Masha Gessen on the Quiet in Kyiv

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2022

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

Masha Gessen is reporting for The New Yorker on the war in Ukraine, which is now in its fourth month. They checked in with David Remnick from Kyiv, which seems almost normal, with “hipsters in cafés” and people riding electric scooters. But the scooters, Gessen noted, are popular because prices have skyrocketed and gasoline is unaffordable. All the talk, meanwhile, is of war crimes—of murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping. (The Russian government has denied involvement in any war crimes.) And outside the city, in the suburbs, Gessen finds “unimaginable destruction,” comparable to what they saw in Grozny, Chechnya, “after the second war—after they’d had nearly ten years of carpet bombing.” The scale of atrocities, Gessen says, makes any diplomatic compromise over territory impossible for Ukrainians to accept. Plus, the head of the largest flight attendants’ union talks with the staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman about leading her members through turbulent times, with organized labor making a comeback, while unruly passenger behavior is reaching new heights.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.1	Masha Gessen is a staff writer for The New Yorker who was born in Russia and has been covering that nation in its politics for us for years, up to and including the war in Ukraine.
0:22.6	I reached Masha in Kiev last week.
0:25.6	Masha, it's good to talk to you.
0:27.6	It's good to talk to you, David.
0:29.6	You've been visiting Kiev for years and years, and now you're there during war time,
0:35.6	and the streets of Kiev are said to be quiet
0:39.0	as opposed to so much of the country in the east and in the south.
0:43.8	What is daily life in Kiev now?
0:47.6	Daily life in Kiev, at first glance, is perfectly normal.
1:01.0	Cafes are open, hipsters are in the streets, it's sunny, it's beautiful, three, four times a day you hear the air right siren, no one pays it in your mind.
1:06.0	You dig a little deeper, it's obviously not all so peaceful and so wonderful. There's small things that you
1:13.9	notice at first, if you pay attention. There are very few kids. The women with children who were
1:20.2	the bulk of the refugees, they haven't returned. You notice, for example, that the lines of the gas stations are pretty long.
1:29.2	The gas is incredibly expensive.
1:32.1	And so that sheds a completely different light on all these young people shuttling around
1:35.3	on electric scooters, which are, you know, bolt is working here.
1:39.0	People are renting scooters, but part of the reason they're renting scooters is because
1:42.8	cabs have come few and far between and private cars are very difficult to use. So it's this resumption of civilian life
1:52.0	that is so much more difficult than life was just three months ago, even if sort of at first
1:59.0	bounce of looks almost exactly the same.
	...

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