CNN’s Matthew Chance (left) interviewing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky
(Picture: CNN)It is often said that journalism is watching history unfold. I’ve never felt that so acutely as that night, six months ago, standing on a hotel balcony in the centre of Kyiv reporting live on a bellicose speech from Vladimir Putin.
I listened to Russia’s president warning of ‘the eastern expansion of NATO’, and an ‘empire of lies’ created by the United States. There was ‘a genocide’, he claimed, in eastern Ukraine, where people had asked Russia for help. Invoking the Nazis and the Second World War, Putin insisted that Russia would need to be defended against those who had ‘taken Ukraine hostage’ and were ‘trying to use it against our country and our people’.
