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This is Fresh Air, I am Terry Gross.

On his reporting trip to Ukraine and the polar side of the border, my guest Simon Schuster

visited the air base in Poland, where the US is bringing a constant supply of weapons.

It made him think that the US and its allies are already fighting this war.

In eastern Poland, he met with the US officials who were coordinating the military and diplomatic support for Ukraine.

In order to understand the flow of humanitarian aid, Schuster drove an old Belgian ambulance,

filled with supplies, and an aid convoy that traveled from eastern Poland into Ukraine.

He's been writing about some of the key figures on the Ukrainian and Russian sides of this war.

Schuster is a national correspondent for Time Magazine. From 2013 to 2020, he was Times Berlin Bureau Chief,

where he was responsible for the coverage of the EU and the former USSR.

He reported extensively from Moscow and Ukraine.

He interviewed Volodymyr Zelensky backstage at the variety show he starred in just before he was elected president.

Schuster interviewed Zelensky again after he was elected and went with him to the front of the fighting in eastern Ukraine.

And spoke with him about the infamous phone call in which Trump said, but first do us a favor.

Schuster was born in Moscow, and in 1989 emigrated with his family to the US, where they settled in San Francisco.

He returned to Moscow in 2006 to work as a journalist and joined Time seven years later.

We recorded our interview yesterday morning.

Simon Schuster, welcome back to Fresh Air.

You reported on the airbase on the polar side of the Ukrainian border.

And you said it's hard to imagine how much hardware we're talking about here.

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