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Empathy, attention — these are finite resources.
Kim Barker, who covered the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan for The Chicago Tribune and now reports on the war in Ukraine for The New York Times, is well aware of the limits of these resources. Readers can become overwhelmed by a news cycle that seems like an endless list of bombings, drone strikes and casualties.
So when the opportunity to focus on the human lives within a conflict arrives, she jumps on it.
Ms. Barker, who lives in London and spends monthlong rotations reporting in Ukraine, was wrapping up some reporting in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv earlier this month when she got a message from a fellow Times reporter, Maria Varenikova. Ms. Varenikova and The Times’s Kyiv bureau chief, Andrew Kramer, had been trying to get President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to let a reporter join him on a visit to the front line.
“That had not happened,” Ms. Barker said. “That is a huge ask.”
But, with the world’s attention shifting to the war in Iran, he had changed his mind. Ms. Barker was tapped for the assignment — and told she would be leaving the next day.
The trip offered an intimate look at the president and the people around him four years into the war. In a recent interview, Ms. Barker discussed what the experience was like and why it was important to include certain details — like Mr. Zelensky drinking about 10 cups of coffee a day, by an adviser’s count, and sleeping for about five hours each night.
She also said she’s not giving up this beat any time soon. In fact, she’s doubling down: In a few months, she’s moving from London to Kyiv. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke with you for 90 minutes and allowed you and the photographer Brendan Hoffman to travel with him for an entire day. How rare is that kind of access to a world leader?
I’ve never had this much time with a leader. I once interviewed Hamid Karzai, the former president of Afghanistan, and got about 40 minutes with him. Zelensky does not grant time like this, most of the time.
At this moment, I think his team is trying to show him as a human being. I think they’re trying to do what they can to say that this war in Ukraine is still going on. They’re saying: “We need help. We’re willing to do what we can to help our allies in the Middle East, but we still need help.”
This piece feels different from a lot of other war reporting. You chose to write in the first person and to include personal details about Mr. Zelensky. How did you make these choices?
Using the first person, it humanizes us as reporters, too, which is really important right now. This lack of empathy that the world is going through, this idea that we’re all numb to everything that’s happening because it feels like there’s a five-star fire every single day — I think this helps people think about the fact that these reporters are actually there.
Very early on, when we were sitting on a park bench, I told him, “I’m going to try to knock you off your talking points.” Because everybody knows what everybody’s president’s talking points are. This man has given a speech almost every single night since this war started.
But how do you get him to seem like a human being? How do you push somebody to say something that they didn’t anticipate saying? How do you get people to try to put themselves into the shoes of somebody who has been trying to lead this country for four years?
So, how do you do that?
At one point, we’re all having lunch and he’s sitting across from me, and I’m thinking that I would be remiss if I didn’t start making some conversation, so I just asked, “What’s for lunch?” He was telling me about how even professional chefs have joined the military to cook.
He was next to the Ukrainian commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, so I just asked, “How much sleep do you guys get?” And then they started joking around with each other. I’m thinking, Zelensky is a former comedian — he’s got a sense of humor. So I try to lean into that and show somebody’s humanity, and I think humor does that.
When you sat down to write, how did you think about weaving those personal details into the bigger picture?
February was a record month for ballistic missiles coming in. That’s not something everybody knows, right? I try to blend in information like that.
Then, once I was done, I had Brendan read my story. I always ask the photographers I’m working with, “Did I miss anything here?” Brendan’s been covering this since 2014. And Brendan said, “Don’t you want to put the fact that the Patriot interceptors were going off when we got back?” And he was right: When we got back at 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, the Patriot interceptors were going off. It was an important detail to have, and now that’s how we end the story. These stories, they’re teamwork.
You’re planning to move to Ukraine this spring. How do you think living there full time will affect your reporting?
In a way, it makes me that much more excited about this story, because I do find Ukraine really fascinating. When I was covering Afghanistan, I got to the point where I wanted to be there all the time. I wanted to be there and to live the story more. I didn’t expect to feel that way about Ukraine. I thought it would be something I would do for a couple of years — but, here I go, falling in love again.
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