The Heartbreaking Atrocity of The Ukraine War (And Why You Should Care) - James Verini

0:00From the start, Putin has maintained that Ukraine is not a real place. It is not a real country. There is no such thing as indigenous, independent Ukrainian culture. There's no such thing as Ukrainian language apart from the Russian language. There's no such thing as Ukraine apart from Russia. When you convince yourself of that and when you convince your soldiers and your pilots of that proposition, well then of course they're capable of doing anything. Putin's idea was that Ukraine had been so softened and so fractured by three decades of active measures and the depredations of post-Soviet life that he would just topple Kyiv and the rest would fall into place.

0:35He could not have made a dumber decision. This invasion cohered Ukrainians like nothing else could have. It's the most admirable nation that exists in the world right now. Fighting for the ideals and the practices and the ideas that we claim to hold so dear, they're not going to stop. They're not going to leave their land. I have my doubts about any form of a peace deal that would include Ukraine ceding captured territory, even if by some strange happenstance, Zelensky or another president agreed to that. The Ukrainians now would never stand for that. They would carry on a guerrilla war behind the lines in Donbass and the south of Kherson for as long as it took.

1:15Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today is James Verrini. He is an award-winning journalist and author, and he's written an incredible book, which is penetrating. It is a short book, but it is a real book, and it's called The Theater, Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War. And so you know I have a lot of friends in the agency, a lot of friends at the Department of Defense. I will still call it that for as long as I live. and we know that the the russians are culturally set up to commit war crimes when they go to war uh you've you've reported on some of the world's most dangerous conflict zones um so go into that first why are you so crazy as my grandmother would have said so why are you so crazy james varini why aren't you going into these war zones then we'll get into the book um thank you for that question that's very flattering I don't really see it as crazy.

2:19I see it as, well, first of all, it's enjoyable. But secondly, I see it as necessary. You know, these things happen and someone's got to go write about them. And I suppose perhaps my personality is particularly well suited to it. But when you actually get to these places, as you probably know from your friends in the military and in journalism, they're not nearly so crazy as they seem on the news. Even in Ukraine, even in Iraq and everywhere else I've worked, it's chaotic, but it's not nuts. You can figure out how to operate safely, how to make intelligent choices. It's like any other somewhat perilous job.

3:04You figure out how to do it intelligently. And for the most part, people stay safe. For the most part. But let's be honest with each other, because I have been to Afghanistan. I have been to Iraq. When I was in Afghanistan in October 2015, they wouldn't let civilians like me even drive in a car. We had to go by helicopter everywhere. They were so afraid of the IEDs and potential. You see, you're shaking your head because you know this. So what is it about a journalist that can get away with traveling around and not get harmed? Well, it totally depends where you work. But I take the point of your question.

3:46I don't really know the answer, but I will tell you this. Working in Ukraine was the most frightening from that perspective. It was more frightening than Iraq. it was more frightening than Gaza, it was more frightening than Central African Republic. And the reason was the Russian artillery. In particular, the GROD systems are what are known as aerial weapons. And they fire indiscriminately, including on civilian centers. And as you know, GROD systems fire off a few to a few dozen missiles in the course of seconds. And there's no hiding from that. In Iraq, in Mosul, there was an air war and there were lots of mortars and lots of artillery, but you could stay on the right side of it.

4:37You could stay on the non-ISIS side and hopefully not get hit. And the airstrikes were precision, more or less. Russian grad systems and, for that matter, Russian artillery in this war generally, including in the theater, is not precision. These are often what are known as dumb bombs, right? No laser guidance, not that different from what they would have been in the middle of the Cold War. lots of civilian casualties unfortunately and a lots of horror i want to go right there then let's go to that let's go to the regional academic theater in marioville more it's march of 2022 set the scene for us probably the single worst act of mass civilian killing in the russian ukraine war so far and it happened in the first month of conflict so set the scene for us yeah if it wasn't the worst in terms of numbers and i think i tend to think it was it was certainly the worst in terms of egregious acts and what it said about russia's intentions um in with the ukraine war i think it was the for the first time in the three weeks of the war to that point as one survivor of the theater massacre put it to me we realized that day what the russians were here to do they weren't here to fight with our soldiers.

