By Mildred Nguyen
This story is a part of the Cincinnati’s Storytelling of Journalism project, which represents a collaboration between Northern Kentucky University (NKU) journalism students, the NKU Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Greater Cincinnati Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Students interviewed professional journalist winners and finalists from the Greater Cincinnati SPJ Chapter’s 2023 Excellence in Journalism Awards to create these Nieman Storyboard Annotations-inspired Q&As and story annotations that analyze and celebrate our region’s award-winning works of journalism.
2023 Excellence in Journalism Award: Magazine Reporting
Winning Journalist: John Stowell, Cincinnati Magazine
Winning Story: When War Hits Home: On The Ground In Kharkiv, Cincinnati’s Sister City
Student interviewers: Evan Bales, Mildred Nguyen, Holland Rajewski and Braden White
John Stowell was in the car, listening to NPR, when he learned that war had just broken out between Russia and Ukraine. Right away, he wanted to write a story, but not just any story among the hundreds, possibly thousands, that have touched upon the war in Ukraine since. He wanted to take a topic of international scope and shrink it down, narrow it to the city limits of Cincinnati.
His drive toward localization stems, in part, from his career progression. Stowell emerged from college with a journalism degree, then worked as a reporter for 7.5 years and as a press secretary for another 3.5 years before joining PSI Energy, a utility company that would undergo three mergers into today’s Duke Energy. At PSI, he took charge of environmental policy, government affairs and international relations, a post that required frequent travels outside the country.
Following 28 years with the company, Stowell turned to writing in his retirement, freelancing for Cincinnati Magazine and Cincinnati Chamber’s business publication Realm, as well as serving as faculty advisor for Xavier University’s student-run Newswire. He also seeks to reconnect with the local community, often by hitting up the Google search engine and calling the names that come up (he admits to an infamy for cold-calling people). One of those names is Bob Herring, president of the Sister Cities Partnership that has twinned Cincinnati with, among several cities around the world, Kharkiv in Ukraine.
At first glance, Cincinnati and Kharkiv do not appear to hold much in common. Only after contacting Herring and expressing his interest in writing a story was Stowell able to delve into a shared history that spans over 30 years. The effort also rewarded him with a treasure trove of resources: photos and artifacts of the cultural exchange between the two cities and, most crucially, a chance for firsthand accounts from civilians on the ground in Ukraine, in the early months of Russia’s invasion.
Still, the harsh reality of war hung over the story. Stowell and Herring waited a month before they could secure an interview; Kharkiv was withstanding such furious bombardments that they were not sure who to approach for interviews, if they could approach anyone at all. But perseverance delivered, and eventually they managed to contact two Kharkiv residents: Polina Tymoshenko and Volodymyr Bulba, whose vivid, harrowing windows into war, survival and determination gave the story its foundations and its lasting resonance.
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| John Stowell |
The end result, When War Hits Home: On the Ground in Kharkiv, Cincinnati’s Sister City, was published in the August 2022 issue of Cincinnati Magazine, and went on to receive the Society of Professional Journalists 2023 Excellence in Journalism Award for Best Magazine Reporting.
For Stowell, however, the story has not ended yet: the article itself concludes on an ambiguous note as the fates of Tymoshenko, Bulba, Kharkiv and Ukraine hang in the balance. With both sides entrenched in a grinding war of attrition for over a year to date, no end lies in sight to the crippling uncertainty that affects not only the people of Kharkiv, but also their Cincinnati community partners and friends.
NKU students Mildred Nguyen, Holland Rajewski, Braden White and Evan Bales interviewed Stowell about his use of quotes versus his own words, the utility of maps and advice for journalists on cold calling.
Your story has incredibly vivid descriptions of life in the city during the war, mostly from Polina and Volodymyr’s accounts. How did you decide where to use their words and where to use your own?
I tried to use their words as much as I could in terms of how they personally felt and the experience they had up until that point during the war. My verbiage came in when I was trying to describe the situation that they were in. I tried to relate the geography of Kharkiv to Cincinnati geography. I thought it very interesting that the Russians had gotten this close, basically to the I-275 loop, so I thought for the reader to understand how harrowing the situation was, if I could relate the geography — the park, museum, roads, including the suburbs — it would be more real to the readers that Russian missiles could hit as far south as Florence.
Did you use any maps or outside resources to help depict the city of Kharkiv?
