You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

Today I'm talking to my colleague James Meek, a contributing editor at the LRB,

who reported from Kiev for the Guardian

in the early 1990s and was for many years that paper's Moscow correspondent. He also reported

from Afghanistan and Iraq when the US and UK invaded those countries. His fifth novel,

To Calais in ordinary time, came out in 2019. We last spoke on this podcast, I think, a year ago when James had written about the situation

in Mikhailov and Heson last summer.

He returned to Kiev a few weeks ago and has a piece in the current issue of the paper

reporting from the Ukrainian capital.

Hello, James, and thank you very much for joining me again.

Nice to be here.

So it's now more than 17 months or more than 76 weeks,

or The Guardian has it counts by days on its website,

more than 530 days since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 22.

So the war goes on, but as you make clear in your peace, life goes on too.

Yes, very much so.

Very much so.

I mean, for me, to go back to Kiev now is to see different layers of change.

When I spent time in the capital, you mentioned my visit to

Mikhailayaev last year and then I just quickly passed through Kiev, but I was in Kiev

literally the day before the war began. I got the last flight out. And then it was winter.

And Kiev never looks its best in the middle of winter in February.

...