Yeah, much, much easier. There's gas at all the gas stations now. The roads are all really open. There were only like less than half a dozen checkpoints in between Kyiv and Kherson, and most of them they just wave you directly through. I actually went through one a little bit too fast and got a speeding ticket, which kind of sucked. And then it turned out that apparently my New York driver's license is not technically an international driver's license. And the cop was like, I'm supposed to fine you a shitload of money for this but I'm not going to because I'm going to be nice. So I have to get an international driver's license.

I have to admit, I didn't even know that was a thing.

I think it's kind of just a scam. You have to pay a company and take an online test and then they give you an international driving permit that's valid in a bunch of countries.

The thought of you getting a speeding ticket in the middle of a still-under-siege country is very bizarrely funny to me. Because it's so banal, you know?

Yeah, it was funny to me too, when it stopped being stressful. When I was out here in June, there were no traffic police on the roads and when you got far enough into the east of the country the streetlights and stoplights were all either smashed or taped over. There was just no traffic enforcement. You just sort of drove in the direction that you wanted and tried not to hit other cars. But that's not the case anymore. The cops are back. I would say ACAB, but this Ukrainian police officer was very nice. [And] the speeding ticket was like 10 bucks, so if they want to charge me 10 bucks for a speeding ticket, that's fine.

10 bucks? That's really good.

The cop was so apologetic about it, because I showed him my military press ID which is, you know, often kind of a cheeky Westerner get-out-of-jail-free card and I think is why he let me off for the international driver's license thing. He was like, "I know you're, like, trying to help our country through reporting. But I do need to give you this ticket." And I was like, you don't have to feel bad. I went too fast through this checkpoint. Like, that's on me. I was going like 70 kilometers an hour, which is what, like, 45 miles an hour, in a zone where they only wanted you to go like 20. This was not a high-speed infraction.

There's something very prosaic about that experience. Have you felt that way more generally about what you've been experiencing while you've been there this time around? Does it feel less like a country at war?

I saw this to a certain extent in Kyiv when I was here over the summer, just sort of how quickly normalcy comes back to areas. That was definitely even more profound on this trip. Kyiv is like totally normal. Everything is fine and open and normal here. The major city in the south is Kherson, which gets shelled daily. It's kind of bad. But the nearest other city to that is a city called Mykolaiv, which was basically where the Russian advance in that region stopped. Early on in the war, there was street-to-street fighting. Parts of it were heavily shelled. Now it's like completely safe. It's outside of any artillery range from the Russian army so it's as safe as any city in Ukraine now.

I went to dinner at this brand-new restaurant that some aid workers suggested we eat and it was extremely nice. Like white tablecloths, modern aesthetic, the pizza was extremely good, they had all these gourmet dishes and stuff like that. There were literally tanks shooting at each other on that street like six months ago. It's very strange how quickly a lot of those things just kind of come back in.

Our fixer was saying he was in Mykolaiv during a lot of the fighting. And he was like, it's surreal to just drive around the city and see the streetlights being on. Only about half of them were on but he was like, if you'd come here in the fall, the entire city would have been just pitch-black because nobody wanted to have lights on or anything to make themselves a target. And now there's less of a curfew there than there is in Kyiv.

I should have asked you, what made you want to go back right now? Was it just that it was the year anniversary?

I think it was. It felt kind of important to be here because I was here when that all happened last year. I haven't been to Ukraine as much as I wanted to this year, but I knew probably with that news peg that I'd be able to sell enough pieces to make it worth it.

So we talked about what you found had changed, or at least gone mostly back to normal. But what feels unchanged to you in the year since the war began?

The sentiment is pretty much exactly the same as it was in the beginning of the war. People are tired. It's been a year of war, of course, but no one here is like, you know, I'm exhausted, all I want is just peace, any end to this war. Some of the people that are very much out of the frontlines feel that way for very good reason. But in terms of Ukrainians in the capital, general everyday Ukrainian life, people are fucking pissed, and they remain pissed.

I think that's something to consider in how we talk about a resolution to this war. It's going to require the Russians even being willing to come to the table to negotiate at all, which so far they've given zero indication that they're willing to do. But I think it's also going to take a reckoning with the fact that Ukrainians don't want some kind of negotiated end to this war. They want every single inch of their country back and every single Russian on it dead. That's what I hear consistently from everyone. And that seems like a very extreme thing. But it does seem pretty significant just in terms of Ukraine's political reality. If Zelensky enters into peace talks and even [thinks about] like, surrendering some part of the Donbas or even Crimea, it seems like it's basically going to be political suicide.

A lot of the people here are like, you know, if we sort of cave to this, then what have all the deaths and the horrible things that we've all experienced been for? It's unfortunate, definitely, because it means that there will probably be a lot more years of violence in this conflict. But who am I to tell a Ukrainian in this country that they're wrong? If we can get some kind of negotiated surrender that ends the hostilities as quickly as possible, that's obviously going to preserve the most human life on both sides of this war. And the Ukrainians are like, well, I don't want to preserve human lives on both sides of this war. I want all the Russians to die.

In the piece you did for Rolling Stone, you end basically on this note, with the guy saying, like, I never thought I would want to see people dead, and now I do. Which is such a stark and tragic statement about how war poisons everybody's mind in that way.

I've been comparing this war to the U.S. invasion of Iraq a lot. It's not an easy one-to-one comparison, but the sort of crime in and of itself is pretty much the same, right? And I think about that story of the little girl who was photographed right after her parents had been killed by U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint. They went back and they interviewed the girl, and she has that famous quote where the filmmakers [told] her, the soldier who shot your parents wants to communicate, like, he's very, very sorry. And she basically says, I don't accept his apology. If he were in front of me right now, I would want to drink his blood. I think a lot of people understand that sentiment. It's just something to bear in mind that there are millions of people in this country who have the same sentiment.

