Spirit amid the I


Jeff Farrell looks back on his reporting of the war in Ukraine as it reaches its third year


travelled to Ukraine to report on the war just weeks after Russia’s invasion on February 24 2022 in what Moscow billed as a three-day special military operation.


Enraged at the attack, I used my holiday time from my then staff sub-editor job to report on the war and the horrors that emerged. President Vladimir Putin had ordered his


tanks to roll over the border in a bizarre claim that he was ‘deNazifying’ a country led by Jewish president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Most analysts expected that Kyiv, outgunned and outmanned, would cave in after just a few weeks. But it didn’t. And, three years on, Ukraine continues to fight off the enemy. I continued to report on the country’s existential battle for publications in Ireland and the UK. Along the way, I earned a nomination in both 2022 and 2023 in the Foreign Coverage category in the Irish Journalism Awards. I first started reporting in Lviv in May 2022 as


a wet-behind-the-ears war correspondent. In my first brush with danger, Russia hammered the energy infrastructure of the city’s railway station. I had been walking in the city centre, looking for a taxi to get to the station for a night train that would take me eight hours east to Kyiv. Suddenly, a boom erupted in the distance and the ground below me vibrated and I fled for a bunker below a hotel. I sat there with my hands shaking, wondering what I was doing in a war zone, travelling to danger as millions fled. But I stayed and, the next day, I interviewed a


priest whose church had been damaged in the attacks. It stood just 100 metres from a railway power station hit in the strike. Petro Kurpita pointed at shattered stained windows and called the Russian military ‘invader savages’. Miraculously, no one was killed in the attack, and the resilience of Ukraine’s railway network and its workers meant the trains ran as usual. I later travelled to areas including Bucha and


Borodyanka to see the rebuilding efforts after weeks of Russian occupation that had turned these vast areas to rubble. In Bucha, I visited the


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site of a mass grave outside a church, where more than 300 civilians were buried after Russians murdered them and dumped their bodies there, Kyiv said.


I visited a shelled housing estate nearby where


Natalia Alekseenko pushed a brush along a floor strewn with rubble in what was the kitchen of the burnt-out property, with a huge hole in the roof. Natalia had lived here with her husband before they fled the Russian tanks. Now she was back in what seemed a futile bid to pull her home back together. She sighed and looked up at the gaping gap, her eyes glassy. “When it rains, the water falls down,” she said, adding: “We lost everything here.


Everything is burnt out. We have nothing.” The monumental task to patch up Ukraine


was already beginning in towns including Borodyanka, some 60km north west of Kyiv. Hollowed-out apartment blocks lined the streets of Borodyanka, the area covered in rubble and walls pockmarked with bullet holes. Lurii stood in a manhole shovelling dirt into a


bucket, explaining that he was clearing debris from the town’s water system. The task to rebuild Borodyanka looked mammoth, but people like Lurii were optimistic. “I see photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki


totally destroyed in the Second World War and now they are prospering,” he said. “It is some kind of victory of humanity that we can be destroyed but rise from nothing. Ukraine will do the same.”


Most Ukrainians had fled from areas where


early in the war Russia was advancing. But not everyone ran — some civilians stayed to defend their homeland. In July 2022, I met one such family when I


travelled to the southern port city of Mykolaiv, by the Black Sea, in an area under constant Russian attacks. In the city, I met Ura Albeshenko, 37, as he stood in his garage. Below was a bunker where he and his wife Svetlana, 33, and daughters Alina, 12, and Kristina, 11, slept amid the regular strikes.


Svetlana strapped on an AK, telling how she refuses to flee Mykolaiv. “I am staying because I believe in my country,” she said. In early October 2022, on my third reporting


trip, I was back in Kharkiv for a feel-good story. It came as Kyiv launched a successful counter- offensive to repel the Russians from large parts of Kharkiv Oblast and Donetsk Oblast. The war, it seemed, was turning in Ukraine’s favour. I travelled to Izium in Kharkiv. In a forest on


the outskirts of the city, the authorities later uncovered a mass grave of 447 bodies that showed signs of torture, officials said. The living, however, were rebuilding their lives. In the forest’s outskirts of the forest, Viktor Dudka stood in a garden that was covered in broken bricks after a shelling. He had no running water or electricity. This was his late brother’s home which he had gone to after his own house was bombed to rubble. “Everything is gone that I earned and worked for for over 40 years,” said the pensioner, 63. “I have to survive somehow to see out the rest of my life some way.” I reported on how many were even thriving – at


least in cities such as Lviv in western Ukraine, some 1000km from the front line. One day in Lviv’s historical centre in late 2022, I noticed a couple who had just married and were posing for photos outside the Church of the Holy Eucharist. Andriy and Solomia told me that they hadn’t thought twice about getting married. “We wanted to have children so we planned a


wedding because we realised it was important now,” said Andriy, 25. “We decided not to wait for the war to end — life is still going on.” These rare ‘love in war’ stories were uplifting for me amid the usual death and misery copy. I got back into the field in May 2023 with my first visit to the zero frontline in Kupiansk, Kharkiv Oblast. Ukraine had liberated the area just months earlier in late 2022 but the Russians were now pushing hard.


I stood in an abandoned shell of a house where brigade member Evgeny peered down the barrel of a Kord machine gun and said, “F**k the Russians,” before he fired into the distance towards Moscow’s troops. No gunfire came back. I then chatted to Evgeny, 23, about what Kyiv needed for its then much-


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