What was it like? Is the question I am often asked when I return from working in Ukraine, where I have been travelling regularly since 2022. There’s an understanding implicit in the question that the answer will not – not quite – lie in the accumulation of reporting. For good reasons the reporter keeps her eyes steady and focused outward, collecting the essential information, conveying it as clearly and smoothly as possible. The reporter reins in and disciplines her subjectivity, while, ideally, recognising its existence and understanding its contours. The reporter knows that the facts of the matter are the thing.

At the same time, feelings and impressions cannot wholly be untangled from the facts. Feelings are inevitable, if you are functioning as a human in any sense at all. They are the tentacles of empathy that reach out in an attempt to understand people and situations. Feelings have an epistemic role – a part to play in acquiring knowledge. Nevertheless, they must be tidied into the background. Respect for your readers and your subjects demands it; the rituals and rules of journalism demand it.

I have recently come back from a month in Ukraine. I write about the war through the lens of culture – considering how artists are shaping the future memory of the war in their work; how language and history and identity are implicated in it. I was behind the lines, in the cities of Kyiv and Lviv as well as Odesa and the Mykolaiv region. Broadly safe places, I suppose, though everything is relative. While I was in Ukraine, a woman sunbathing by the sea in Odesa was killed by a piece of shrapnel from a drone. One of the holiest places in eastern Europe, the Pechersk Lavra in Kyiv, was on fire after a drone hit it. Every morning, the civilian death toll crept up and people dealt with the loss of loved ones, or their homes, or their livelihoods; or they tackled smaller problems: windows and doors blown out, cars smashed up by debris falling from the sky. Ukrainians also laughed at memes of exploding oil refineries in Moscow, and........

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