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Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr.

Chris (00:00:37):
On today’s podcast, I’m joined by author and journalist Tom Mutch, and we discuss his book, THE DOGS OF MARIUPOL. We also discuss the realities of reporting on the front line in the war in Ukraine. This episode was recorded prior to the latest peace talks, so we won’t be discussing that in this episode.

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Chris (00:01:51):
Thomas, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

Tom (00:01:54):
I’m doing well, thank you.

Chris (00:01:55):
Excellent. Well, for the uninitiated, please could you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Tom (00:01:59):
So I am a journalist from New Zealand, which is where I was born and raised. But I moved to the UK for university when I was about 19, spent maybe about seven or eight years living there overall, and I was also a parliamentary researcher in the British Parliament for a while, where I focused on defense and security policy. And from about 2020 onwards, I’ve been a freelance conflict and crisis reporter. I’ve reported from a number of places: Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan. But the place I know well, the place I’ve made my home, and the place that I’ve written a book about is Ukraine.

Chris (00:02:50):
Yeah. Before we get into your book, actually, I’ve always been fascinated by war journalism. Can you talk to us a little bit about the logistics of going to a war zone and operating in one as a journalist?

Tom (00:03:02):
Well, it varies incredibly from place to place. That’s the thing, right? It’s very, very hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer. To help contextualize it a little bit, so often I’m asked as a journalist, why are you in Ukraine and why are you not in Yemen? Why are you not in Sudan? I can’t tell you how many people yelled at me saying, why are you not in Gaza? And the answer was because we can’t go there. Well, they have changed some rules now, and you can go to Sudan, but you still can’t go to Gaza and you never could for the entirety of the two-year Israeli onslaught there. So Ukraine, in a way, it’s by far the easiest major conflict zone to operate in, whether it’s operating with the military, whether it’s operating independently — there are so many advantages there.

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So with Ukraine, for instance, most countries at war, you need a ton of different permissions from the government. You are very, very tightly controlled — where you can go and where you can report from. But in Ukraine, you can literally just turn up at the border, cross the border. Accreditation is very easy to get, and you can basically drive around the entire country and no one will stop you until you get five kilometers from the front line. And even then, you can probably blag your way through. Well, maybe not now, because even five kilometers from the front is very, very dangerous with all the drones. But Ukraine is a bit of an exception. It’s not like most war zones to operate in.

Chris (00:04:42):
Yeah, yeah. Got you. Well, thank you for that. So you were actually in Ukraine before the invasion started, so what was your decision to sort of stay once the invasion kicked off?

Tom (00:04:52):
So I was there. I had been to Ukraine a few times before, and I arrived about January 2022, so about a month before the full-scale invasion began. And I remember it very, very clearly in Kyiv. In the first couple of days, everybody I know who was there, their editors were all calling them being like, get the hell out of Dodge. You need to leave. It’s going to be overrun. They could shoot you, whatever. We don’t know that it would have happened. That’s the whole point: no one knew. But everyone assumed that what US intelligence was saying — Kyiv, in three days or whatever — would fall to the Russians. And I ended up leaving Kyiv on about day four, if I remember rightly. And we got to Lviv in the west and we were planning to, me and my team, we were planning to leave Ukraine basically the next day, but we ended up staying the first day just to catch a breather.

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Then realizing there were a lot of stories with refugees coming through, and after we’d been there a couple of days realized actually it doesn’t look like Ukraine is going to fall after all. Two other factors behind my decision: one, I had a Ukrainian girlfriend at the time who was in Kyiv, and when I arrived in Lviv, I called her up and I said, oh, hey, did you manage to get out of Kyiv? Are you all right? And she’s like, no, I’m not leaving. I’m staying. This is my home and they’re not going to make me leave it. And I remember feeling very, to be honest, kind of cowardly that here I am on the front page of my newspaper back in New Zealand with a flak jacket being like, oh, corresponding in Kyiv and stuff, when I’m the one leaving on a train to go to the west and she’s staying put. And then also we kind of realized I was getting called by local TV channels and newspapers and various publications being like, we need someone in Ukraine. And so on a sort of practical sense and a moral sense, and just a sense that it’s like, if you were a journalist, this was probably the biggest thing that had happened in the 21st century, at least in terms of international politics or geopolitics or whatever. It’s like the choice to stay once we knew that Kyiv wasn’t just going to collapse was pretty easy to make.

Chris (00:07:10):
Yeah. And was there a moment where you realized that Ukraine and even maybe your life had changed forever in that time?

Tom (00:07:17):
I remember, for instance, being there that first night or second night when we were down in the subways — and these are like 70 meters underground — and they have these enormous fixed steel doors that they kind of slammed shut. And we were really, really genuinely — it was probably the scariest night of my life because we were genuinely worried that we would go upstairs the next day and there’d be just Russian tanks or soldiers in the street.

Chris (00:07:44):
Yeah, sounds terrifying.

Tom (00:07:46):
Returning to Kyiv I think was a pretty big moment. That was about day nine or 10 if I recall. And I just remember kind of being there. And Kyiv is a huge city. I think when it was in the Soviet Union, it was the third biggest city in the Soviet Union. It’s like their population between about three or 4 million. And it was just completely empty. The streets were just totally deserted, absolutely no one there. It looked like it was post-apocalypse or something like that.

Chris (00:08:19):
And obviously that invasion was, according to Vladimir Putin, it was going to take three days to topple the government of Ukraine. So was there a moment when obviously those three days had passed where people realized maybe this conflict could be won?

Tom (00:08:34):
I think that was pretty early on. I think it was after about four or five days when the Russian army was kind of stuck in the mud all around Kyiv, right? Because it hadn’t just been stopped in Kyiv. It had been stopped in Kharkiv, it had been stopped going towards Odessa. The only place that had really succeeded was the southeast, where they’d managed to get to Mariupol and encircle it. But yeah, especially as the Russians had been so awfully overconfident, the fact that they weren’t really able to get to Kyiv. So it’s probably worth going back to say that in about the first three days, there was a small but very, very important battle that happened. It’s called Hostomel, which is actually a small town that has a military airport kind of just a little bit northwest of Kyiv.