Were you surprised at all by the intensity of those kinds of reactions?

I'm not sure if I was surprised by it. I think I maybe thought that I would see a little bit more fatigue with the war. But Zelensky and his government have waged a very effective propaganda war with their own people, which, to be fair, I don't really think they needed a whole lot of help in that. Of course they're tired of war, but that sort of intangible will to fight, the will to basically keep putting your friends and family in boxes until you win something is, at least in the conversations that I've had on this trip, is still very much strong.

And there's no difference in Kyiv, where things are safer, than Kherson, where things are less safe?

You hear that slightly less from people who are actively under shelling. The patriotic desire to go and fight and kill is slightly less in, like, 70-year-old fruit cellars in Kherson or surrounding villages than it is in 24 and 25-year-olds who are getting called up or have their friends called up.

Going back to your piece, one of the really poignant parts is that you're reconnecting with people who you met on your previous reporting trips. What is that experience been like, seeing where these people are at this stage of the conflict, and also just the general sense that you have been building up these relationships?

It's been really nice on this trip and over the past year or so to really make friends in Ukraine. I have been in this country plenty of times, and I knew people and I had friends. But I think in the duration that I was gone, because I didn't really come here from the beginning of 2016 until last year, some of those relationships kind of faded more. And I didn't feel like, at least at that time, like I made friends as quickly as I have now. The intensity of what this war has been for everyone who's experienced it, even [people] like me who experienced it tangentially—not to be corny, but [it's] brought people together quicker than other times.

Do you feel at home there in any way?

No. I mean, I feel very welcomed. Ukrainian hospitality is great. It has a really strong hospitality culture, like so many countries and cultures do. But I don't speak the language, so the language barrier is pretty tough to get over. I've been talking about this with a friend today, actually, about living in countries that are not your own. And I've found that I do really like the kind of home and life and base that I've built for myself [in the United States]. So Ukraine is definitely not my home. But I do feel welcomed. I feel comfortable here.

There's something to that in terms of the job that you're doing as well, in keeping the distinction.

Obviously, some of the best reporting in this world has been from people who do call Ukraine home. Those voices are going to be the most important. But maybe it almost helps me to not feel completely at home here, because it makes me conscious that the places and people that I'm talking about, they don't belong to me. So I need to temper the ways that I speak about this based on my experience, which is that I'm not Ukrainian. I can relay what they're saying, but I can't speak for them.

Another thing I'm wondering about is a year ago, I remember you talking about the intensity of the media crush that was all around you. It was very much like you and the entire world's press. Have you felt anything like that level a year later? Or does it still feel like the field has been much more vacated, which I think is what you felt the second time you went there last summer?

It's still pretty media-saturated, but it's not leading A1 every single day in the Times anymore, and I think you can definitely get a sense of that on the ground.

Do you feel like people sense that the attention is not as strong as it was?

I think they definitely do. I think for most everyday Ukrainians, the attention that it gets in the Western world is sort of directly tied to whatever aid and, like, arms shipments that they're getting. I'm losing track of the number of people who are like, give us the fighter jets man. And I think especially Ukrainians that are major media consumers, which is very much not everyone, just as it's not everyone in the U.S., they're pretty conscious of how much coverage the war is getting.

One of the things that's become slightly amusing to me is the sort of now-endless parade of dignitaries and world leaders jetting into Ukraine to get their photo-ops in. Do people have any reaction to all of that stuff?

In short, they love it. Not to go full MSNBC, but the president of the United States traveling to what, it sounds very dramatic to say, but what is an active war zone, they're stoked about that. I don't think that they have very strong feelings about, like, Janet Yellen showing up. That was extremely funny to me, Janet Yellen coming over here to just be like, we're gonna keep giving you money, I guess, and everyone being like, who is this?

I get the skepticism towards what Zelensky's doing, because it's very clear that his, like, wanting to go to the Oscars and stuff like that is propaganda. I totally understand that cynicism, [and] I feel like cynicism should be leveled at politicians from any country at all times. But that's also his job. His job is to continue garnering the most public support and soft power from the West as he can and turn that into direct material aid.

Earlier, you said that it felt to you like this war was going to continue for a while. Obviously, we can't predict anything, but is your sense that, if you return to Ukraine on the second anniversary of the war's outbreak, that it will still be a country at war?

Yeah. It's impossible to predict [but] I don't see any resolution to it. Russia basically cannot abandon this premise that it needs to invade Ukraine. Putin doesn't want peace. I think we're going to absolutely be looking at another year of war.

And do you intend to go back relatively soon, or do you feel like you're gonna wait a while?

Ask [my wife] Kara about that. No, I mean, I've got a bunch of other stories to work on back in the States. So I think I might try and sort of keep to a schedule, kind of like what I was on last year, and definitely do a summer or early fall trip. I'm probably going to miss the next big news cycle in this, which is going to be the spring offensive season. The Ukrainians are very much planning on a very major offensive in the spring in order to take back some more territory. We'll see how that goes.

Has your attachment to this place and this story grown over the past year?

I think I have the same commitment to it as I did when I started. I was chatting about this with a friend earlier today. This is basically the biggest story of—[maybe] not of our lifetime, I'm sure the U.S. is going to invade another country eventually—

You can't go wrong betting that.

Yeah. But certainly since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the biggest international story in decades, basically. I'm glad that I'm privileged enough to be able to do a little bit of this work. This is the kind of stuff and the kind of stories and reporting that I want to do. So I'm glad to be able to do it.

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This blog is part of our interview series, Discourses. To read all of our interviews, click here.