It was a war plan no one even tried to keep secret.
In July, when I visited Ukrainian troops near the southern front lines, outside the bomb-blasted city of Mykolaiv, soldiers told me how eager they were to start a long-rumored counteroffensive. Their goal was to retake the strategic Black Sea port of Kherson, which would block Moscow's plan to annex the entire south, including the embattled port of Odesa. It would also pave the way to eventually retaking nearby Crimea.
That campaign has begun, slowly. But the hype the Ukrainian military gave it was a ruse.
The southern push concealed the army's true objective: a lightning counteroffensive over the weekend in the northeast that sent Russian troops fleeing back to their own country. Those forces had been depleted when their commanders sent crack units south to defend Kherson. They got conned.
The Ukrainian blitz broke the dangerous stalemate that still existed when I visited in July, and threatened to drag on for months or years. It marked a new phase of the war, in which Ukraine has gone on the offensive, and is retaking Russian-occupied territory.
It also produced the greatest Ukrainian military victory since the Russians were driven out of the capital, Kyiv, in March — giving the whole population a desperately needed morale boost.
The war is far from over. Russia still occupies roughly one fifth of Ukrainian territory. As I witnessed firsthand, Vladimir Putin's forces commit outrageous war crimes daily, bombing civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, markets, and housing, along with water and power systems.
Yet the Ukrainian military proved this weekend that it has the skills and professionalism to defeat Putin's flailing army, if the West will give it the critical weapons systems it needs, in sufficient numbers, to defeat the Russians.
On my July trip to Ukraine, I witnessed the courage of individual soldiers and civilians that helps explain how Ukrainians have been able to withstand the Russian onslaught and are now reshaping this conflict — with the real potential to win.
Molotov cocktails and camouflage nets
There is no easy way to get to Ukraine in wartime.
The airports are all closed, and all international and domestic transport is by road or train. So when I set out for Kyiv from Krakow, Poland, I first traveled three hours by car to the train station at the small Polish border town of Przemysl, where tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees had poured in at the beginning of the war.
Now the flow moves both ways, with hundreds of Ukrainians boarding the overnight train from Przemysl to Kyiv each day. (For some reason — with a few horrible exceptions — the Russians have chosen not to bomb the rail infrastructure that crisscrosses Ukraine, and the trains are crowded.)
Passengers waited outside on the train platform in the freezing cold — the lobby was overflowing — for an 11 p.m. departure that was delayed by four hours. The snaking queue included parents who had been visiting daughters and grandchildren who had fled the fighting. (Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 have been banned from leaving the country.)
The line also included refugees returning to Ukraine for medical treatment, Ukrainian students at Polish universities who were headed home to visit, and lonely female refugees bringing their kids home despite the danger.
I had long conversations at 2 a.m. with Ukrainians who didn't know how to plan their lives beyond the next few weeks, since no one knows when the war will end.
Then we filed onto the train for the 15-hour journey to Kyiv, sitting up the whole way because there was no sleeping car. Passengers bring their own food and pay the car attendant the equivalent of 3 cents for a cup of tea.
Returning to Kyiv was disorienting. I had visited the city in February and left just before the Russian invasion, which targeted the capital in an attempt to kill or capture its leaders and install a pro-Russian puppet government.
Back then I was trying to gauge the readiness of Ukrainians for war.
This time, I came to measure the steadfastness and morale of soldiers, citizens, and cities battered by Russian rockets and missiles in a deliberate effort to break the will of the population and the troops.
Never, in four decades of writing on conflicts, have I covered a war where a nuclear-armed superpower attacked a smaller neighbor with the goal of destroying and annexing that country — using deliberate massacres of civilians and threats of nuclear war, as tactics.
I returned to Kyiv to try to gauge how long Ukraine could hold out before the West recognized it could not afford to let Ukraine lose — or let Vladimir Putin win.
When I finally reached Kyiv, the center of the city appeared little different, except for "hedgehog" antitank barricades and sandbags at some key intersections, and a display of captured Russian tanks in front of St. Michael's Golden-Domed Cathedral.
But the people had changed. The unthinkable had happened.
None of the many locals I had met in February had believed Putin would launch an attack on their city.
None had imagined they would spend months in shelters, often deep in the lowest levels of the subway system, as the Russians battered parts of the city with missiles and rockets, until the Ukrainian military forced them to retreat.