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And the Russians had planned to capture that in the first day and basically land all their forces there and send them all into the center of the city. And the Ukrainians managed to stop them, and they managed to basically blow up the airport, blow up the runway and make it unusable. And so the Russians couldn’t land any of their troops there. Those that did land ended up getting mostly destroyed. And then, you might remember there was that huge big snake of a convoy from the Belarusian border down towards Kyiv. Well, that was actually getting totally picked apart and destroyed by Ukrainian artillery, by Bayraktar drones, the little Javelins and NLAWs that everyone had. And I think it was not only that definitely punctured the air of inevitability that the Russians were going to just win, because it was like, well, obviously they’re nowhere near their targets for the first week. They have clearly massively screwed up their plans and they are not this kind of great unstoppable behemoth anymore.

Chris (00:10:35):
Now in your book THE DOGS OF MARIUPOL, which is really great, by the way, you describe Ukraine’s Iron Generation — young people who swapped ordinary lives for combat. What struck you most about this transformation?

Tom (00:10:50):
What struck me most: a couple of points. One is what struck me most about the people involved is that so many of the people that had signed up were genuinely really, really brilliant. And this is one of the saddest things about the war in Ukraine is a lot of the people who have been killed are Ukraine’s best and brightest. And I remember there’s a scene in the third chapter where I’m in a trench in a village near Izium. This is, it’s in the Donbas region. This particular place that I was, even though Izium is technically in Kharkiv — that’s probably too much geography that your listeners don’t care about. And we were with a bunch of soldiers and two of them were a married couple — lawyers that had been doing their law PhDs. There was another guy there who had been the president of one of the universities in Ukraine.

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He now was actually Ukraine’s education minister. Another guy had been part of President Zelenskyy’s personal protection squad. And here they were kind of living in a trench under Russian shell fire basically day by day by day. So one of the things that struck me is the obvious: just how kind of brave these people were and kind of willing to sacrifice everything for their country. Another thing that’s actually very, very interesting is that you see that there are definitely some people who sort of take to war and they take to it quite well, as in they seem to function, perform, feel more comfortable and more at home. And so chapter six, I talk about this one young woman who I met because I’d met her in a cafe actually about a month, maybe three weeks before the start of the full-scale invasion or something.

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And I just remembered, to be honest, she looked a bit depressed and I ended up meeting her — she joined the army — and I ended up meeting her about a year and a half later in Bakhmut, where she was sort of a press liaison officer taking journalists around artillery positions. And she was so fired up with that kind of air, so much energy in her eyes. And she had this really — she’s five-foot-one — but she had this real aura, real commanding presence that made men twice her size take note and take her very seriously. And she’s got quite a fascinating, ultimately quite sad story. She met her fiancé there and he was one of the first drone pilots in the Ukrainian army, one of the guys who kind of helped popularize it. And he got killed in Kursk, the Ukrainian incursion there, and she ended up taking his place and she’s now fighting on the front lines again herself.

Chris (00:13:44):
Wow. Yeah. Yeah, that’s quite a story, that one. Now from the Battle of Kyiv to Mariupol, you’ve witnessed some of the war’s fiercest fighting. So are there any particular moments that stay with you the most and why do they stay with you?

Tom (00:13:58):
One of the moments that we — just talking about pure combat experiences — is that I want, just to be clear, I wasn’t in Mariupol when the siege was going on. I took a lot of accounts from there, but I had left. There were very few journalists who were there at the time, and the ones that were there were either killed or they made an Oscar-winning film out of. It was a pretty binary choice. Yes, I remember when I was in Kherson — for those who are not aware, it’s a city at the very, very south on the sort of mouth of the Dnipro River — and it was the only provincial capital that the Russians ever captured. And the Ukrainians basically managed to capture it back about seven, eight months later. And this was about six months on after the city had been liberated. And it was in a pretty poor state because the Dnipro is not very wide.

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It’s a big river, but big rivers are very easy to shoot over them. And so the Russians had artillery parked on the other side, and the Nova Kakhovka Dam was blown up and the city had just flooded completely. You had water going up four stories. It was insane. It looked like Venice’s evil twin is sort of how I try and describe it. And I remember we were on the Ukrainians — they were basically sending Special Boat Service guys over to the other side of the river to pick up the Ukrainian civilians who were in Russian-held territory and picking them up and bringing them back. And I remember we were on one of those boats and we were kind of following them and filming them, and the Russians basically saw this, can’t recall it, a flotilla of about three boats, and they just start shelling all around us. I can remember seeing one shell just come straight down, it smashed into the water.

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I don’t know, maybe 40, 50 meters in front of me. Now, weirdly enough, we were very lucky because we were on the water. And so the shells just kind of go through and they go straight to the bottom, and the water resistance is going to mean that unless they get a direct hit — which is pretty unlikely — it’s not going to hurt you. Most people don’t die from being hit directly. They die from the shrapnel or the shockwave, but it was absolutely terrifying. And I remember that one of the things that I often say is when I’m talking about describing war is that people are like, oh, it must be so — there’s things you’ve seen must be so crazy. And it’s like, well, yes, but you’re kind of focusing on the wrong sense because I can show you what I see very easily.

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I can video it or I can take a photo of it and it doesn’t look any different on a photograph or a video. What I can’t convey to you are the other senses. I can’t convey the sound. Sound of artillery is just so much bloody louder than you would expect. There’s no way that any film or recording or whatever can convey just how overwhelming it is. And in some places, the smell — the smell of a grave. I remember when I was in Izium, which is in the Kharkiv region, that just got liberated mid, late 2022, a Ukrainian counteroffensive. And there’d been a grave of about 500 people. Some had been murdered, executed, some had died of natural causes, some it was undetermined, and the bodies had kind of been decomposing for months and they were just digging them up. And I remember that the smell, just the kind of rotting remains just absolutely clobbers you — the worst thing I’d ever smelled in my life. I still remember it now. And so that’s what I can convey one side to you. I can convey what I’d see through writing and visual media. I can’t convey the other senses.

