‘HA! Yes, am trying not to be annoyed about what goes viral and what doesn’t!” read the Twitter DM from another Scottish journalist, Jen Stout. We were both sitting in bomb shelters in Kyiv on a warm October afternoon in 2022 waiting out another air raid alert after a country-wide wave of Russian attacks that morning.
Russia had been humiliated a couple of days previously by a successful strike on the Kerch Bridge, which illegally links Russia to annexed Crimea, and had responded in its usual delinquent manner by attacking Ukraine’s largest population centre during rush hour, killing several motorists at a busy intersection and badly damaging a children’s playpark.
My editor at the newspaper I was working for in London had checked in to make sure I was OK, and – my Scottishness never far from his thoughts – linked to a tweet from Stout that was doing brisk business.
It was a photo of a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer with the caption: “Digging around in my bag for treats as I wait out the air raid sirens and what should I find but a Tunnocks wafer, squirrelled away on a Loganair flight a month ago. Little bit of Scotland in Kyiv!”
Sitting bored in the metro station I was sheltering in, I had reached out to Stout, suggesting we meet for a beer after the dust and the related rash of deadlines had settled. We did so, and have been friends since.
Stout has done much since then that, in a more just world at least, would warrant viral fame. She is, in reality, not at all focused on social media, though an amusing side note is that the only other post of hers that has done similar “numbers” was one about finding herself in a Kharkiv bomb shelter with a group of Ukrainian soldiers who somehow all knew and were enthusiastically and accurately re-enacting the “eleven” sketch from Burnistoun.
That situation is one of countless eye-opening personal vignettes to be found in Stout’s book, Night Train To Odesa: Covering The Human Cost Of Russia’s War, which came out last month.
In it, she maps out the unique path she took to reporting on the biggest war in Europe since 1945, from hurriedly leaving Russia a few days after the invasion began, to reporting on the flood of refugees at a border crossing in Romania, to reporting from Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and many shattered towns and villages in eastern Ukraine only recently liberated from Russian occupation.
Stout is from Fair Isle, the remote island halfway between Shetland and Orkney, but is currently based in Edinburgh while she promotes her book.
When I talked to her she was in the cafe at the London Review of Books, which gave her a dream-come-true article commission while she was in Romania and which had invited her to sign some copies of the book, which they had “very kindly put in the window!”
Later in the evening there would be a talk at the Ukrainian Cathedral with Channel 4’s international editor Lindsey Hilsum for On Front Line. “The Tunnock’s and Burnistoun stuff going viral doesn’t really make me mad,” she laughs when I bring up our initial contact. “What stuff like that does is find a human connection between people in Scotland and people in Ukraine through these wee funny bits in life.”
Stout certainly hasn’t had to rely on Tunnock’s and Burnistoun to make human connections in Ukraine. Fiercely interested in people and their stories and a warm and engaging conversationalist, she is also fluent in Russian and is “haphazardly” learning Ukrainian.
Her reports for the Sunday Post and various other newspapers, websites and now her book, are full of vivid, emotionally charged encounters with people on the ground that would be hard to gather in their purest form when working with a fixer and/or interpreter. As a freelancer on a tight budget, Stout’s means would not stretch to these in any case.
The book Stout has produced about the first year and a bit of the war is beautifully written and has an ease and authority that suggests it could be her fifth book rather than her first. Surely writing it wasn’t as smooth as it feels? “It did flow very easily,” she tells me. “I just had to immerse myself in all my photos and videos and sound recordings and diaries.” She wrote it in just seven weeks from August to September last year, and is keen to thank Creative Scotland for a grant that enabled her to do so.
“I did get stuck at times,” she says, “especially when I was trying to explain the back story of Ukraine. The country’s full of complex ideas about language and identity and borders, which I wanted to weave into the places I was visiting and the stories I was telling, so it didn’t come across as hectoring”.
She tells me insomnia led to her spending the “grim” first four hours of her birthday reading up on the Nazi occupation of Lviv, which tells you it wasn’t absolutely all plain sailing.
Stout’s journey to this point began with a teenage fascination with the Russian language and a hard-won school trip to St Petersburg. “Russian snared me,” she writes in the book. “I’d say later that I must have spoken it in a past life; I couldn’t find any other way to explain it.”
In St Petersburg, she “decided that I’d come back to this place. I’d sit exams, go to university, become fluent, become a correspondent”.
Financial hurdles and bereavement back home got in the way of properly following this dream, and Stout ended up working for a local newspaper and later as a TV producer, a job “which was driving me slowly and completely insane”.
She never let go of the dream of moving to Russia and becoming a reporter, however, and finally, after a delay for Covid, she found herself accepted to the fully funded, nine-month-long Alfa Fellowship in Moscow, which was open to Brits, Americans and Germans who spoke Russian and were early in their careers in business or journalism.