One of my Kyiv translators on my February trip had slept for two months in a subway bomb shelter along with her mother, before the Russians were pushed back from the outskirts of Kyiv. Another Kyiv helper left for her in-law's village house where she and other volunteers worked making Molotov cocktails and camouflage nets for the army.
Some of my acquaintances volunteered for the army (one from Odesa had been killed) or were doing civilian volunteer work rebuilding houses and schools in destroyed suburbs and villages around Bucha and Borodyanka.
My new Kyiv assistant, Alex Babenko, whom I found and interviewed on a Telegram channel for fixers, translators, and photographers, was a recent university graduate who had returned again and again to the contested Donbas region with foreign journalists.
He was determined to expose the suffering of Ukrainians who were trapped there. (I decided, however, to visit the northern and southern fronts, which were heating up, as the fight for the Donbas settled into a stalemate).
Alex hustled to find me body armor, which was being loaned out by a local office of the international humanitarian group, Reporters Without Borders. The lightweight ceramic plates available now are a far cry from the heavy steel plated vests I wore in Iraq and Afghanistan when I covered wars in those countries.
The Inquirer provided me with a top-notch helmet — an item in shorter supply in Kyiv. That equipment was unnecessary for our work in Kyiv, but it was essential for reporting from the front lines.
The citizens of Kyiv were learning to live with constant anxiety about the future. At an appointment with Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova, air raid sirens suddenly went off. She calmly and quickly escorted me down several flights of stairs to a basement shelter.
It turned out Russian cruise missiles were sailing over Kyiv on their way south toward the contested region of Zaporizhzhia, where Russia's military has seized control of a Ukrainian nuclear reactor. All the while, Dzhaparova never stopped deploring the plight of her fellow ethnic Crimean Tatars, who are being severely repressed under the Russian occupation of Crimea.
But I particularly recall now what Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told me in a spartan conference room at the Defense Ministry. At the time, Ukraine was just taking delivery of a few long-range, multiple rocket systems known as HIMARS. The HIMARS "have let us ruin the enemy warehouses, arms depots and headquarters command sites," Reznikov said. "It is really starting to change the situation on the front lines."
But, he added, "But we need [adequate] numbers, not slow and in small pieces."
HIMARS have made the difference in the new counteroffensive, but many more are needed for Ukraine to win.
I traveled through Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where the Russians infamously left the bodies of murdered civilians lying on the roads as they retreated four months ago.
The bodies were gone, and the town looked almost normal, though empty. Yet a couple of miles away, in the town of Hostomel, where the Russians tried — and failed — to seize the military airport, the devastation was more evident.
War-weary suburbanites were busy trying to repair shattered homes and the battered factories and businesses where they used to work. Most of those were closed. A destroyed Ukrainian tank sat in one factory worker's backyard.
I drove to the ravaged town of Borodyanka with Kseniia Kalmus, the owner of a flower shop in Kyiv, who had organized a network of 70 volunteers, mostly from Kyiv and many of them professionals, who were working to help residents of nearby villages repair the roofs of traditional Ukrainian wooden homes.
They were also helping area schools fix structural damage in time for kids to start school in the fall. Some of their funds come from Ukraine TrustChain, a U.S. charity formed by two Ukrainian Americans, one of them from Philadelphia.
Despite the surface calm, residents of Kyiv and its environs live with the lingering fear that Russia might try again to take the city — if Russian forces are not pushed back from the territory they already occupy in Ukraine.
Fate
I soon went south by train to the port city of Odesa, which Russian warships in the Black Sea were blockading, preventing Ukraine's grain exports from reaching the world. A U.N.-brokered deal, under which Russia would permit limited grain exports, was about to be announced. But every elected official, entrepreneur, and farmer I spoke with believed Moscow would twist the deal to further squeeze Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia is still blocking all other major Ukrainian ports.
The war had frightened off the European tourists on whom Odesa's economy depends, and many of the city's streets, shops, and famous restaurants were nearly empty.
I stayed at the once glamorous, now down-at-the-heels Mozart Hotel, across from the city's famed Odesa Opera House, where the only other guests appeared to be a contingent from the United Nations Children's Fund. The town is now a haven for thousands of refugees from frontline cities who are living in school buildings and vacant apartments.