5:58They weren't here to fight NATO as Putin claimed. They weren't here to protect oppressed Ukrainians as Putin claimed. They were just here to kill us, us as in Ukrainians, us as in Ukraine. So in terms of the scene setting, Mariupol was in a particularly unpropitious place at the start of this invasion. It's on the Sea of Azov, which was effectively controlled by Russia at the time because of the Black Sea Fleet. It was just a few miles from the border of what was known as the Donetsk People's Republic, you know, this crypto-satrapy statelet that Putin controlled while claiming he didn't, and only a few miles more from the Russian border.

6:42So Mariupol was perfectly set up for a devastating siege, which is exactly what happened to it over the course of 81 days. It was attacked on land, by sea, and by air. by multiple units and divisions, fighters from Russia and even Ukrainian fighters from the Donetsk People's Republic and Chechen fighters. So within a few days of the beginning of the war, a few days into the siege of Mariupol, the entire city was encircled and being under full siege, which wouldn't let up for 81 days. And as you know, to this day, it's the only major Ukrainian city that Russia took and has kept. Russia also took Kherson, but it didn't keep Kherson.

7:27And as you also know, it was the ugliest episode of the war in its way, at least when we were able to see the war sort of in full view at the beginning. Well, I mean, you know, I love the fact that you're saying, as you know, you're giving me more credit than I deserve, because I actually did not know, but I knew as a result of reading your book and the book has been compared by many critics to john hershey's hiroshima uh and i'm sure you read that book i read that book as a kid and her hershey describes the devastation that took place and uh there's a there's moral weight to this book there's a reality check for all of us um but why did you choose this story we're four years out from this story lots of happened in the war.

8:17But this will be, in my opinion, the seminal book on this war. 25 years from now, when they're reading about the Ukraine-Russian war, assuming we haven't nuked ourselves, that we go into this book. Okay. So why did you pick it, James? That's very kind of you. There are a few answers to that. In one sense, the book chose me, not to put it too glibly, but as soon as all the reporters got to Ukraine at the beginning of the invasion, the Ukrainian military and government made it clear that it was going to be very difficult to work with them as a journalist. In part, this was because, of course, they were trying to counter an invasion by the Russian military, and they had more important things to deal with than hundreds of international reporters running around whom they had to protect.

9:05In part, it was because they did actually genuinely want to protect reporters. You'll recall that a few died or were very badly injured at the very beginning. And in part, it was because the Ukrainian government wanted to control the narrative. The Ukrainian government immediately took control, essentially, of all the independent media in Ukraine. The point being that it was very, very difficult to work with the soldiers, much less the military higher-ups. Individual soldiers knew perfectly well not to talk to reporters. There were press liaisons in every unit who made it pretty clear that they didn't want you around or you should stay to the side.

9:47So many of us found from the start that the only way we were going to be able to tell the story of this war was via the civilians, via the Ukrainians who were not soldiers and not combatants, who were normal people caught in the middle of this. And that turned out to be actually very fortunate in its way because it had occurred to me before covering other wars, but I always managed to forget it, which is the fact that if you and I were caught in a war, well, at least me, if my country was invaded, I probably wouldn't end up fighting. I would probably end up like one of the people in the theater, just a regular civilian who's expelled from their home, expelled from their city, and winds up in a refugee shelter.

10:33We all of us like to think that we would be on the front lines. Very few of us actually would be. I probably wouldn't. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit, James, because what I have discovered in interviewing veterans and, you know, the veterans always say they don't they never know who the hero is. You know, the the macho man on the battlefield could turn out to be a coward.

