Hello from the Heartland. My name is Jenna, and this is Smarter News, news when it matters and why it matters.

Our Smarter series features unique people who help us think and live smarter.

Hey, everybody. Hope you're after a great day wherever you are. I'm really excited for our

conversation today. I'm always excited for our conversations, but I'm really excited to speak

with Holly McKay, war reporter Holly McKay, who just recently returned from Ukraine. It's a really

good day to take a deep breath and talk to Holly about what her reporting was like inside Ukraine, what it was like to actually leave Ukraine, the complicated nature of that decision to leave. And also now at this point with a few days to step back and think about all that she learned during that time. So we're going to

bring Holly in in just a moment. In the meantime, President Biden is actually heading overseas today,

and he's going to start a very significant trip, which is going to be meeting with NATO allies.

And in the past several weeks, we've seen different cabinet members do this, but the president

traveling overseas really matters.

So we'll watch the beginnings of those meetings.

We're already getting reports that we could hear from NATO more troops in different strategic

areas, move to these strategic areas to firm up NATO's fronts against Russia.

And they would not put it that way because that sounds more combative. But there's clearly some strategic thinking going into where to put additional troops,

additional resources. And one of the great questions you had for Holly was how much NATO's

efforts thus far have been affecting in any way, positive or negative,

that war in Ukraine.

So before we get to all of that, I want to show you, as we always do, just to look at the maps

and give us an idea of what does it look like from a bird's eye view of Ukraine at this very

moment.

The BBC has been a great job of this.

They're using some resources from the Institute of the City of War.

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