The Daily co-host just spent three weeks in Ukraine, and offers a searing glimpse of life on the front lines.
For this bonus Next Question episode, Katie got deep with New York Times journalist and The Daily co-host, Sabrina Tavernise. Sabrina recently spent three weeks in the heart of the conflict in Ukraine, and has delivered a series of dispatches that paint a vivid, shocking picture of life on the frontlines. Returning there also brought back powerful personal memories of the 1990s, when she first worked as a freelance journalist in Russia.
Sabrina’s choice of profession made a sharp contrast to her peaceful, almost idyllic upbringing in rural Massachusetts, where, as a kid, she’d picked blueberries in the summer to make money, and attended a school with just eleven other kids in her class. Shortly after graduating, aged just 24, she moved to Eastern Russia to a remote city called Magadan as a freelance journalist. She later became a foreign correspondent for the New York Times in Moscow — and spending a lot of time in war zones. It was a painful, frightening time for the average Russian, with much of the population becoming impoverished while a rare few were “fixing” the privatization process after Putin came to power, and coming away with fortunes.
Sabrina’s sophisticated understanding of the region gives her a rich perspective above and beyond the breaking news headlines. To get a fuller sense of the real weight of emotion behind the ghastly situation in Ukraine, she and Katie dug deep, covering everything from what life was like in Russia just after Putin’s rise to power, to how Russians today see this war and how the months ahead might play out. Oh, and if you hear barking, Sabrina’s dog Clementine also made an appearance! Listen to the full podcast here.
