Welcome back to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier.

Photographer Alan Chin was on the show over a year ago talking about the siege of the US Capitol.

He's now recently returned from covering the war in Ukraine,

taking photos and writing stories for Insider, an online business magazine.

I gave him a few days to settle in after he got back home to New York City

and then I called him to find out what it was like over there.

He said when he arrived in Ukraine, two weeks before the war started,

there were 190,000 Russian troops on the border surrounding the country.

And Russian President Vladimir Putin was saying it was just a military exercise.

He had no intention of invading Ukraine.

When Alan asked people he met if they thought there was going to be a war,

they all said, what do you mean? We've been at war since 2014,

when Russia took Crimea and people in Lohansk and Donetsk along the Russian border

started fighting to separate from Ukraine.

They've been shooting and shelling ever since.

So Alan decided to go there to Lohansk and Donetsk.

I went down there and we were actually checking out a town where they had been shown.

That morning and also a few days before.

And while we were there to check out what had happened, the shelling started again.

And that's pretty serious to be coming under artillery fire.

But so after that I decided, okay, you know, I don't really want to be stuck here

if it really starts, if it really gets worse.

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