Nevertheless, the spirit of this vibrant, multicultural city had not been vanquished. On a Friday night, I attended the Odesa Opera Theater production of a new ballet titled Doli (the Ukrainian word for "fate") that grappled with the contemporary tragedy of the war through dance and pantomime. It included a brilliantly staged, Orwellian scene of attempted Soviet-style brainwashing of Ukrainian citizens in occupied territory, by forcing them to watch Russian television night and day.
The theater was about a third full, including some families with children. An announcement at the beginning of the show instructed the audience to proceed to the shelter in case of shelling, informing them that if the shelling lasted less than one hour the show would go on.
On Saturday night, at a more cheery event in Odesa's central City Garden — which is about four times the size of Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square and lined with walkways and flower beds — families with kids and baby carriages strolled as they slurped ice cream cones. Two buskers — who played a harmonica and a trumpet — were belting out klezmer-style music to the applause of locals and refugees, while two older — and slightly drunk — gentlemen tried to perform a traditional folk dance in time with the music.
'200'
My first trip to Mykolaiv, a badly battered city two hours by road from Odesa, and close to the front lines, took an unexpected turn.
I was scheduled to visit the front. But early that day, a few hours before I arrived, a Russian missile hit a military barracks in the city, killing around 40 people, some of them from the same unit as my military escorts. My frontline tour was postponed, and I wound up visiting the Mykolaiv morgue instead.
Ambulances marked with the number "200" — a military term for corpses derived from the weight of a typical soldier at 200 kilograms — were still arriving. A refrigerated truck was parked nearby with its back door open. It was filled with about 20 corpses, most in body bags, but one half-clothed man lay near the opening, looking as if he were sleeping, his head wound only partly visible. As I stared at the body, it looked so alive I kept expecting it to move.
Igor Gritsenko, a doctor at the morgue's forensic institute, told me that in the 4 1/2 months since the war had started there were "only 21 days without missile hits. We observe deaths we never saw before, from shrapnel to people crushed under buildings." The only thing that kept him from sinking into a deep depression, he said, was "the need to get up, get dressed, and go to work."
At the Pizza Grill Pub, one of the few restaurants open in Mykolaiv, I met with Alex and Volodymyr, two junior Ukrainian officers on their day off, who had known many of those killed by the missile, and were flipping through cell phone photos of their fellow soldiers, who were now among the fallen. "After the Russians have launched thousands of missiles above Ukraine, almost all people have lost relatives or friends," Volodymyr told me. "And they all have a desire for revenge." Alex added, "We need victory so that ordinary people don't die." Both said they would fight until the end.
On the drive back to Odesa, in an effort to recoup from the grimness of our visit, my Odesa fixer, Alla Dardur, and I stopped to wander through one of the huge sunflower fields that line the road — and fueled Ukraine's major export of sunflower oil before the Russia blockade. I had never seen a sunflower field before and realized why Ukraine chose it as its national flower. The blaze of thousands of bright yellow flowers is so glorious that it could lift anyone's spirits — even ours, on this dreadful day.
'They dream of war'
On to Kharkiv, 15 hours by train from Odesa, and only around 20 miles from the Russian border. I was met at the train station by my Kyiv translator Alex Babenko, who is a native of Kharkiv, and by Igor Balaka, a prominent real estate agent and journalist, who is a childhood friend of a Ukrainian American professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. Contacts from local Ukrainian Americans have been invaluable every time I have gone to Ukraine.
Balaka brought me to a Rotary Club meeting where members were packaging donated food and clothing for Kharkiv-area citizens whose homes have been destroyed, and also introduced me to restaurateur Oleksiy Lomskiy, who is providing thousands of meals to residents of the grey zone. That is the area that Ukrainian soldiers have taken back from the Russians, but which is still under the constant threat of missiles.
Ukrainian military officers drove me in an armored van to their positions near the front lines. They escorted me on dirt paths through flat wheat fields where army jackets, empty food tins, and other debris of a decimated Russian special forces unit lay scattered on the muddy ground, half covered by long grasses.
I walked through the devastated high-rise apartment complexes of Kharkiv's North Saltivka district, which are still being shelled by the Russians, until the sound of outgoing Ukrainian fire compelled us to leave hurriedly before the incoming Russian response.
What struck me most forcefully was the frustration I heard from Ukrainian soldiers and officers in the trenches and behind the barricades.
That's because the Biden administration along with most of its Western allies have denied them the long-range weapons and air defenses they need to stop Russian missiles, for fear of "expanding the war" with Russia. For the same reason, the U.S. has made Ukraine promise that its military won't fire across the Russian border, even if Russian missile launchers are based there.