11:05And the person that thinks he's a coward rises to the occasion on the battlefield. So and you are a wartime correspondent. So you're already two steps into it. So you're already crazy enough to be a lunatic. So you're not giving yourself enough credit. But something here that pains me, literally, as a father of five, you reached into my heart with your hand and you grabbed it. You started choking my heart because you write beautifully. Thank you. You are writing about children and you're writing about a sign in Russian in Cyrillic. It says children. okay the letters are on the pavement outside the theater they're visible from the satellites yeah the russians the russians bomb it anyway yeah okay uh so my question is and obviously over 600 people minimum of 600 people confirmed dead as a result of this uh do the russians know what they're bombing uh i mean i i think you know i'll let you answer the question but i i know their habits in war yeah and anthony beaver who will be on the show is talking about rasputin and wrote about stalingrad we know their habits in war but go ahead did they know yes of course they knew of course they knew you you you you may remember that the whole world had seen those images of deti children in russian written on not just one but two sides of the theater in the parking area and then the front 20 foot high letters um it people tend to forget now because it's been so long but the initial satellite images of the theater were sent out before the theater was destroyed and all of ukraine and then all of the world a few days before the bombing was able to see this theater intact with these signs of children and there was even some footage that came out of the interior of the theater when the refugees were still in it this handheld footage of these very crowded, dark hallways, but people looking okay.

13:13If you were in Ukraine at the time, a lot of Ukrainians thought to themselves, uh-oh, because those signs aren't going to be a warning to a Russian pilot. They're going to be an invitation to a Russian pilot. Of course, the Russians knew. They had seen children written in those letters on either side of the theater for days before the bombing. They would have seen it in all of their surveillance. They owned the skies at that time this is before the drone war really uh they would have seen it in their surveillance not only that but the pilot um who was flying the fighter bomber that dropped the two 500 kilogram bombs on the theater these were not laser guided as most of the munitions in russia weren't so he would have had to uh he would have dove quite low and had to slow down a lot to put these bombs on the theater as accurately as he did so not only would the commanders and the higher-ups and everyone have seen the signs and known this was a refugee shelter, the pilot himself would have seen them as he was approaching.

14:13He would have had to make that final decision whether to drop or not. And he made the decision to drop. As to whether this is a particularly Russian way of war, I can't speak to that. What I do know is that from the start, Putin has maintained, or at least he started maintaining around 2014 and then only amplified it that ukraine is not a real place it is not a real country there is no such thing as indigenous independent ukrainian culture there's no such thing as ukrainian language apart from from the russian language there's no such thing as ukraine apart from russia when you convince yourself of that and when you convince your soldiers and your pilots of that proposition well then of course they're capable of doing anything and the bombing of the theater was that anything it was the most stark anything at the very beginning of the war wartime propaganda we know we can do different things i have a uh i have a cover of a superman from mid-war and uh superman is holding hitler and he's holding tojo in his hands and they both uh look disfigured you know we're trying to dehumanize our enemies so that it makes it easier for us to kill our enemies, right?

15:30And, of course, Alexander Dugan, which is somebody that you've written about. You had a New Yorker magazine piece about Alexander Dugan in March of 2025, who is sort of the Russia-must-destroy-Ukraine ideologue, and he's a bud of Putin's. Disgusting freak, if you ask me. So I get all of that. But what I want to really drill down on is really the moral force of this book. So there's the actor, the lighting designer, the refugee physician running an infirmary in the spotlight booth. Oh, the animatician. Yeah. What about the teenage with the soldering, the Christmas light flashlights? Who were individuals?

16:19This was not about generals. It wasn't about soldiers. Yeah. You were setting a moral framework. And so tell us about that craft choice as a writer. And I would ask you the following question, James Verini, are you a deep human being? But I don't need to ask that question because I know the answer is yes, because I read this book. Thank you. So tell me about the choices made there and the literary device that you used to grab my heart and touch so many other people with this book. Well, thank you for putting it that way. So it gets back to your question from before about focusing on civilians as opposed to soldiers.

17:00In part, that choice was forced on me as a journalist in Ukraine. It wasn't like Iraq, where I got to in bed constantly with soldiers or in other conflicts I covered. But it ended up being a really good thing. And it ended up being how I got to this book, because it forced me to just spend a lot of time with civilians who were caught in this war, who, again, that is the experience that most of us would have in war. And with my first book, the book about the Battle of Mosul, it's a pretty violent and grim book. Michael Hare in his wonderful book Dispatches about Vietnam said that eventually the war came down to men hunting men and that's what my first book was about it was men hunting men and I wanted to see with this book if I couldn't find another way of talking about war about how war affects not the combatants but everyone else because the vast majority of people affected in most wars are civilians they're not combatants um and i wanted um i wanted to study that i wanted to put the reader as much as as far as i could into the experience of ordinary um people living through this war and and more than that i wanted to do a war story that wasn't really about war if you like this is not about people trying to kill people uh this book this book is about people in the midst of a war helping one another um not to sound schmaltzy about it but in in war it's often said you see the best and worst in in people and that really is true this book is largely about people doing their best for one another um helping one another saving one another's lives um and in that sense it was it was a real pleasure to write you know of course it was deeply saddening um and um i you You know, I was often brought to tears and speechlessness interviewing these people when I found them around Ukraine and Europe, the survivors.

