When out of five attempts, one comes out. Russian aggression in the shoes of Czech Television reporters

The editorial office was thus able to send reporters to Ukraine continuously throughout the year. They captured the very beginning of the invasion, the dramatic days of uncertainty in the battle for Kiev, they were among the first to reach the places of massacres of civilians in Buch or the mass graves in Izhyum, they spent days without electricity and under fire in Mykolaiv, Kherson or Kharkiv.

Now for the reporters Czech Television they remember in the book chronicle called Putin’s War, which was compiled by the editor of the foreign editorial office Jakub Szántó. On the occasion Happy Book Thursday it is currently being published by Argo.

A few days before the start of the invasion, Andreas Papadopulos jokingly switches the navigation from Ukrainian to Czech to his Ukrainian fixer, that is, the local guide. On February 24, nobody jokes anymore in Kyiv. Papadopoulos convincingly describes the situation when the Russian army, which at the time still has a reputation for invincibility, is rolling in on the metropolis, and it seems that those who remain in the capital will experience ugly things. The author of these lines was that day in Kiev, so the feeling confirms.

Veteran Michal Kubal experienced heavy shelling in Kyiv and fighting in the suburbs. The forty-six-year-old journalist reflects in the book that he no longer expected something similar. After Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries where he worked. In one passage, he recalls war correspondents for whom work was an adrenaline rush, but often left behind broken marriages and dysfunctional parenting.

Last March, Kubal was deciding whether he would be the one to replace his colleague Václav Černohorský in Ukraine. “Do you have anyone to send there?” asks Kubala’s wife. “No, no one wants to go there,” he tells her truthfully. “I can’t force others to go to war if I don’t want to go there myself,” the journalist thinks for the umpteenth day, that there probably won’t be any other option. Once in Afghanistan, he and his wife were expecting their third child, and now another son is due to be born in a few weeks. “I can’t leave you here,” she objects at home. The woman is silent for a moment. “You have a family, yes,” he finally declares. “But who among those who would go there does not have children?” Kubal objects that someone without children could be found, but that such a person has his whole life ahead of him. “This sentence ended the debate and my hesitation. It was decided. Another war,” summarizes Michal Kubal.

That’s what’s valuable about the book Putin’s War: the people who make the news on the ground talk about what they have to do so that viewers at home can see the reports or interviews. For example, an interesting detail: at checkpoints, the Ukrainian army and militia ask drivers to turn off their lights. But the Czech TV car lights up automatically when it is started. The result is Ukrainian patrols shouting and guns pointed at the car.

Another reporter, David Borek, was crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border at a time when his mother was undergoing a complex heart operation. In the book, he describes how he saw a corpse for the first time in his life, a Russian soldier in camouflage at a gas station. But then he arrived in Buča, where, as he writes, “death is mundane, almost banal. Tools are heard from the next street. Residents are already starting to repair demolished properties. The main thing is to look ahead!” describing.

In other parts of the book, there is a feeling that almost every journalist knows: the sense of futility that he devoted the energy, time and vision of successful quality reporting to something that turned out to be a mirage. Journalism in a war zone is often a struggle to get somewhere and get a story, a shot, a statement. It can go awry because of anything: the reluctance of the soldier to let the journalist go, a sudden change in the situation, or simply in the commotion, nobody has time or mood for reporters.

Michal Kubal recapitulates last March’s dramatic days in Kyiv. “Many of the originally agreed shoots did not take place in the end. There were many more than those that managed to be completed,” he writes.

Andreas Papadopulos drove all over Ukraine to film solo carp, T-72 tanks supplied by the Czech Republic. In the end it worked out. “The report, for which we drove one and a half thousand kilometers, disappeared in an instant. It was not. In exchange for a journey of several hours, we received a promise that when the situation calmed down, we could return. It was a weak consolation, but I heard it hundreds of times in Ukraine,” he writes . “The iron rule of journalism in this war has been confirmed again: Out of the five agreed-upon reports, it is possible to shoot only two, and of those you will finish one in the end. A ratio that I have never been able to reverse.”

In the chapter entitled Ukrainian exodus, the editor and editor of the book, Jakub Szántó, ponders in a few lines what it is like to find yourself without a home, on the run, to lose your life from day to day. He watched the desperate escape of hundreds of thousands of people in the west of Ukraine, who tried to save themselves by crossing the border in anticipation of impending evil. The powerful story of his text is a group of deaf and mute people who worked together in a workshop in the east of Ukraine and also needed to get to safety. “The massive vibrations of bomb explosions brutally announced to their quiet world that war had begun,” the author writes.

But there are also so-called nice moments in the book. Martin Jonáš became the star of social networks, the popular dog Patron. The one with the dog’s protective vest, which has the Ukrainian flag and name on it, digs out mines and explosives. Jan Šilhan, on the other hand, found a man in depopulated and gloomy Kherson who housed him, helped him and wanted nothing in return.

There is also a so-called view from the other side from Karel Rožánek, a correspondent for Czech Television in Russia. His story of how he infiltrated a press conference in Moscow for the opening of the Chutné a tečka restaurant, i.e. the local substitute for McDonald’s, will amuse the reader, but otherwise there is little optimism in his texts. In reports from the country of the aggressor, where the image of war is distorted by the media in an Orwellian way and yet people believe it, hope is hard to find.