Chris (00:18:13):
Random question, what does death smell like?

Tom (00:18:17):
Easiest thing to say is rot. You know what rotten fruit smells like?

Chris (00:18:23):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom (00:18:24):
Take that and times it by a hundred, just like that. But if that’s a one or a two out of 10, this is like an eight or a nine, and it’s kind of like an exponential curve. That’s the closest thing I can think of. And smell and mix in bleach and kind of cleaning fluids and stuff, yeah, I don’t recommend it.

Chris (00:18:49):
No, because obviously this is not like your day, well, it wasn’t your day-to-day experience until you went out to Ukraine. How do you cope with seeing that kind of stuff on a regular basis?

Tom (00:19:02):
So I should make clear that what is in the book and is in my career, what I’m describing to you now, this was not happening to me every day. The two experiences I just described, I was there for three years. They were probably one or two of the most intense experiences of that particular year. So it’s not like I’m exposed to this on a daily basis.

Chris (00:19:29):
But still it’s pretty extreme stuff to be exposed to.

Tom (00:19:32):
So one of the things is I never hugely struggled with it in a way that some people do. One of the things that has happened is it’s kind of hard to feel sorry for yourself in those situations.

Chris (00:19:48):
Mmm.

Tom (00:19:49):
One, you meet so many people that see or have it so much worse than you do. So it’s like for one, our local colleagues, like local journalists, they’re often much closer to it. They live much closer to it. So for instance, I have plenty of friends in Kharkiv or in Kramatorsk or whatever, and they’re living there and they’re getting bombed pretty regularly. And whereas if I’m staying in Kyiv, I’m a lot further behind the lines and I’m not exposed to it on a day-to-day basis like that. And not only that, soldiers — as journalists we’re on the front line, we’re maybe there for max a day, you’re really only supposed to spend about two hours. Occasionally they’ll let you stay overnight, which I did a couple of times, but they’re there for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. And fundamentally also as a foreign journalist, you can leave whenever you want. They can’t. So I guess my sympathy is pointed more at other people than it’s at myself.

Chris (00:20:54):
Yeah, yeah. No, I get you. I get, so your book, the title is obviously THE DOGS OF MARIUPOL, which is a powerful title. Can you explain to us the meaning behind that. Does it come from sort of an experience?

Tom (00:21:03):
Just before the war broke out when I was in Mariupol, for those who don’t know, Mariupol was the most destroyed — probably the worst-destroyed city in all Ukraine, based on my experiences in all the Ukrainian cities — because it was surrounded before most of the civilians had a chance to leave. It was indiscriminately bombarded and basically leveled, and probably tens of thousands of people died. But we may never know if we never get a chance to look at the grave sites there anyway. And I remember we were going around interviewing people: you think it’s going to be a war? I remember we went to a hospital once and we’re like, have you been stocking up on supplies more? Are you getting blood in? Are you getting food and supplies and extra mattresses or pillows or whatever? And they’re like, no, no. What are you talking about? Nothing’s going to happen, da-da-da, all sorts of stuff — why are you bothering us on a weekend? It was a week before. But one thing that was happening is the dogs were going absolutely crazy. The dogs just wouldn’t stop barking in the city streets the whole time. And I remember I actually took a note of that. I made it and I tweeted about it at the time: what’s going on here? Do they know something we don’t or something?

Chris (00:22:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom (00:22:29):
And of course there’s that kind of superstition that dogs bark. People say that animals have this kind of sixth sense for detecting changes in the environment — or that they have future foresight, know the war is coming or whatever. But that image really stayed with me and I was like, yeah, that makes a good title.

Chris (00:22:49):
The book also includes accounts beyond the kind of headline battles. So you have Chernihiv, Sumy, Kherson. Why was it important to you to bring those off the radar stories to light?

Tom (00:22:59):
I think because, look, even the Ukraine war has been very, very well covered — the most covered war, probably; most journalists that have been in a war, in terms of sheer numbers, since, I don’t know, probably ever, to be honest. I don’t think there were that many journalists around the entire Second World War. But people are only following one thing at a time. So when we look at the battle for northern Ukraine, for instance — which was the first really, really important campaign of the war — people remember particular snippets. They remember Hostomel that I talked about. They remember that big column of Russian tanks. They remember Zelenskyy defiantly staying in Kyiv and recording those messages on his phone. But actually the Russians attacked from about six different directions trying to get Kyiv, and we only really focused on the main one that came down from Belarus. They also attacked Chernihiv, and there was a huge battle there. One of the biggest and most consequential battles of the war took place in and around the failed siege of Chernihiv. And no one really knows about that just because it didn’t quite have the glamour, I guess you could say, of the battle in Kyiv. Yet it is still incredibly important. And had the Ukrainians lost there, they may well have lost the entire war because the Russians would’ve just gotten to Kyiv from a different route.

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Same thing with Sumy. I think Kherson is a little bit more well known, but what a lot of people didn’t realize is that the destruction of Kherson went on a lot further than just 2022. And it was liberated — there was fighting going on kind of across the river for ages. Both sides were kind of seeming like raiding parties in boats across and stuff like that. So the Russians were indiscriminately bombing with artillery and then with drones for months and months and months at a time. And so yeah, there’s just a lot there that hasn’t really been looked at or explored yet.

Chris (00:25:17):
Yeah. And out of interest, how did you gain the trust of civilians and soldiers in these situations to tell their story authentically to you?

