Until a couple of years ago Peter Ruzavin was a wunderkind of Russian opposition journalism. Starting at age 18, he worked as a reporter and then a host at TV Rain, the country’s leading independent channel. Then, as a podcaster, he covered Russian prisons and the war in Ukraine. Now, at 34, he is a corporal in uniform — a Ukrainian uniform. He serves with a drone unit in Kharkiv. “I feel lucky,” he told me when I visited him there recently.
It’s a fair assumption that most people living in Kharkiv these days don’t feel that way. Ukraine’s second-largest city is just 20 miles from the front line. In the center of town, one cannot walk a block without seeing boarded-up windows where glass was blown out by bomb blasts. In the bedroom suburbs to the east, entire blocks of Soviet-era high-rise apartment buildings lie in ruins. To Ruzavin, the city’s exposed struggle is a relief compared with the eerie near-normality of Kyiv, where he lived for several years, or the gentility of the Western capitals where many of his former colleagues ended up — not to mention the mind-scrambling opulence of Moscow, where he grew up and became a journalist.
Ruzavin and I have many mutual acquaintances from the Moscow media world. Most of them fled Russia. Some continue to work as journalists for Russian media in exile. Others try to find ways to push against Putin’s war by supporting political prisoners at home, helping Russians evade military service or making donations to the Ukrainian armed forces. Ruzavin, on the other hand, gets to be a part of the Ukrainian war effort. “It’s an honor, really.”
For a long time, longer than anyone could have predicted, the Russian invasion of Ukraine felt like an incomprehensible aberration, a bizarre interruption of life. It would end, and Kharkiv would once again be full of international students, Odesa’s beaches would be crowded with tourists and the millions of people who fled to Western Europe — most of them women and children — would come home. None of this seems likely anymore. Along the 750-mile front line, a trench war keeps grinding on. Most nights, Ukrainian cities and towns come under Russian bombardment. Last year Kharkiv opened its first underground school; rather than a building with a bomb shelter, this one is all bomb shelter. Western media is filled with reports on negotiations about ending the war, but on the ground in Ukraine these look like what they are: an empty spectacle.
“I’ve accepted internally that Putin will be around for another 15 years,” Ruzavin said. “As long as Putin is around, the war” — or the threat of war, anyway — “continues.” War is life now, and for the foreseeable future. And Ruzavin is living this life in a way that’s rare even in the best of times: with a daily sense that he is exactly where he should be, doing exactly what he should be doing. No wonder he calls himself lucky.
The post He Was a Star in
Russia’s Media World.
Now He’s a Corporal
in Ukraine’s Army. appeared first on New York Times.