I have an old map that I used. I also had a brochure that the Kyiv Chamber of Commerce had put together that had all the cities in Ukraine with the tourist highlights. That’s how I got the information about their park, their museums. I went back and verified it with Bob, first of all to make sure I spelled everything right because it was all in Ukrainian which is in Cyrillic. Maps are sort of interchangeable if you take the language out.
How did you get in touch with Sasha Maslov, the photographer, for your story?
That gentleman was someone that Cincinnati Magazine was familiar with and had worked with on a couple of previous assignments over the years. They knew he was Ukrainian, the editor knew he was planning to go — turned out he was already there! We had a heck of a time getting a hold of him. It didn’t work out quite the way we hoped it would: he was quite restricted in his movement over there; some of the photography was certainly left on the cutting room floor — by cutting floor I mean it was still in Ukraine, and we couldn’t get it into the issue.
The photos that you saw, many of them, were provided by Bob who had been there half a dozen times, and had kept a scrapbook over the years, and from Susan [Neaman] who’d been there two or three times. They were very generous to allow us to use the pictures. There was a picture of the boy’s baseball team, just to show the humanity of the Ukrainian people. I found that the most hardening picture of all because I knew the time when it was taken; I did the math and gosh, they’ve got a gun in their hands now and not a bat. I still wonder to this day how many of those gun boys or men are alive.
You mentioned that you have a habit of cold-calling people. What advice do you have for journalists who are afraid of cold-calling people and journalists who are not afraid of cold-calling people?
Gosh, I don’t know what my advice would be! Maybe, “Get over it! This is the way it works.” I don’t do it a lot. I’d done it so I could have a shot at getting a gig with the magazine. In my last job at Duke Energy, I was in charge of international relations, so I was out of the country a lot. Now that I’m back I want to reconnect with the community and I want to write. I thought that was the best way of doing that. I just got on the Google machine and found out who the editor [of Cincinnati Magazine] was, picked up the phone. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn’t.
I think for reporters, it’s really important for them to take a chance. …When you guys are on campus, walking to class, do you ever see a student that you don’t know and just say hi to them? That’s the equivalent of a cold-call in a way. I guess a better equivalent would be if you just sit down with a stranger in the cafeteria and engage them in conversation. You never know what you’re going to find, right? You might find a story.
When War Hits Home: On The Ground In Kharkiv, Cincinnati’s Sister City
By John Stowell, Cincinnati Magazine
Polina Tymoshenko has almost grown accustomed to the roar coming out of the north. Sometimes it sounds like a hungry stomach, she says, or a distant growling rumble like an approaching storm. But too often it’s like tonight.
A cacophony of bone-jarring lethality roused Tymoshenko out of a fitful slumber. She, her husband, and six refugees she’d recently taken in bolted to their safe room as blinding flashes of white flame canceled out the star-filled sky. They huddled behind two thick protective walls, unable to do anything but wait and pray. Fortune would either be with them, or they’d die in their night clothes.
Question: The last sentence in this paragraph, “Fortune would either be with them, or they’d die in their night clothes,” packs quite a punch. Was it something that one of your sources said, or did you come up with it yourself?
Answer: That was my verbiage. I wanted to portray to the reader the helpless situation they were in and that their immediate fate was dependent on pure luck.
This is life in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Cincinnati’s sister city. I hear about the situation first-hand in a Zoom call in late May with Tymoshenko and Volodymyr Bulba, just hours after the latest shelling. “All our lives here in Kharkiv can be divided before and after February 24,” says Bulba, a college professor with a resonant but soothing voice. “That date is when a new life began.”
February 24 will forever be Ukraine’s Day of Infamy, when Russian soldiers poured over the border in a brutal attempt to subjugate their neighbor and wipe out its emerging democracy. “Oh, yes,” says Tymoshenko. “That day everything fell apart. We lost our spiritual and our physical balance. Nothing is the same.”
Question: Was the Zoom call efficient enough for you to connect with the source mentioned here?
Answer: Yes, it was amazingly efficient. Unlike our attempt last week of the ill-fated Zoom call from just 20 miles away, we had no interruptions, the sound and visuals were good and — importantly — I had a translator fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian. There were actually two sources here — both in Kharkiv — Polina and Volodymyr.