19:04But the fact that I got to describe, you used the word heroism before. A lot of these people, like Olena Matushin and Sergei and Vigenia, who created the shelter, these are people who didn't ask to be heroes. Heroism was forced upon them by this war. And when it presented itself, to many of them, it wasn't even a choice. It was, of course, of course I'm going to help these people. When these hundreds of people showed up at the theater because the caravan of evacuation buses never ended up leaving, and Evgenia and Sergei had to decide whether to let in the theater, even though they were not prepared to receive any refugees, they thought, of course, we must do this.

19:45We have no choice. And the same with Dr. Olena. Of course she's going to set up the infirmary. What choice does she have? Not only what practical choice, but what moral choice? And so they ended up being everyday heroes. So much here. Short book and a deep book. You know, I'm going to throw some ideas, some concepts out of you. I want you to respond to them, okay? Russian brutality, devastating Russian brutality evidenced in this book. Up against extraordinary Ukrainian resilience. Now, this is something that happened, let's call it, you know, at the beginning of the year or beginning of the war.

20:28We're four years plus out from that moment. Tell us where we are right now. If you were being descriptive about the Ukrainians, what did they do to adapt themselves to this war, to protect themselves from the Russian brutality, the drone war? Give us some of your journalistic insight. fast forward because you actually write in the book, like if I read the book on the day that the attack happened, you'd be like, okay, the Ukrainians are going to stick in this thing forever. They're not going anywhere. And that's what they seem to be doing. So tell us about this, please. You've put it well yourself.

21:08I couldn't put it much better. You use the word resilience at the beginning. That's precisely what's going on. There is a absolutely iron resilience among the Ukrainians, which is all the more heartening because it wasn't necessarily there before the war. I started going to Ukraine reporting in the summer of 2021 before the invasion began because I sensed something was up. And I went to the front line in Donbass, which had already been there for seven years since the 2014 invasions. And I found a lot of division among Ukrainians, a lot of, first of all, russophilic Ukrainians, And then a lot of ambivalent Ukrainians who were sick of that war in Donbass and who didn't particularly trust their government.

21:51Zelensky before the war had very low approval ratings. He seemed to be capitulating to Moscow. He had run on the promise of a peace deal in Donbass. That had never happened. And I had my doubts about how much Ukraine would cohere in the face of a full scale invasion. But those doubts were, as we know, erased almost immediately. Putin had the same idea. Putin's idea was that Ukraine had been so softened and so fractured by three decades of active measures and the depredations of post-Soviet life that he would just topple Kiev and the rest would fall into place. he could not have made a dumber decision.

22:36This invasion cohered Ukrainians like nothing else could have. In this war, which has now been going on for over four years, it has left Ukraine as a nation in a way that it simply was not at the end of 2021. It is now not only a nation, I would argue it's the most admirable nation that exists in the world right now, you know, fighting for the ideals and the practices and the ideas that we claim to hold so dear. And Ukrainians, I think, were already extremely resilient and proud. And the war has only made them more so. And as you point out, they're not going to stop. They're not going to leave their land.

23:22They're not going to leave their land and nor are they, I have my doubts about any form of a peace deal that would include Ukraine ceding captured territory, even if by some strange happenstance Zelensky or another president agreed to that. The Ukrainians now would never stand for that. They wouldn't stand for it. They would carry on a guerrilla war behind the lines in Donbass and the south of Kherson for as long as it took. Well, I mean, you make that also very clear in the book. But I think that for me, the most resonating feature of this book is the crime, man's crime against other men and the fight and how somehow, some way the humanities are always there, James.

