Odessa sits next to the Black Sea — it’s Ukraine’s largest port city, meaning this tourist center is also crucial for the country’s economic survival. News images show that its citizens are currently preparing for battle: They’re forming a human chain to fill sandbags in preparation of a possible Russian attack. The primary concern is the possibility of an amphibious Russia landing on the shore.
Whitney Leaming, a video journalist at the Washington Post (whose video of a boy playing piano in Kharkiv during the first day of the Russian invasion went viral), and Salwan Georges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist at the WP. He started off in Kharkiv before the war started and ended up documenting people fleeing and hiding underground. (His photos and videos of families hiding out in the subway stations in Kharkiv went viral.)
Leaming and Georges are now in Odessa, along with their colleague Isabelle Khurshudyan. Says Georges, “As a former refugee myself and as a person who grew up in the war in the ’90s in Iraq, I never wish it on anyone. But I can really connect with people and what they’re feeling and how they’re reacting. What I look for as a photographer is really showing the impact on humans. This is what breaks my heart. We were in Kharkiv a couple of days before the war started, and it made me speechless to see how it went from such a vibrant city to no one standing outside at 8 p.m.”
To understand this crisis and what’s at stake, I spoke with Leaming and Georges. Watch our conversation right here:
And here’s some of the highlights of our talk:
Katie Couric: Tell us what’s going on in Odessa.
Georges: We just got here a couple hours ago and we were able to go around town, see how life is. But it’s definitely not normal what’s happening. It feels like a ghost town, sadly. I was able to go to the beach to see preparation — a lot of sandbags being taken away from the beach to downtown, to protect buildings and streets, and as protection for some of the fighters. I saw a couple at the Monument to the Unknown Sailor who were embracing and looking into the Black Sea and I talked to them afterward and they said they were scared.
KC: As you guys walk outside in Odessa, what are you seeing?
Leaming: The people here are definitely preparing for an attack from three sides, which makes this a very volatile and precarious situation. But I haven’t been hearing an air-raid siren at the moment. A lot of people have no intention of evacuating. I think a lot of people are here to stay. You see these long lines of traffic with families in the cars, heading out of the country. But the traffic that’s going back toward the east is entirely filled with single men in cars. It looks a lot like men are driving their families toward an evacuation safe point, then driving back to help support their communities.
KC: It’s been really inspiring to see all these Ukrainians civilians enlist in the military, learn how to shoot guns — people from all walks of life.
Georges: Oh, absolutely. We use local producers in every town that we go to, to give us eyes on the ground. And several of them have been involved in the territorial defense.
KC: What is the latest on the ceasefire?
Leaming: The ceasefire is a little up in the air. We’re seeing more people evacuate outside of Kyiv, according to our colleagues who’ve been in the Ukraine since the invasion started. They’re in desperate need of supplies and aid, and they need to get people out, and from what we are hearing, that’s really not happening. It’s getting pretty dire. We saw long lines outside of gas stations, outside of grocery stores. And we never saw any supply vehicles coming in.
KC: What kind of safety precautions are you taking?
Georges: We rely on what’s out there in the streets. Honestly, we rely on some of our colleagues at The Washington Post to keep us updated and tell us how to stay safe. But I mean, it’s such an unpredictable war. You just don’t know when or where the Russians are advancing, or what are they’re targeting. Because as you see, a lot of civilians are getting killed when Russia claims that they’re hitting government buildings. So it’s just unpredictable and we are taking every precaution.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