She arrived in Moscow in November 2021, in time to witness first-hand a crescendo of paranoia and propaganda as the full-scale invasion approached.
On the morning of February 24, 2022, Stout arrived in a beautiful part of Siberia for a four-day trip organised by the fellowship. In the book, she recounts the moment she switched her phone back on after landing: “’They’re bombing us from planes’, a Kharkiv friend had written, and it took me long, stupid seconds to understand the message.”
As the options for getting out of Russia rapidly diminished, word came through on the final day of the Siberia trip that the fellowship was suspended and that the participants would be leaving as soon as possible.
By February 28, Stout was in Istanbul, trying to decide on her next move. The only thing she was certain of was that she wasn’t going home.
She headed for the Romania-Ukraine border to report on the flow of refugees and worked on the logistics of getting into Ukraine to report on
the war. “I didn’t want to rush in, but I had spent a long time in offices in the UK wishing I was out there reporting on what was going on,” she says
“Here I was sitting on the edges of the war, I spoke the language and had lots of friends from previous trips to Ukraine who would help me when I was there, so realistically I was always going to go.”
Odesa, on the night train of the title, was her first port of call, and through 2022 and the first few months of 2023 she ventured further into the country and closer to the war.
She stresses that she completed hostile-environment training back in the UK before going anywhere near the frontlines – in stark contrast to a lot of the more gung-ho pseudo-journalists anyone who has reported from the country in the past two years is likely to have encountered telling tall tales in the bars of Kyiv or Kharkiv.
Along the way she met soldiers, civilians, parents searching for missing loved ones, artists, writers and more, and forges the sort of personal connections with them that can only be the product of caring deeply about people and their stories.
Stout firmly believes being from Shetland (above) has shaped her as a reporter. “You have to be good with people there, you have to not be too judgemental because that doesn’t work in small communities.
“You understand the value of solidarity quite keenly because people work together in crofting. You understand the finding of solace in nature and the importance of dancing and music.
“It might seem strange to people to be talking about singing and dancing in a wartime story but I think it’s absolutely necessary. Singing and dancing is life itself – it’s the whole point of fighting for a decent society, as Ukraine is right now.”
Dancing and music figure repeatedly in the book – perhaps most notably in Lviv when Stout comes upon a group of traditional singers in the street and ends up singing with them for the next several hours.
She also cites an oft-overlooked internationalist and leftist outlook to be found in Shetland as something that has served her well in travelling and communing with people from vastly different cultures.
“Plus I can drive almost any vehicle on any terrain,” she laughs. “Which came in handy driving to the Donbas in a Mitsubishi Colt.”
Night Train To Odesa takes us up to spring 2023, just before the start of Ukraine’s much-vaunted counter-offensive to retake territory from Russia in the east. The counter-offensive fizzled, providing a handy stick to beat Ukraine with for the West’s more cynical commentators and politicians.
“Ukraine was expected to do an incredible counter-offensive with their hands tied behind their backs, and when they didn’t manage it, everyone used it as an excuse to say, ‘oh maybe we should stop supporting them’,” Stout says with palpable anger.
“I think it was one of the most morally revolting things I’ve ever seen.”
Stout avoids making predictions about how the rest of the war will pan out, though her unhesitating use of the phrase “when Ukraine wins” tells you what she believes the endgame will be.
After a spring and summer of promoting her book, she intends to get back in the saddle and return to Ukraine in the autumn to witness what anyone on the right side of history hopes will be a turning of the tide after a year of worrying setbacks, as the country has waited for new weapons and support from the West.
That much-needed assistance is slowly starting to arrive now after the US House of Representatives finally passed a new $61bn military aid package in April, and Ukraine has been able to stabilise the situation near Kharkiv in the past weeks after receiving limited permission to use Western weapons against targets inside Russia.
A new sense of hope is starting to flower after a grim winter and early spring, though the looming possibility of a second Trump presidency, which looks more like a probability after Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance on Thursday, will temper any unduly rampant optimism.
As for Russia – the country whose language fascinated Stout as a teenager, leading her to all of this – she sees no hope at all of it being fit for re-entry into the community of civilised nations any time soon.
“One day in some form,” she sighs. “Defeat can be good for countries in the long run, but I look at Russian society and the darkness, the victimhood, the twisted lies and the revisionism are so total and so all-encompassing.
“I had no illusions left about the place when I went there just before the war. Like everyone else apart from Western intelligence I didn’t think they’d go through with a full-scale invasion.
“But that wasn’t because I thought they were nice, it was because I thought they weren’t completely stupid.”
Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War by Jen Stout is out now published by Polygon. Talk dates and tickets are available at www.jenstout.net