24:10The arts, the culture. Yeah. Things that make us human stay with us as we're trying to deal with this sort of primitive hate. and you you write beautifully about that as well okay so the book is awesome uh i'm down to the five words you probably never listened to my podcast before but if you did you'd know that we pick five i've listened to all your podcasts okay good you are a really good liar okay that that is really good well all two of them all two of them that i'm aware of i don't know if you have a third one okay all right well i'm you know let me tell you flattery get you everywhere with me you can call me tall and thin while you're telling me that you listen to my podcast i'll be a very happy camper anything i just say won't matter okay so we we at open book we pick five words from the book okay and then you got to give me a sentence or two about the word so i'm going to start with theater i say the word theater you say what i'm glad you brought that one up first uh because to my mind and i hope to the mind your mind and the mind of the reader it simultaneously evokes two things a theater like where this takes place but also a theater of war in the context of war anyone who's read about war thinks of theater so hopefully it brings to mind two ideas at once maybe a little heavy-handed but that's what i know it's not heavy-handed i'm just going to add a sentence i think when i hear the word theater because i'm a dramatist and i think greek greek tragedy it's the struggle between good and evil this is why the title of this book is so great because it means all those things.

25:46Okay. I say the word courage, James Verrini. What do you say? Unasked for, but very welcome. All right. Interesting, right? And courage is hard to predict, apropos to what we were saying earlier about the struggle of war. Including in oneself. Including in oneself. No question, especially. What about survival? I say the word survival. You say what? Resilience. Resilience. There are people - This is a story of that, by the way. There are people in this book who will not mentally survive. There are people in this book who simply will not be able to put the theater behind them, and it will be the end of them mentally.

26:25Sergei, for example, who I last saw in Tallinn, and he could barely stand up. He was so drunk. Then there are people who were made stronger by this experience. Survival is, I don't know that it's a choice. It might be something innate. The ability to survive might be, at least mentally, might be innate in some and lacking in others. What about Russia? I say the word Russia, you think what? All right. Well, you and I, you're a little bit older than me, but you and I grew up in roughly the same time, which is to say the Cold War. So you can't say Russia to you or me without some of the most awful implications, right?

27:05We were just conditioned to think that way by American popular culture, American education. Rocky four, James. Rocky four. Rocky four. Rocky four Rambo. I grew up in the 80s watching the most preposterous anti-Russian propaganda. So there's there's part of our minds that will never escape that. Right, Anthony? It doesn't matter how much we read. It doesn't matter if we learn Russian. There's something formative in us having grown up in the end of the Cold War that Russia will always have those silly negative connotations. I think you and I would also agree, though, that you're a big reader and you love fiction.

27:46You mentioned drama. It also, Russia, to our ears, also means absolute artistic brilliance, right? a sort of a creative brilliance on the page, arguably unrivaled in the rest of the world. So I would say in the way that you set up the nice dichotomy around the word theater, I would say Russia has a similar dichotomy, right? We think of it as being both insane and brilliant at the same time, Both beautiful and as ugly as it gets. They have the Bolshoi valet. And they have Dostoevsky. Yeah. And Tolstoy and others. But listen, it's painful to see this protracted dilemma, which really started during the Russian Revolution.

28:41Okay. Last word. I'm going to give you the last word. I say the word Ukraine. You say what? Slavy Ukraine. Well, you know, and it's interesting because, you know, and to rebut, to really understand the ancestral history there, going back to Peter the Great or even the famine that was instigated by Stalin, there is a culture, there is a diverse and entrenched culture. They happen to be brothers, which is why this is very reminiscent to me of the civil war that the United States perpetrated in the mid 1860s. This is brother-on-brother crime. And so we got to get it resolved. But I hope it gets resolved the way you and I want it to be, where the Ukrainians maintain their sovereign territory and they somehow find their way into the peaceful nations of the European Economic Union.

29:32But this is a phenomenal book. You deserve high praise for it. The theater, the courage and survival in defining the atrocity of the Ukraine war by James Verrini. It's a brilliant, it's a masterpiece, James. And I say thank you for sending it to me and I enjoyed reading it. Thank you, Anthony. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.