Tom (00:25:27):
So there’s a couple of ways. One, the fact that I was there for a long time. I don’t want to say I have something of a grasp on the language. The fact that I knew clearly: if you sit down and you talk to someone about something that very well — or something that’s going on around you — and you see the person asks intelligent questions, especially in your own language, then you very quickly get a sense: oh, okay, this guy kind of gets it. He knows what’s up. And I can communicate that very quickly to anyone from Ukraine that I meet with — just a few words. Secondly, I should say, once again, the environment. Ukraine is quite permissive. So it’s one of those cases where the Ukrainians understand very clearly that journalists are there to tell their stories, and they see a quite neat link between their stories being told and military and humanitarian assistance from the West.

(00:26:32):
So they sort of see it a little bit as their civic duty, if you know what I mean. Now, that can be very different in other countries. I didn’t cover the war in Syria. I covered a little bit of the aftermath after a ceasefire, but I didn’t do any of the really, really, really hairy stuff. And what people would say — people who did cover that conflict — was they were like, well, at first people would be like, oh, yay, you’re going to tell a story, and then someone’s going to come in and blow up Aade or whatever. And then after a year or two people were like, why should I tell a story anymore? Nothing’s going to happen, nothing’s going to change. And that’s when journalists started to actually get into dangerous situations because people didn’t care — that people who they were working with no longer cared about their safety. Whereas in Ukraine, it’s been fairly consistent for the entire time.

Chris (00:27:25):
Let’s take a break and be right back with more.

(00:27:26):
You talk about Russkiy Mir in your book, which is the idea of a Russian world, and it runs through your prologue. How did you see this concept and Russian propaganda play out on the ground?

Tom (00:27:54):
Yeah, so it was very, very interesting because it’s one thing — just to very quickly describe it — is the concept of a Russian world that’s bound together by language, literature, shared history, the Soviet Union, which includes things like the victory in the Great Patriotic War — what they call World War II — and various stuff like that. And the Russian propagandists kind of consider that to be Russia, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan and some other places. And they have this very strong assumption that wherever there’s a Russian speaker, that is part of the Russian world. And the idea that Ukraine was turning politically and economically towards the West was just complete anathema to them. Many of the people in the Kremlin, like Putin himself further down, genuinely believed that Ukraine had been captured by some radical coup, and all they needed to do was get rid of it, and then the sort of oppressed Ukrainian — but really Russian — people would just fall at their feet and greet them with flowers and stuff like that.

(00:29:24):
And that just didn’t turn out to be the case. But it’s also, I think, worth going back and saying that there were people in Ukraine — especially up until 2014 — who didn’t necessarily see themselves as Russian or want to be part of Russia, but they did see the same sort of shared cultural space, and everyone watched Russian movies, everyone watched Russian films, listened to Russian music. Loads of people spoke Russian as well. I think we sometimes forget that there was this kind of people and that there was this really weird idea that Russian was banned, or that Russian speakers were rounded up before February, 2022. 90% of the conversations you had on the street in Kyiv were in Russian, right? It was an absurd idea. Regardless, what ended up happening is very, very many of the formerly — not necessarily pro-Russian, but Russian-sympathetic — people, once they saw Russian missiles blowing up their apartment blocks and their schools and their hospitals and killing their friends and family, they very, very quickly spat on the idea of it. And what they would do, kind of ironically, is you drive past something blown up, right?

(00:30:49):
Normally a building, and they’d just be like, there, that’s the Russian world — Russkiy Mir — ironically. It has a kind of dual meaning because the word mir can mean both “world” and it can mean “peace” as well. So the Russians would say, oh, we’re spreading Russian peace. And they would say, yeah, well, that is what Russian peace looks like for us. Yeah.

Chris (00:31:09):
And were there moments that you felt this sort of information war was almost as decisive as the fighting itself in Ukraine?

Tom (00:31:15):
I have to say, not in Ukraine, right? The Ukrainians never really — after about 2014 — the information war in Ukraine didn’t play a huge part. Russian or pro-Russian thought, or channels, or media, or whatever, steadily declined in influence after the annexation of Crimea. I mean, I think it’s rather astonishing: considering how well Russian propaganda has worked in other parts of the world, how well — other than the parts that Russia managed to militarily control, such as Crimea and sort of the Donbas cities, the parts of Donbas, they controlled before 2014, and in some parts of some eastern cities where there were still a few people who kind of supported them — they never got the allegiance of any major political or military figures in Ukraine. If anywhere, that sort of propaganda war has only really been in the West. It’s been about convincing the West about Ukraine’s.

(00:32:37):
And I think that’s one of the things that we’ve run with: the Trump administration’s been speedrunning over the last year is, at the very, very start of the year, they were kind of sympathetic to Russian narratives. Like, oh, this was all some kind of big misunderstanding. It’s something that shouldn’t have happened. If we just — the Russians are good and reasonable people — and we just sit down at the negotiating table, we’ll hammer something out. And then the Russians sit down at the negotiating table with totally, totally unreasonable demands. And I think we’re finally getting to the stage where we’re realizing: well, this is what they want. They want the war. They want to keep going until it’s stopped on the battlefield.

Chris (00:33:18):
Yeah, yeah. Were there any Ukrainian countermoves to Russian disinformation, or was it more down to just the reality on the ground that suddenly made Russian disinformation less effective?

Tom (00:33:35):
Yeah, I think it was the reality on the ground, really. I mean, everybody saw — okay — where Russian propaganda was really, really effective, like 100% effective, was in Russia. Everyone in Russia — almost — bought the Russian narratives, even the people who opposed the war (which was not a lot of people, but it still wasn’t a popular thing, especially in sort of, I guess, upper-middle-class, maybe artistic circles in Moscow and St. Petersburg). Most of these people didn’t like the war, but they bought into another narrative. I go into this in chapter eight in quite some detail. They bought into a narrative of: there’s nothing we can do. There’s absolutely nothing that the average, ordinary Russian person can ever do. The state is all-powerful. The government controls everything. There is no way that Putin is kind of like this omnipresent dictator with total control over absolutely everything, and nothing will ever stop him — which there’s some kind of truth to — but it’s why you never really saw a sustained Russian opposition or protest movement towards the war, really.

