“We need to be very aware of what this war is about. We need to stop being so utterly complacent as to think that it will never touch us.”
Jen Stout’s Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War – published on 2 May – delves into her years reporting on the war in Ukraine through the many faces and friends she met along the way. Stout, a Scottish journalist and radio producer, has covered the war in Ukraine for BBC Radio, the London Review of Books, Prospect, and The Sunday Post.
The book opens with Stout, keen to study languages and travel, leaving Shetland behind and embarking upon a Russian studies program in Moscow. Only months into her program, she departed Russia in pursuit of covering the war in Ukraine, getting her fill of train rides as she traveled to Odesa, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro, and the Donbas. Through conversations with mothers living with their children in basements and elderly women taking shelter in the metro who are more worried for Stout than themselves, she paints a picture of a people united by an existential threat.
In this interview, Stout talks not only about her working methods but also the connections she made, binding her to Ukraine and its people.
First, tell me about the process of writing this book. Was it a write-as-you-go piece, or did you keep a diary? What was the process of bringing everything together?
I sat down in autumn last year trying to gather together all of the photos, videos, sound recordings, and diary. I think the diary helps a lot. For years, I’ve kept quite a detailed one. The gathering of it all together took a while and I had to immerse myself in it. The diary gives you all the wee details of the day that you might otherwise forget that was really important in piecing things together because I didn’t want it to be ploddingly chronological, like I went here, then I went there. Because that’s boring. If you put in all these wee details, you know: How did it sound? How did it smell? What was the very feeling at the time? That makes it a bit more vivid for people.
What was it like to reimmerse yourself in everything again and relive everything you went through?
It was just kind of cathartic, to be honest. It’s a great way to make sense of what’s happened to you, especially when you were rushing around from place to place and on the road for so long.
You can sit back and put it into a narrative, and we all need coherent narratives about our lives that way. I think that’s a deep human need, so I always find that writing is a way to make sense of the world.
A common theme throughout the book was that many victims of the war you spoke with were always worried about you.
It made me feel like we were all in this together, I suppose. That kind of human feeling and solidarity and concern, it transcends the sort of relationship of reports and what was being reported on. Some old ladies would say, “Isn’t your granny worried about you?” It really makes you take a step back, and I would say, “Yeah, she is.” There’s a lot of kindness like that, and that’s partly because I had the privilege of time to sit and talk to people at greater length because I’m freelance and because I’m not a TV journalist. In particular, I’m not under pressure to get the story and file really quickly, so it gives you more time to talk to people.
At times when it got bad, and you wanted to leave or other people were telling you to leave, what was it that made you stay and keep reporting and talking to people?
I didn’t want to go. I like being in the middle of things, like a conduit, and I like being in Ukraine because for so many reasons – so many reasons – it’s a very inspiring place. It’s a very beautiful place. I was learning a lot. I was using my brain, using my skills.
There was a point in the book when you got to Kharkiv for the first time, and you asked a woman how she coped with fear. How exactly did you cope with fear while reporting, especially in the last part of the book, when you were really on the front lines?
It’s difficult to say. Being with other people, you know, the real fear – tons of real, real, real fear – is when you’re alone. If you’ve got people who have shared experience with you, everything’s a lot more manageable. I did conflict-environment training and that teaches you a lot of the psychological stuff that’s very, very useful, so you understand how your body will react to it; how people react in different ways; how your breathing will change and why your fingers might feel cold; all that kind of stuff so you can understand and predict how that will happen. But everything’s so fast moving, so you’re going with the flow and some people don’t mind it, and perhaps I’m one of them.
At another point of the book, you talked about the “degrees” of worry and how perspective changes, in the context of your being at home and people complaining. How did your perspective shift throughout your coverage?
It’s very hard to explain to people who haven’t been to Ukraine. If you’re watching it from afar, you think that the whole thing is this sort of post-apocalyptic hellscape, and it’s not. It’s a very big country with millions of people, lots of normal life, and rush hour, and the same things that we have here. The more you get used to it, the more your risk perception shifts. You do something that you think is a bit mad, and then it was fine, and so the next time it’s not so daunting. You have to keep an eye on that because your risk perception can shift too much, and then you’re not being cognizant of the actual dangers. But the situation in Ukraine, it’s not like a normal war, is it? Because of strikes everywhere, there is no safe place. You can be at the front line, which is more dangerous. You can be in Kramatorsk eating pizza like my friend Vika Amelina, and an S300 missile crushes the ceiling and gives you catastrophic brain injuries, and you die three days later. She was just eating pizza. It’s difficult to explain all of the normal life next to the constant threat of death.
I’m wondering how you decided what to include, and then if there was anything that you left out that you wish had been included in the book?
I really put everything in. There were a lot of my friendships and personal relationships there, and I obviously checked with all those people if they were happy with that, and if they wanted me to change their names, particularly with soldiers, obviously for security concerns. Some of them did, some of them didn’t. It all fit quite neatly into 82,000 words. I sort of skipped what happens when I go home because it’s not quite so relevant. I wanted to talk about the realities of reporting like this because it’s very difficult. It’s very physically demanding. Of course, I got exhausted, I got sick, and I didn’t want to just whine about that, but I also didn’t want to gloss over the reality of that.
What is your biggest hope with publishing this book, and what do you hope comes out of it?
I want people to feel connected to Ukraine. I want them to understand that it’s not far away. These aren’t different people from us. This could happen to us. We need to be very aware of what this war is about, which is about empire, fascism, conquest, and freedom. We need to stop being so utterly complacent as to think that it’s very far away and will never touch us. I always want to write in defense of journalism, what we do; I think it’s important. I talked quite a bit in the beginning of the book, especially about how long it took me to go and do the kind of reporting I wanted to do. I’m very angry when I think of all the people like me, for whom it’s so difficult to break into journalism, particularly foreign stuff because of money. You can do it, and this is how I did it.
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Lydie Lake is the editorial assistant at Transitions. She studies journalism and political science at George Washington University.
Photos courtesy of Jen Stout.