It’s been 20 years since Tymoshenko and Bulba walked the streets of Cincinnati. They visited our neighborhoods and suburbs, spent hours in our schools, admired our architecture, and enjoyed ice cream on Fountain Square. They were among several groups of Kharkivites who have visited the Queen City over the years since the sister city relationship was formed in 1989, and they remember the trip fondly, vividly recalling that their visit came as the United States was dealing with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. They were here for only three weeks, but the friends here they made remain friends—and they’re now part of The Cause.
Question: In this paragraph Polina and Volodymyr mentioned that they came to the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks. Did they say anything in particular about that experience, the general atmosphere in the country or how they were treated? How do you decide what background details to include or leave out?
Answer: We didn’t dwell on the details of their visit vis-a-vis timing (9-11). They were both impressed with the friendly reception they received and they loved the architecture, particularly in OTR. I remember Polina, in particular, mentioning how she never had to eat alone (everyone wanted to take her out to dinner). They both mentioned how they’ve kept in touch with many of the friends they met here 20 years ago.
Bob Herring had felt the tension in the weeks leading up to the invasion. The former principal of Nativity School in Pleasant Ridge has been to Kharkiv five times and currently serves as president of the Cincinnati-Kharkiv Sister Cities Partnership. He has friends there, or he did. Some have fled, while some doggedly remain and help keep the city running. Some, he acknowledges with a shudder, he can’t say.
“I’m still in touch with my friend Tamara,” says Susan Neaman, the organization’s vice president. She speaks with a hesitant cadence that reflects her concern. “She’s still in Kharkiv, and what she says I have great trouble with.”
Tamara, who is in her 70s, sounds like all our grandmothers. Everything is fine. Don’t worry about me. The shops are open. We have food and water and electricity. We are safe. Neaman suspects Tamara, whom she hosted when Tamara visited Cincinnati, is shielding her from the truth.
Question: I love the descriptions of their voices after the first introduction of a person. Is this something you commonly do in your writing? What made you decide to add these descriptions for this specific story?
Answer: Yes, I try to bring my interviews to life so the reader can better connect to them. I recognize that, sometimes when I do, it could border on editorialization so I am careful not to use descriptors that one could feel are judgmental.
“We don’t know if our conversations are being monitored, but I do know Tamara lives in a tiny Soviet-style apartment building in Kharkiv, and I mean tiny,” says Neaman. The Russians have either targeted civilian housing or simply fire off missiles randomly that have hit and destroyed hundreds of apartments. Neaman wonders if one of those apartment buildings is Tamara’s.
Question: It has been over a year since your story was published. Is Tamara still okay?
Answer: As far as I know (as of 3 months ago), she is still alive and well. So is Volodomyr.
“It’s like you are watching a horror movie,” Tymoshenko says on our Zoom call. “It’s impossible to imagine that all these horrors are happening to your city.” She has a jolly laugh and answers my questions at length through a translator. There’s no question she would be the life of any party, but war has hardened her resolve and exposed a defiant trait that keeps her focused.
Tymoshenko puts her 20 years of experience as a social worker into practice every day in Kharkiv. She darts from one bombed-out neighborhood to another delivering medical supplies, helping homeless families resettle or evacuate, and dispensing a sort of psychological triage to hundreds of anguished residents. She says she’ll carry stories of individual tragedies forever. Adding to her burden is constant concern for her son, who enlisted in the Ukrainian Army immediately after the invasion.
Question: “Dispensing a sort of psychological triage to hundreds of anguished residents” is an especially beautiful phrase. How do the words come to you as you write?
Answer: It’s hard to say how the words come to me, but this story touched me deeply and maybe that unlocks a part of your brain (the side that controls empathy?) where those words are stored. Sometimes I struggle to find exactly the right phraseology; sometimes it just comes.
On the call, Tymoshenko sits to the side of a Ukrainian flag mounted on the wall. There are bold Cyrillic letters imprinted across the flag’s lower half that read, she says, “We are from Kharkiv. We are processing the invaders into fertilizer.”
Sister city partnerships were established during the Cold War when President Dwight Eisenhower envisioned a citizen-to-citizen exchange program to form economic, cultural, and personal bonds among the world’s peoples. It took 32 years and the leadership of then-Mayor Charlie Luken for Cincinnati to score its first partnership, twinning with Liuzou, China, and Gifu, Japan. Kharkiv joined a year later in 1989; back then it was a city in the old Soviet Union, and it was known as Kharkov. Today, Cincinnati has nine sister cities: Liuzou, Gifu, Kharkiv, Nancy (France), New Taipei City (Taiwan), Harare (Zimbabwe), Mysore (India), Amman (Jordan), and perhaps our most famous partner, Munich.
Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second largest city but shares similar traits with Cincinnati. It’s home to a large public university and Freedom Square, a gigantic downtown plaza that would dwarf Fountain Square. We buy our fresh produce at Findlay Market while Kharkivites shop at Tsentralniy Market. There are several major hospitals and an impressive music hall. We have Washington Park; Kharkiv citizens stroll the leafy gardens of Shevchenko Park. North of the city, Maxim Gorky Central Park might remind you of a mash-up of Mt. Airy Forest and Coney Island. Like Cincinnati, two rivers flow through Kharkiv (the Lopan and the Udy), although they’re more like the Licking than the mighty Ohio.
Question: What resources did you use for the map of Kharkiv in this paragraph? Did you consult maps, satellite images, photos?
Answer: Bob Herring, who runs the Sister Cities program, provided me with a detailed map and I sat with him for more than a half hour going over it. I also did a fair amount of internet research on each of these Kharkiv sites mentioned in the paragraph.
“There was an energy there, especially among the young people,” Neaman says of her four trips to Kharkiv. “There was a sense of pride and mission that was palpable. They were very optimistic about the future.” Left unsaid, but written all over her face, is that memory now sullied by bombs and bullets.
Question: This is such an interesting quote. Do you remember the question you asked to get this reaction and answer? Was this question predetermined or was it a follow up question?
Answer: I don’t remember the precise question, but the context is that we were discussing the school-to-school contact that was occurring between Cincinnati and Kharkiv pre-war and hopes that Susan and Bob had about it resuming after the war ended.
Nearly every block of our sister city and its surrounding villages has been punished by artillery, rockets, mortar barrages, and bombs dropped from the sky. Freedom Square is a cratered moonscape, while their music hall, opera house, museums, and government building lie in ruins. Apartment buildings, their facades peeled away, expose the ruin of thousands of lives. The air raid siren has become almost background noise since the invasion began. Even after the Ukrainian Army pushed the Russians back to their border in May, the invaders continued to pour death into the city. Shelling picked up again in June.
It’s easy to see why Kharkiv is still in danger. The city lies just 25 miles south of the Russian border, about as close as the Monroe Outlets are from downtown Cincinnati. When the war began, Kharkiv absorbed an artillery shellacking as Russian soldiers drove across the frontier. Ukrainian defenders dug in at the top of the highway loop that circles the city and halted the Russian advance.
“Think of it this way,” says Herring. “If you lived in Fairfield, Hamilton, West Chester, or Loveland, you were in occupied territory. The front line was I-275.” But no one was spared artillery fire, especially when the Russians were able to move their big guns forward as the infantry advanced. Even Kharkiv’s southern suburbs, like Merefa, where Tymoshenko lives, were shelled. If the war were here, that would put Florence and CVG airport under the guns.
Question: This analogy is incredibly powerful and, I think, essential for Cincinnati readers to understand the gravity of the situation for the people of Kharkiv. Do you intentionally ask for analogies in reporting? Do you remember how this came up?
Answer: This discussion came as a result of Bob and I pouring over the map of Kharkiv. He showed me how far the Russians had advanced and I used the legend to figure out how close the front was to the center city. When I pointed out the mileage and said my hometown of Loveland would have been occupied territory, he gave me this quote. This was an absolutely “must have” graf for this story for the reasons you mentioned.
Herring thinks back a few years to happier times when a group of fresh-faced young men from Kharkiv wanted to start a baseball team. “They did this on their own,” he says. “They wanted to play the great American pastime in a country where there were only soccer fields and no balls, bats, or gloves.” The men appealed to Cincinnati for help, and it came.
The Sister City Partnership contacted the Reds, Knothole Baseball, and the Cincinnati Recreation Commission to obtain equipment and then began considering a program that would bring these men to Cincinnati to watch and play baseball at all levels—professional, college, high school, and Knothole. Unfortunately, Herring laments, the trip fell through when the U.S. government denied the men visas, worrying they might not return to their homes.
Question: This is such a fascinating and heartwarming detail. Did you already know that Cincinnati sent baseball equipment, or how did this topic come up in the interviews?
Answer: I did not know this piece of Kharkiv-Cincinnati history and was so glad to include it in my story. Bob brought it up and had several photos.