(00:34:53):
And you didn’t even see — the reason I think that this is worth stressing is it’s not just that you didn’t see that in Russia. You never even really saw that Russia outside — with the Russian expat community outside Russia. But yeah, for Ukrainians on the ground, they stuck together pretty strongly from the beginning. Are there still Russians in the east? There’s not many, but they’re there. A lot of them stayed behind. They called the zhduny, which means the waiting people who kind of waiting for the Russians to come. And you would hear some crazy things from what was going on there. I remember one very sad story. So it was in a little town called Soledar, which is about very near Bakhmut, which everyone probably knows. And I remember there were evacuation crews that would constantly try and evacuate people. And we would go to the basements and you’d get people, and I remember I was with a crew that evacuated this one mother, and I think her two children, and we get back to this — sounds hit pretty hard.

(00:36:02):
There’s soldiers running around everywhere. You can see explosions going off all over the place. And I remember we got back and one of the women just burst into tears and we were kind of wondering what had happened. And she’s like, oh, I just can’t believe we’re safe here. And she told us that some of the people in the basement had been saying, look, if you take your kids there, they’re going to be taken and they’re going to be sold into NATO sex slavery and crazy shit like that. And it sounds wacky and funny to us, but

Chris (00:36:38):
She believed it. Yeah.

Tom (00:36:39):
It’s not even she believed it. She was like, this is — when you’re living with 20 people in a basement being bombed, there’s no real contact with the outside world. It’s like, maybe I believe my government, maybe I believe the people here. I don’t know who to trust kind of thing.

Chris (00:36:58):
Do you, living in New York — I mean, me living in London — I encounter people who believe some of the Russian disinformation, and these are not Russian people. It’s like English people. And you probably got the same situation in America where I’ve noticed people who are a bit right-wing leaning tend to respond to a message pumped out from Russia that they’re somehow the savior of the Christian world and somehow the Ukraine war is to do with that. Then you’ve got the left-wing version of things where it’s all about just being — it’s sort of an anti-NATO narrative — and somehow NATO started this, NATO’s at fault. Have you encountered any kind of Russian talking points in your day-to-day life walking around New York that surprise you — or just, I dunno, annoy you because of what you’ve experienced?

Tom (00:37:49):
So I’ve only been here a month, and — I wouldn’t even say that. Sorry, I mean New York: I’m at Columbia. There’s not a lot of MAGA hats here in sort of liberal media stuff.

Chris (00:38:12):
But it’s not even just MAGA either. I found it’s very far-left people too. But, yeah.

Tom (00:38:16):
Most people are focused on Israel and Gaza, which I’m happy to go into, but not really thinking about Ukraine, to be honest. If anything, the only thing I’d get from them is why are you talking about Ukraine? You should be talking about Gaza instead. And I’m like,

Chris (00:38:30):
Wow. Yeah, we should be able to talk about all the conflicts, but yes, yes.

Tom (00:38:34):
Yeah, it’s like, well — or they’ll say stuff like, why aren’t you talking about Myanmar or Sudan or the Congo or whatever? Kind of saying that Ukraine isn’t that important to talk about, rather than specifically parroting Russian narratives. And part of the reason, as I said, I did explain to you at the very, very start: there are some reasons that are very practical and logistical for why people don’t talk about Yemen or Sudan as much. And it is a shame, I agree. Ukraine, if anything, probably is overrepresented in world media coverage, but that just is the way it is.

Chris (00:39:08):
Yeah, yeah. No, fair enough. I mean, how does it make you feel when you get somebody saying to you, why are you focusing on Ukraine and not Palestine or something?

Tom (00:39:17):
I don’t mind, to be honest. I think it’s a relatively fair question, to be fair. I mean, yeah, I’ll just give my honest opinion. It’s like, one, I can’t be in every conflict at the same time, nor can I hope to get the level of depth and expertise. Well, I mean actually this year, while I’m at university here, I am focusing quite strongly on Israel and Palestine and the Middle East because I want to deepen my knowledge on those subjects. But for Ukraine, it’s like, look, I lived there. I speak some of the language. I have really good local contacts. I know the place inside out. That’s my field of specialty. And if you don’t want — there are plenty of people you can talk to about Gaza and they will have that conversation with you and I will have that conversation with you, but this is my focus and this is what I care about and is where my heart is.

Chris (00:40:16):
Right. Yeah, thank you for that. So shifting slightly now to espionage and resistance. So in your reporting, did you come across Ukrainian partisans or intelligence style networks operating behind Russian lines?

Tom (00:40:29):
Yes. So in the chapter on Kherson, actually, while Kherson was occupied, I managed to get in touch with a few people — I go into the methods — but basically people who were working as partisans, who’d been involved in sabotage behind Russian lines. And that persisted until Ukraine had retaken that part of Kherson. I should make clear that, unfortunately, that was probably the place where partisan activity was at its strongest and its best. And one of the things I remember I talked about with one guy when I went in there, so he was like, one of the reasons the city has not been destroyed is because all our people here were sending the Ukrainian army coordinates of absolutely everywhere in Kherson where there was a Russian military base or an ammunition depot, or whatever. And so the Ukrainians had pinpoint weapons, and they’d have partisans that would kill people in the streets, blow their cars up and stuff like that.

(00:41:42):
As the war has gone on, these things have become less of a factor, really. They still happen occasionally — like the occupied parts of especially Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — not so much in Donetsk and Luhansk because the Russians have controlled them since 2014. They’ve had 10 years to propagandize the population, root out collaborators and stuff like that. Apparently the Ukrainians do have networks of agent provocateurs in Russia. That’s what I’ve heard. I’m sure it’s true. I don’t have any special insight into those. But also I think it’s important to realize that with Kherson, these people knew the Ukrainian army was nearby, they knew the Ukrainians were doing well in the battlefield, and they could hope that there would maybe be some chance for liberation in the near future — and they were right about that. Now these people who are in the other parts of — basically the other side of the river — where the Russians still control, well, there’s no real prospect the Ukrainian army is going to break through there anytime soon. They might, but no one’s really thinking of that as a major — anything but kind of an outside possibility if things go really well.

