On today's special episode of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec takes you on the ground deep into Southern Ukraine. In all he and the crew traveled 1,200 miles by train and car, more than 40 hours from the border city of Lviv in the West, to blockaded Odessa on the Black Sea, and the besieged city of Mykolaiv. This episode was recorded while on the train between various points of the journey. Donations to Ukraine Humanistarian Aid: https://www.caritas.org/ukraine-appeal-22/ Here’s y...
Something that was completely unannounced and a little bit unplanned, but here we go.
This episode is entitled The Night Train to Odessa and is recorded in various points along the route from Lviv to Odessa to Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine.
You guys are really in for something special here.
Before we get into that, I want to mention very quickly what's going on tposa.com.
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And then if you want to register for Turning Point, the Student Action Summit, it's tposa.com slash sass.
Use promo code POSO, all caps P-O-S-O, for 25% off.
That's going to be July 22nd to 24th, 2022.
And President Trump, of course, is a confirmed speaker.
I've also heard a certain Florida governor might be there.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard for a very special edition of Human Events Daily.
powered by Turning Point USA. The sound you hear in the background may sound suspiciously like the noises of an ongoing train and the reason for that is because I'm currently recording this from the forward compartment of an overnight train between Odessa and Lviv in Ukraine.
So, to get everyone up to speed, after the events of the detention in Davos that happened last week, we continued to report on the World Economic Forum, we continued to report on the World Health Organization's assembly meeting in Geneva,
having driven about three hours to get there, three hours back, and one day myself and the crew were filming a documentary called The Great Global Reset that's going to be available at tposa.com when we get the whole thing up.
I then had originally planned to fly back on Friday evening from Switzerland directly to the US, but then, you know, just something about being over in Europe already, I didn't want to not stop and visit from my family's home country of Poland.
So we stopped by to visit Poland and to see family for the weekend.
And while we were there, I was reaching out to a few contacts on the ground, local journalists, local activists, who said essentially that if we wanted to, they would be able to get us into Lviv And then get the necessary approvals to travel all the way forward from Lviv, where it's quite safe, into Odessa, and then into Mykolaiv.
And from Odessa to Mykolaiv, you're only a little bit further away from Kherson, probably about 15-20 miles at the closest point from Russian occupied territory and when we saw that opportunity and saw that it was being done safely and conducted in a legitimate proper manner with proper authorization the ability to get us through checkpoints we decided to take them up on the offer and so we did it so we
took an overnight train uh into Odessa from Lviv we then took A car.
We met with local journalists in Odessa, traveled around Odessa, were able to visit with a few people, then traveled from Odessa over to Mikolaev, and were able to see firsthand the effects of this war.
Up close.
So let's take it back to the beginning.
We left my cousin's house in Poland and traveled to the train station, Shamsil, which is just across the border with Lviv.
At that point, we probably had to wait.
So we had an eight o'clock train, but we probably had to wait an hour to an hour and a half in line with the sheer amount of people that were standing there Waiting to get back into Ukraine.
Now these were Ukrainians that were on their way back in and we've got photos, we've got videos on a lot of this, but really the entire train was completely sold out of people heading on their way back into Ukraine.
Now we were told Anecdotally by some of the activists who helped us arrange the tickets and get across, they were saying that if you took the road, so if you tried to take by bus or by car and try to drive across the border, that you could be facing travel times of a six-hour wait to a 10-hour wait, some people even seeing 12 hours more or longer waits.
And they said the train really was the fastest way to get across.
And so we took that option wholeheartedly because I've taken the train, even in peacetime, from Belarus into Poland.
And one of the big issues there, of course, obviously, is Belarus is not a member of the EU. It's not part of the Schengen zone.
And I've taken that border both by bus and by train.
And clearly, clearly by train, it was absolutely the best way.
And that was even, of course, in the time of peace about five years ago where there was no war going on whatsoever.
Now, interestingly enough, At the time of this recording, I have not yet returned back into the EU or back into Schengen zone, so we'll obviously have to see how that goes.
But what we've been told is that a lot of those restrictions, for example, COVID restrictions, have been completely dropped when you're traveling between Lviv into Poland, or traveling from Ukraine into Poland.
And as an American, we were already allowed to travel into Ukraine For I believe up to 30 days without a visa prior to all of this.
But for even now, they've made it much, much easier to get in.
We were told, actually, the city of Lviv right now is about 25% Americans.
And going around with some of the activist networks, some of the on-the-ground networks that we met with, They told us, I mean, it was predominantly American, American-run, but of course Americans and Ukrainians working together.
Some of them were faith-based networks, some of them were military-based networks.
When I say military-based, I mean veterans, volunteers, that type of thing, not official U.S. military, obviously.
But that being said, a large amount of people were veterans, and of course those veterans were then taking up leadership positions in all of this.
So, took the train across.
The train actually was very comfortable once we got on, even though it was a considerably long time, to wait to get on.