Still, they were able to organize a game in Gorky Park, and the mayor of Kharkiv came to watch.
“The Sister City Summer Classic is still my dream when this is over,” says Herring. “A team from Kharkiv comes here one year, and a team from Cincinnati goes to Kharkiv the next.”
He and I look at the photos of the smiling boys in American baseball gear and wonder: They are all of military age. What horrors have they experienced? What’s happened to their homes and families? Are they even alive?
It is kids who are central to the heart of Herring’s passion for Kharkiv. In the early 1990s, a delegation from Kharkiv that included the vice principal from Kharkiv School No. 3 visited Cincinnati and spent three days at Nativity, where Herring had created a global education program. “Yuri Golb was the vice principal from Kharkiv, and he visited every classroom during those three days,” Herring recalls. “We developed a real friendship and began talking about an exchange program.”
Herring wasn’t involved in the Sister Cities program at the time, but he was hooked after the visit and soon found himself in Kharkiv, staying in the home of School No. 3 teacher Iryna Bakumenko, who went on to become president of Kharkiv’s sister city program. Iryna has fled to England, and Herring wonders if the exchange program will ever be revived.
The outbreak of hostilities also ended, at least temporarily, a potential exchange program among Cincinnati’s and Kharkiv’s suburbs. Herring says he hopes Denys Tkackov will eventually be able to come to Cincinnati to continue his government-to-government outreach with some of our suburbs. He was scheduled to visit in early March to study how some of our jurisdictions share costs and responsibilities such as fire protection. Tkackov and his family have now fled to France.
It was 4 a.m. on invasion Thursday when Bulba awakened to a loud buzzing noise as a nearby explosion rattled his house. Rockets likely launched from nearby Belgorod, Russia, were flying overhead, and the black sky was alight. His children and others who live nearby ran to his home, which has a basement. “Everyone brought their pillows,” Bulba remembers, “and the little ones all thought it was a big game. The women were crying, of course, but the kids, at least the young ones, were excited.”
Question: This is such a detailed scene based on memory. Can you talk about how you get sources to share such vivid details from memory?
Answer: Remember — this interview took place just two months (to the day) after the Russian attack. So, it was very vivid in Volodomyr’s mind. He was still enraged, but even though my interview with him and Polina was just an hour or so after the latest missile attack, neither appeared to be afraid. I specifically asked him the question about the initial attack. He had no problems sharing it.
He would see that same juxtaposition of fear and excitement days later as he passed out medical supplies and words of encouragement to women and children huddled underground in Kharkiv’s subway tunnels. Those supplies have a direct connection to Cincinnati. “I get very emotional when I talk about it,” Bulba says softly. The lighting is muted on our Zoom call, but he’s clearly fighting back tears. “Literally, just a few hours after the tragedy began, my friends in Cincinnati contacted us and asked what they could do to help. I realized they cared and we weren’t alone.”
Question: This paragraph has but one of the instances where you take readers outside of Kharkiv and Cincinnati, and place them in the conversation you had with your sources. Is there something specific that informs these decisions?
Answer: I felt it was important, by this stage of the story, to reclaim the Sister City story. I could have written several more grafs on the war itself — they had some harrowing stories — but the point of this story and the reason Cincinnati Magazine wanted to print it — was to show that special relationship. Volodomyr’s stated gratitude was a way of bringing the story back plus delving into what he was doing on the ground.
Bulba is a man with connections and, like Tymoshenko, a whirlwind of action. Within days of the war starting, he helped create the School of Courage, a volunteer organization dedicated to helping thousands of displaced Kharkivites with the delivery of products essential to life. Tymoshenko, a former student of his, is one of many courageous drivers. Food, bottled water, medicines, and personal hygiene products were at the top of Bulba’s wish list, and when he forwarded those needs to his Cincinnati connections, Herring, Neaman, and the rest of the Sister City Partnership got to work.
A three-week-long web-based and word-of-mouth fund-raiser in late March and early April netted $100,000, all of it from individual donations. The Cincinnati group wire-transferred the funds to the Red Cross Kharkiv, which purchased supplies that the School of Courage helped to deliver.
That was closely followed by a separate effort from the Procter & Gamble Alumni Group that raised nearly $300,000 over Easter weekend from its expansive membership. Kathleen Dillon Carroll, a marketing expert and P&G alumna, credits John and Frances Pepper for jump-starting the P&G effort by providing $50,000 in matching funds. Those funds were earmarked for a SpotFund fund-raising campaign called Mission to Ukraine and used to purchase a variety of desperately needed medical and personal supplies, as well as power generators to keep the hospitals running.