Chris (00:42:53):
And how does civilian intelligence gathering like farmers, villagers, shopkeepers calling in Russian positions, blur the line between ordinary people and spies, do you think?

Tom (00:43:06):
It’s a question. The Russians — so for instance, a lot of the ways Russians have justified killing civilians, whether Bucha or Izium or whatever — is they’ve said, well, these people were literally giving coordinates to the Ukrainian army. That makes them combatants, and they were putting our lives at risk, so we’re going to just get rid of ‘em. And there’s a certain kind of cold and twisted logic that I do follow there. I remember I was talking to one of my contacts — he’s from Chernihiv — and he was telling me that he was like, yeah, my taxi driver — he was quite high up in his remains quite high up in Ukrainian high command — he’s like, yeah, my taxi driver there never gave a shit about politics, but he would just drive around with a dash cam on his car, close to where he knew the Russians would be. And he just sent me a text with the coordinates, which I would forward onto the artillery guys, and bang — within an hour. And I mean, one for one, that does show you the civilians in Ukraine were not neutral, right? Civilians in Ukraine overwhelmingly wanted the Russians out. They wanted them to stop being there, to get off their land, and they wanted them to be destroyed,

Chris (00:44:24):
Which is understandable considering they’re being invaded.

Tom (00:44:28):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Those who were specific spies — that’s kind of sort of a murky world. And a lot of it, I think, was quite by happenstance. People happened to be in an occupied town and have good connections to the Ukrainian leadership or whatever.

Chris (00:44:50):
Yeah. And did you ever feel as a journalist, you may have been treated with suspicion that you might’ve been a spy by either side? Because I know John Sweeney, the BBC journalist or former BBC journalist now freelancer in the early days of the war, he got arrested on suspicion of being a Russian spy.

Tom (00:45:08):
Yeah, I got a story to tell you like that. Okay.

Chris (00:45:11):
Oh, cool.

Tom (00:45:11):
It’s a long story. So bear with me. We were in Kharkiv — Ukraine’s northeast, second biggest city there. I should say this was a much bigger thing early on in the war, early in the first month or two. This whole thing about spies or collaborators was massive. And I remember we’d been driving around the city. We’d picked up a woman who was like a school teacher who’d been at school, it had been bombarded, interviewed her, and she just asked us if we could drop her back. And we dropped her back at her apartment, outside her apartment. There were a couple of police officers. One of them sees me — I have a camera, I have it slung over my shoulder. I’m not even using it. It’s like lying next to me. He turns to me, kind of stumbles towards me, gets his gun out, points his gun right at me. Fucking — sorry for swearing.

Chris (00:46:04):
That’s right. No, you can swear on this it’s fine. We’re all adults here.

Tom (00:46:08):
I could smell his breath. He’d been drinking. His finger was not trigger-disciplined — sort of already on the trigger.

Chris (00:46:18):
He was on the trigger.

Tom (00:46:19):
Got his gun aimed at me, yelling at me in Russian. And I have no idea what he’s saying, because at that point I don’t speak a word of Russian, anyway. But I’ve got a translator with me. He’s kind of like hurriedly translating. He’s like, what are you doing? Why do you have a camera? Da-da-da. Give him the camera, give him the camera. And he’s like — and then we were getting out our passes — and he is like, so what are you doing with a camera? We’re journalists. We’re here to sell stories. He’s like, we’re here to do interviews and take photos. Well, why do journalists do interviews and why do they take photos? And I’m like, oh my God, we’re literally going to have to explain this to them. And we’re kind of getting into this discussion.

Chris (00:47:02):
Yeah, yeah.

Tom (00:47:03):
And his colleagues kind of come up and they look pretty awkward. They’re trying to save face, but they also realize that this is going in a bad direction. They sort of calm him down, he puts his gun down, and they get the camera, and he tries to keep the memory card. And we just — at the end of it, I just grab it off him. Anyway, so we’re a bit freaked out. And later that night we end up going back — we’re staying in Dnipro City, just right in the middle. And we left Kharkiv. We didn’t stay overnight. I basically ended up spending a lot of time in Kharkiv. But the chapter four will tell you all about that of my book. And anyway, we get back to the room.

(00:47:55):
It’s a bit weird because our key doesn’t work. We have to knock on the door and get the neighbors to listen, and they’re looking at us pretty suspiciously. We go into the room. My friend Neil, another journalist, he goes into the next room to get a drink, and then all of a sudden I just hear a — and some shouting — two guys just come round the corner, assault rifles: get on the ground. And I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m not — again, literally twice in this space of about three hours and I’m on the ground, and it looks exactly like it does in a cop movie. When someone like a SWAT team barges in, I’m on the ground. They’re like going through. They’re like — you haven’t — somehow the guy speaks pretty good English. Do you have any weapons? No. What are you doing — journalists — da-da-da-da.

(00:48:46):
Again, they kind of sit us on the bed and they were like, look — these guys were much, much more professional. By the way, all of the people who pointed guns at my head that day, I would far rather have it repeated by these guys. They were SBU — they were Ukrainian — but they were kind of like Ukrainian internal security, I guess — the FBI kind of equivalent. And they sat us on the bed and they were like, look, we didn’t mean to give you a fright, but the neighbors called in. They were really concerned. Two young guys, clearly not from here. We are wearing military armor. They’re like, what the hell is going on here? And we have to do our due diligence, and next time you should call here to let us know you’re here, but just get on with your day. And anyway, so there you go. Basically, it’s a convoluted story.

Chris (00:49:38):
Yeah, brilliant. Is there a procedure now to prevent that? So do you have to go to the SBU office and identify yourself, or

Tom (00:49:45):
No, not really. That’s not really a thing. So this was very, very early on. This was, as I said, for the first month or two, that was quite a thing. Now, they’re a lot more used to foreigners. They’re a lot more used to journalists. They know that, to be honest, the people who are — it’s the pro-Russian elements that remain in the population that they’re really going to be worried about. I remember being in one city in Donetsk region, and one of the guys was like, yeah, there are a lot of citizens here who would sell us out to the Russians in a heartbeat if they had the chance. But that’s really what they’re worried about now.

