Masha Gessen on the Quiet in Kyiv

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2022

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.1	Masha guess is a staff writer for the New Yorker who was born in Russia and has been covering
0:17.7	that nation and its politics for us for years, up to and including the war in Ukraine.
0:23.1	I reached Masha in key of last week.
0:26.3	Masha it's good to talk to you.
0:28.0	It's good to talk to you, David.
0:29.8	You've been visiting key of for years and years and now you're there during wartime.
0:36.7	The streets of Kiev are said to be quiet as opposed to so much of the country in the east
0:42.7	and in the south.
0:44.0	What is daily life in Kiev now?
0:48.1	Daily life in Kiev from at first glance is perfectly normal.
0:54.8	Pays are open, hipsters are in the streets, it's sunny, it's beautiful.
1:00.7	Three or four times a day you hear, they're right, siren, no one pays at any mind.
1:06.0	You dig a little deeper, it's obviously not all so peaceful and so wonderful.
1:12.7	There's small things that you notice at first.
1:14.9	If you pay attention, there are very few kids.
1:17.9	The women with children who were the bulk of the refugees, they haven't returned.
1:24.3	This is for example, the lines of the gas stations are pretty long.
1:29.2	The gas is incredibly expensive.
1:32.4	That shows a completely different light on all these young people shuddling around on
1:35.7	electric scooters, which are bulldozers working here.
1:39.0	People are renting scooters, but part of the reason they're renting scooters is because
	...

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