But many of my most memorable moments in Kharkiv also had to do with art: the puckish, endlessly fascinating black-and-white drawings of the street art star Gamlet Zinkivsky, which pop up all over the city. I watched him paint one, and visited a haunting exhibition of children's paintings deep in the subway, where many Kharkiv families with kids had lived for weeks at the beginning of the war.
At the studio of artist Mykola Kolomiets, who is still helping some of those children cope with their trauma, I saw astonishing art works, including one by a 10-year-old girl named Kristina who refused to leave the subway for weeks — even after the heaviest shelling ended. Her self-portrait depicts a terrified child with four eyes in the midst of flames. "Many children who spent months in the shelter are stronger than adults," Kolomiets told me. But "they dream of war."
Hard lessons on the road home
Before I left Ukraine, I made another train trip from Kyiv to Odesa and to Mykolaiv, where preparations for a counteroffensive to retake the strategically key city of Kherson were underway. This is the biggest city occupied by the Russians and the most vulnerable to a Ukrainian counterattack.
The mood had changed sharply from my previous visit, two weeks before, because Ukrainian forces on the southern front lines had just received some HIMARS systems that enabled them to cut off Russian supply lines. But the Russians were still hitting Mykolaiv mercilessly with missiles and cluster munitions.
Officers I spoke with were eager to begin the move on Kherson. But the military was still lacking sufficient HIMARS, artillery, and air defenses — and many basic supplies. Friends and relatives of forces based in Mykolaiv were continually trying to raise private money for diesel oil, tires, spare parts, and used civilian cars (there is a great shortage of armored vehicles), and even for large flags to wrap the coffins of the dead.
In Odesa, although the U.N-sponsored grain deal had been signed, the prevailing attitude was still skeptical about how long and how well the Russians would honor their pledges, especially since they bombed the port at Odesa the day the deal was finalized. As I was having breakfast outdoors with Oleksandr Goncharenko, a member of parliament from Odesa, a message came over his phone that made him blanch. The Russians had directed a missile directly into the bedroom of Ukraine's largest grain dealer and agricultural entrepreneur in Mykolaiv, assassinating him and his wife. The message was clear: Moscow still controls your grain.
Before leaving Odesa, I visited the chief rabbi of Odesa and southern Ukraine, Avraham Wolff, at the Beit Chabad Synagogue. Back in 2014, shortly after Russia's first invasion of Ukraine, Rabbi Wolff had told me what had happened to the extended family of my maternal grandparents: The 3,100 Jews from their town of Mezhirich were marched into the forest by the Nazis in August 1942 and shot.
So the rabbi was furious that, despite Ukraine's Jewish president and prime minister, Putin was promoting the blatant lie that Ukraine was led by neo-Nazis. "This talk about Nazism here is cheap propaganda," he told me. "The best time for Jewish life in the last hundred years [in Ukraine] was before this war. Local governments, the national government, did everything to help. Kindergartens, schools, anything we needed."
Only 15,000 of Odesa's preinvasion Jewish population of 40,000 remain in the city, the rabbi told me, with most of them now refugees in Europe. But Rabbi Wolff's congregation was still busy distributing aid to refugees, including Jews who had fled from Kherson.
"Putin is committing crimes against 40 million people," he said. "All of them have lost something, lives, homes, something." The rabbi, however, will not leave.
As I left Odesa by train to the Polish border, I carried with me an overwhelming respect for the valor of Ukrainian civilians, and the daring of its army. Even though many people are fearful about the future, they block out those long-term concerns and focus on the near.
And those in safer parts of the country try to help those displaced from hot zones.
They recognize this is an existential battle they can't afford to lose, against an enemy that wants to destroy them.
Yet, as I saw and heard, this enemy can be pushed back only if the United States and Europe hold firm and send Ukraine critical weapons that the West is still withholding — from a misplaced fear of provoking Putin further. Such timidity only feeds Putin's aggression. Ukrainians still fear Western leaders will give them only enough for a stalemate, which will leave them with a physically destroyed and economically unviable country, in which Russia controls their sea coast and a huge swathe of their territory.
As they told me over and over, there is only one way to stop Putin's aggression: disabuse him of his belief that a weak West will let him expand the Russian empire by force, and compel him to find excuses for a pullback. It was very painful to leave Ukraine and its courageous people, and wonder when, or if, Western leaders would give them the weapons to win.