Chris (00:50:29):
Yeah. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the divisions within Ukrainian society? So you’ve touched upon, should we say some of the people who are pro-Russian, and also there’s a tension, I think, between people who have fought and some who have fled. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Tom (00:50:45):
Yeah, yeah. So I go into this a lot in chapter seven, where I talk about home life and Kyiv. I find that interesting because it’s one of the things that I’m asked most about. People who’ve read the book and want to interview me, they always ask me about this particular question more so than the battle scenes or whatever. Yeah. So look, for the first — I’ll tell you a little anecdote. I was at a music festival. They still have music festivals in Ukraine. They’re big. There’s a lot of people. They’re not loads. They’re not Lollapalooza or Burning Man or Tomorrowland or whatever, but they have — there’s a thousand-ish people there. Not —

Chris (00:51:22):
That people got to blow off steam and everything.

Tom (00:51:24):
Yeah, exactly. But that’s that. Do they have to blow — that’s where the kind of big question comes down: what should people be doing? Is this appropriate? I remember we had a conversation. We sat down with a pretty famous Ukrainian band — very famous in Ukraine. Everyone who knows, they’re in Ukraine. I dunno if people would know who they’re outside. And we’re interviewing them, and they’re like a bunch of young guys, mid-twenties. And we ask them standard questions: what do you want people to know about the situation in Ukraine? How have you been affected by the war? What is your music? Blah, blah, blah. And then I kind of got asked the last question. I’m like, look, Ukraine has a problem. We don’t have enough — there’s a shortage of infantry. The army is desperate for more troops. Have any of you guys considered leaving your musical career to sign up for the army?

(00:52:14):
And they’re like, all of a sudden, the kind of previously jovial mood in the room has just gone like ice cold. And they’re just looking around sort of awkwardly. And one of them says, oh, I think we do our best by promoting Ukrainian culture and fighting on the cultural frontline. Anyway, next day I get a call from the band’s PR guy being like, please, please, please don’t publish that line. It’ll make us look really bad. It makes us look really disrespectful to the soldiers, da-da-da. Yeah. So there really is a big tension. I’d say tension cuts two ways. There’s tension between — one, actually it’s across genders as well. There’s tension between women — mainly women — who left because only women can leave as refugees: women and children, as men can’t really cross the border. Well, it’s a very complicated, expensive process.

(00:53:14):
And very illegal. Women who stayed and women who left. The women who stayed often see the women who left as having abandoned the country. And then the men who fought and the men who did not, right? And this very — you’ll often speak to soldiers who say that when they come back to Kyiv, for instance, on break, they find it really weird. Like, what’s going on here? This place is full of — I’m in the trenches watching my friends get blown up and nearly dying myself and never sleeping and these horrible conditions, and yet here there’s all these young men on the street — bars, parties, chatting up girls, whatever — why aren’t they fighting? And I found from soldiers there’s really two responses. One is, look, we are fighting for this. We are fighting so that people can choose how they live their lives. And isn’t it amazing that we have this normal life still going on despite the war? And the other opinion is, fuck these guys. They’re letting the country down. I remember I talked to one guy in — he’s a medic from 3rd Assault Brigade — and he told me: on the second day of the war, I joined the army. My best friend left the country. I dunno how — maybe paid a bribe or something. He’s like, that guy is dead to me now, and all my brothers are here.

Chris (00:54:48):
Wow. And is that still a tension going on to this day?

Tom (00:54:53):
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It will be. And it will be one that continues definitely when the war is over. I remember seeing — there was a sign I remember that said when I was driving to Lviv last time — it’s like a recruitment sign that says, daddy, what did you do during the war? I was like, there’s going to be a very big thing when the war is over. Those who fought and those who did not.

Chris (00:55:18):
Yeah, I’ve often wondered that because I know a couple of Ukrainian men who live in London who I think they were already here before the war started, but they’ve stayed here and not gone back. And I can partly understand, nobody wants to go into an act of conflict, but at the same time, it’s also a part of me that thinks, well, if my home nation was under assault like that, I would like to think I would be motivated to kind of go back and do something about it. And I wonder what their future will be when they do eventually return back to Ukraine.

Tom (00:55:49):
Well, look, for one, they’re not going to — you can’t really discriminate. And Ukraine is going to need those people to come back because it’s lost so many of its best people that it’s going to need incentives for people to come back. At the same time, those men are often very, very quiet around me. They’re very sheepish because they know that. I know they feel a bit embarrassed. It’s like, well, this guy — this guy isn’t even Ukrainian, yet he’s been on the front lines and he knows what people in Ukraine think of us. So they often — I’ll give one little anecdote. I was with a friend, we’re in Lviv city in the west, and a lot of Ukrainian men will hide out in western cities where they think they’re less likely to get conscripted or whatever. And I remember this one guy I still really remember because they all looked the same.

(00:56:47):
And I remember this guy was tall, really built, really good looking, yet he just kind of hunched over. And this was in a hostel where a couple of them were staying. And my friend who only just arrived to Ukraine — she’s since gone on to do some very, very good photography in Donbas and in the conflict states — she was like, oh, I want a photograph of those guys, but none of them want to be photographed or talk about the war. And I’m like, that’s a shame. No one wants to be associated with a stigma of being a guy who’s running away from the war. And you can just see it written all over them.

Chris (00:57:22):
Yeah, indeed.

(00:57:23):
Let’s take a break and be right back with more.

(00:57:24):
And you dedicate the book to Arman Soldin and other journalists killed in Ukraine. So what do you want people to understand about their role alongside soldiers in the conflict?