Question: How are Cincinnati’s efforts to deliver and coordinate aids to Kharkiv faring now?
Answer: There have been fundraisers such as a “virtual hike”, one connected with the Flying Pig, a benefit concert, and even a formal organization — Cincy4Ukraine — was formed. Bob took a Cincinnati city councilmember to Kyiv a few weeks ago to sign a new Sister Cities agreement with Kharkiv (the old one had expired). So the efforts are ongoing.
Music students at Walnut Hills High School hurriedly organized a benefit concert, and Northern Kentucky University sponsored an event featuring two world-renowned Ukrainian pianists, both NKU graduates. Cincinnati Chefs for Ukraine hosted a massive pierogi party at the OTR StillHouse.
Bulba holds up a piece of paper printed with the Cincinnati-Kharkiv sister city logo. “This is the heart of Ukraine and the symbol of the helping hand of Cincinnati,” he says. “Your funds have helped so many people with medicines. We have been able also to purchase generators, rescue equipment, and tools to help us clear the rubble in our streets. We would never have imagined this could happen.”
It’s been months since the Russian invasion began, and yet the brutality of war continues. Cincinnati was all in from the beginning. The questions now are: What’s next? Where will home be?
“We have reached out to the Biden administration and let them know that Cincinnati would be proud to provide a home for Ukrainian refugees,” says Mayor Aftab Pureval. “It’s out of our hands for now, but we’ve been working with Catholic Charities to be ready.” The U.S. has committed to accepting up to 100,000 displaced Ukrainians.
Question: Did you ever look into how many displaced Ukrainians were able to take refuge in the U.S.?
Answer: According to the Department of Homeland Security (an NBC report), as of February 24, 2023, more than 271,000 Ukrainian refugees were resettled in the US. I know of a few that have resettled here (one founded the Cincy4Ukraine organization mentioned above) but I haven’t done a follow-up.
Neaman hopes to be among the first in line. She’s housed three sets of Kharkivites in the past and desperately wants to bring her friend, Viktoria Marinuk, and her 13-year-old daughter, Irina, to Cincinnati for resettlement. Viktoria, who taught English to young adults in Kharkiv before the war, fled to Slovakia, where she now works with mental health professionals tending to traumatized Ukrainian refugees. Getting Viktoria and Irina here will involve a lot of paperwork, vetting, and approval by the American Embassy in Bratislava and a pledge by Neaman to financially support them once here. It will likely be a slow process.
Many of Cincinnati’s sister city friends have, in fact, fled the war zone. Most are women and children—males between 18 and 60, with some exceptions, can’t leave—and they’ve relocated to England, France, Germany, Poland, and other European nations where they’re trying to rebuild their lives. Some, like Tymoshenko and Bulba, remain in immediate peril, doing what they can to keep themselves, their families, and their neighbors alive. Others have stayed in-country but moved to central or western Ukraine, out of the reach of Russia’s guns.
“Will they come back to Kharkiv? Can they come back and, if they do, to what?” Herring asks rhetorically. If they do, he hopes the Sister City Partnership will be there to help rebuild. What Kharkiv will need and when is unknown and, assuming the city remains Ukrainian territory, the job of rebuilding will require a lot more than what Cincinnati alone can provide.
Cincinnati’s sister city leadership team clearly has the contacts in Kharkiv. They have a love for the city and its people and, most importantly, their trust. Cincinnati, says Herring, has strong companies with skilled people and vital equipment that can make a difference. Maybe when the dust clears and the enemy has been expelled, they can help bring Kharkiv back to life.
“It was a beautiful city, and it’s been ruined,” Herring laments. “I know it’s not possible now, but I am dreaming about what we can do to help them rebuild.”
“It’ll be a while,” Neaman says sadly. Herring gives a quick nod. He knows.
Question: The story ends on an extremely ambiguous and cautiously, even uncertainly, hopeful note. Why did you choose to end it like this?
Answer: Because it is ambiguous and uncertain as to what the final chapter will hold. It’s a sad story of a ruined country full of ruined lives. At the time of the interview, the US was fully supportive but now? It’s hard to say but it’s now a war eclipsed by another and both are tied to our domestic politics. If anything, it’s more ambiguous and uncertain than it was when I wrote this.
