Uzhhorod

But she was in her home and, um, they'd gone out just before it got, uh, blow- it got hit by a missile and their actual place got hit by a missile, but then their building got totally demolished by another missile.

And so they have moved r- across to, uh, Uzhhorod Baptist Church, which is the church that we're working with.

Mm.

And they've lived there now for four years.

in very temporary accommodation.

Pretty awful accommodation, but it's all there is.

Um, and they throw their doors open and they feed, um, they provide 600 meals a day and they have people coming in from all over the city of Uzhhorod to get a warm meal.

Their government isn't able to look after them.

In the second year of Russia's full-scale invasion, Nina Kossman traveled across the country alone.

Going by night bus, marshrutka, and overnight train, she journeyed from the quiet western borderlands to frontline cities in the east, from Uzhhorod to Kramatorsk.

Everywhere she went, she listened.

From her conversations, Nina wrote a book that collects the stories of the people she met.

Uh, it's like you travel from U- about nine months.

Thank you.

Uh, you travel from Uzhhorod in, in the, in the far west, um, all the way out to the edges of the battlefield in Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, uh, Kurakhove.

And, and throughout this novel, there's this very present sense of location for each story.

So that's point number one.

Of course, some people, especially those who can and those who have small children, It's not on a massive scale, but there are people who relocate to the Western Ukrainian cities, right? Uzhhorod, Lviv, because this way or the other, the West of Ukraine is relatively safer than the central part and the Eastern Ukraine and the South, of course.

But overall, I think, you know, I don't see even among the people I work and live with and I'm friends with, I don't see any fear.

It's almost...

And I started by asking him about Ukraine's deep strikes on Russian territory and Zelensky's promise to close Russian airspace.

He was born obviously in Uzhhorod, in Zakarpattia.

He's an ethic Hungarian, and he was a businessman for much of his life, by all accounts building up quite a substantial wealth.

And he only actually joined the territorial defense forces, I think, literally weeks before the full-scale invasion.