Tom (00:57:52):
The Ukrainians understand the role of journalists in the war. The Ukrainians understand that. I’ve spoken to Ukrainians and they’re like, look, it’s one of the reasons we got so many weapons in the start was because so many journalists went into Bucha and they talked about the crimes that were committed there, or the guys who were in Mariupol and made all the films and shared them with the world and everything like that. And I think one of the — Ukraine does show that journalists are still very, very important in shaping how the narrative of how conflicts are done and made around the world. And I think it’s important to know that some of them do sort of really put their lives on the line and pay the ultimate price. I dedicated it to Arman because one, he was a really fucking great journalist, and two, he was a good friend of mine.

(00:58:46):
So I just was naturally the person that I would dedicate something like that to. And I think that’s the kind of thing that’s the case for all conflicts. I think whatever your stance on, for instance, on Israel-Palestine is, I think it’s worth saying that we would know much, much less about what was going on, especially in Gaza, if we didn’t have Palestinian journalists who work under appalling conditions. And so you think like, oh, well what about the conflict? The toll it takes on me? I’m like, well, I’m thinking of people in Gaza or something. And the journalists there are facing absolutely extraordinary conditions and still producing some very, very powerful work.

Chris (00:59:28):
And I’m just opening a very wide question here. What do you think the future holds for Ukraine at this stage? We talked earlier about the Trump administration who was somewhat sympathetic to Russian narratives have now shifted to a more real politic position where they’re realizing that Russia can’t be trusted. So what do you hope and what do you think the future holds? So

Tom (00:59:50):
Look, my guesstimate for what will happen: I reckon the war will probably end in about a year — or if it does, even if it doesn’t end neatly on an armistice, it will probably sort of slowly peter out because everybody is kind of sick of it. Even, to be honest, the Russians are kind of sick of it. They’re losing huge amounts of soldiers. And I think with the casualty figures now, they’re like more than 10,000 a month or something — ridiculous numbers for nothing. They’re getting nothing — barely anything — just farmlands and fields. They, they’ve tried to take major cities like Pokrovsk and Sumy and Kostiantynivka, and they haven’t gotten close. And so I reckon the war will probably end on — maybe the Russians will probably pick up another few small gains, but I don’t think anything — so barring some massive political catastrophe in Ukraine, I don’t think — even if the West completely cut off aid. Now, Ukraine is self-sufficient enough with the innovations in drone warfare. And I also would doubt that. My personal assumption is that the Russians would probably not try and do this again anytime soon.

Chris (01:01:05):
Yeah, one would hope.

Tom (01:01:06):
I slightly differ from — I actually had an interesting conversation with an official from another nearby central European country who was like, yeah, we sometimes worry a little bit that if Russia just has to stop in Ukraine, it will just look for easier targets and we might be them. And just because Ukraine has turned out to be such a tough nut to crack, and it’s going to turn into, for the next long time, quite a nationalistic militarized — there’s going to be a hyper-militarized society where everyone has a gun, everyone goes through military training. There’s going to be, as I said, a lot of bitterness and resentment. There’s, I think, some bright sides too. I think Ukraine is now — Ukraine is one of the great heroic country stories of the 21st century, and I think there’s going to be a lot of investment being poured into the country once the war ends.

(01:02:07):
Ukraine is the leader on military technology in the world. I sometimes think — I’m writing a couple of articles now about it — but people have no idea just how much more advanced the Ukrainian, and to be fair, the Russian militaries actually are, especially when it comes to ground warfare — so much more so than the United States even, or China or whatever. I would say that even the US military or the Chinese military would struggle to take over Ukraine at this stage. And I think there’s a — I don’t want to say bright, but I think there is a future where Ukraine sort of carves out its niche as this kind of fortress nation that helps the rest of the world with its military technology, or hopefully it can sort out its kind of endemic issues with corruption and nepotism and stuff like that, which plagued it really since 1991, which had gotten better. But there’s a lot of progress to be made there. I think Zelenskyy saying he would step down, do the kind of George Washington thing — I think if he follows through with that, that would probably be pretty positive. Then he’d be sort of remembered as the great war hero rather than something worse — which is certainly possible. So yeah, I’m relatively — I’m more optimistic than I’m pessimistic, but there’s a lot of challenges in the future and the war is only one.

Chris (01:03:38):
Yeah, definitely. So finally, what do you hope readers take away from your book, THE DOGS OF MARIUPOL?

Tom (01:03:43):
So what I want the readers to take away — and this is the moment I just sold the last copy that I had to a friend, so

Chris (01:03:50):
Hey, congrats.

Tom (01:03:51):
Maybe you can superimpose it. One, I want ‘em to take away the resilience of Ukrainian society, the things that the iron generation and the amount of sacrifices and struggles that Ukrainian people have made, and the ingenuity of Ukraine to manage to resist for four years — a country that’s four times its size and five times its GDP, or might be 10 times its GDP, whatever — resist these overwhelming odds and still kind of be fighting to the mats. I want people to also, as I said — you asked earlier why I’m talking about Chernihiv and Sumy and stuff like that. Part of this is I want to have a historical record. I want this book to be part of the historical record of telling those stories that people might have forgotten if it weren’t for — and honestly, most of those battles I’ve done research on, I am taking Ukrainian accounts that just — I haven’t popularized in English — and I’m reproducing. I’m either reproducing them or doing similar kind of interviews and stuff like that. Yeah, and just how the nature of modern warfare has changed irrevocably.

Chris (01:05:05):
Fantastic. Well thank you so much for joining me today. Where can listeners find out more about you, your work and your book?

Tom (01:05:11):
So the book is THE DOGS OF MARIUPOL. Amazon. Biteback, my publisher — their website. It’s in UK bookshops, I believe — Waterstones, Daunt, places like that. I am on X at Tom the Scribe — S-C-R-I-B-E. And my Instagram is at “ntmutch” — my last name, N-T-M-U-T-C-H.

Chris (01:05:39):
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much again for joining me today.

Tom (01:05:41):
Absolute pleasure. Thanks.

Announcer (01:06:14):
Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.