Now, I personally am not vaccinated, and so I've been able to get through all of the EU and then even into Ukraine without a vaccination or even anybody asking me for any kind of medical status or tests whatsoever.
So, Hop on that train.
And that really only took about three hours.
Very, very slow, mind you.
If you were driving and obviously the situation were not what it is, it would probably only take you about two hours drive.
But it was a very slow train across from Ukraine into Poland.
And all along the way, even at that point, the minute that we crossed from Ukraine into Poland, or excuse me, from Poland into Ukraine, we immediately started seeing these small villages with defensive outposts, barricades, volunteers of people just standing outside the entrance road to that village or that settlement,
armed with AK-47s, sometimes wearing uniforms, sometimes wearing kind of makeshift uniforms, And soldiers just everywhere.
Soldiers on the train, soldiers running the customs checkpoint at the border.
Soldiers were ubiquitous throughout the entire time that we traveled in and around Ukraine.
Obviously, as you can imagine, they've considerably beefed up their numbers and beefed up their active presence patrols in order to protect against behind the scenes or behind the lines activity, being on the lookout for spies, being on the lookout for subversives, that type of thing.
And so really the military presence with those ubiquitous golden armbands was just everywhere throughout Ukraine.
When we were on the train at one point actually, my brother who I was traveling with, we were facing separately because we were in different seats and he saw and recounted to me afterwards that when they were going around asking us for passports, one individual Happened to be of Russian descent and because they had a Russian passport that person was actually taken out of their seat and Taken out of the car that we were sitting in to some other area on the train It was moving at this point and
we didn't see that person again.
So that guy got taken away Moving forward, get into Lviv.
Pretty hectic area, as you can imagine, once we got in.
Hustle and bustle, people moving everywhere, humanitarian aid in tents all over the place, and free meals, free food, some basic humanitarian supplies, and we were meeting with a local contact who would give us an address,
so we were able to find a local Local taxi driver went with the nice looking old guy as opposed to the younger looking guys who looked like they might screw you over because well in your situation like that you want to go with the friendly looking older guy if you can if you have your chance and now they do have and this was something that I didn't even realize going into it they do have Bolt Cars,
which is essentially the Eastern Europe or a lot of Europe's part, their version of Uber, they also had Uber up and running.
So both Bolt and Uber rideshare apps were running at this time and are running at this time that I'm recording this.
And as a matter of fact, the trains were running as well.
So we saw in the train station, the trains not only were running to Lviv, Trains are running to Kyiv.
They're running to Dnepr.
They're running to Zaporizhia.
They're running all the way down to Odessa.
That's the train that we took.
And so even all the way up to Kharkov, which is right on the border with Russia.
So the trains on at least the western side of Ukraine are running all the way across to Dnepr River.
And I think that's something that's been lost in a lot of the coverage in the war right now.
We hear this settlement's been taken, that settlement's been taken, we hear that Russia has stopped their advances on Kharkov and Kyiv and some of the other locations in the south, like Mikolaiv and Odessa, but has hardened their advance and is continuing their advance in the Donbass region, so Donetsk, Lugansk provinces, as well as across the line from Kherson.
Which we'll get to.
But one thing that I just completely hadn't heard was that the trains are still running all the way across from the border with Poland, essentially all the way to the border with Russia in Kharkov.
So if you want to go all the way across, and if you so choose, feel free to.
We actually had the opportunity to go to Dnepro City.
Right on the Dnieper River as well as Zaporozhye and then continuing further south but we just didn't have enough time in the schedule to do this and at some point if if this all continues I would like to come back and do a further tour run really focusing specifically on Ukraine and what's going on there in their fight.
So we get off the train at Lviv, huge hustle and bustle, and I was going to order one of those rideshare apps, but I had bought a Vodafone SIM card while I was traveling throughout Europe.
And I've been there for about two weeks and this thing worked completely fine.
Got a great deal just as we were transferring across the airport in Dublin.
And from there, we were not able, I was able to use it all the way across Europe.
But yep, no such luck when I got to Ukraine.
So back to the drawing board and had to use good old fashioned people skills.
So, once again, that's a good reason to know people skills, boys and girls.
You want to be able to actually talk to people in the real world and be able to have a conversation, get where you need to go, and have the ability to just operate without relying on On apps, on a little piece of glass in your hand, you know, just regular, real-world discussions.
And the other thing was making sure we had cash.
You want to make sure you've got cash on hand when you're going to be in a place like that.
You don't know where your card's going to work or something, you know, your debit card's going to get locked, your credit card's going to get locked for being in a different area, or you're going to need talking to somebody who doesn't have a credit card.
But you know what?
Cash is king in these situations.
First thing we did, we got off the train, got some cash, linked up with the old guy with the taxi, and he took us off to our first meeting in Lviv.
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But suffice to say, a network of Americans, Ukrainians, very helpful.
Once we got to Lviv, we were able to receive documentation.
We were able to get a place to stay.
And we were able to get transport on further down to Odessa and Micolaev.
That's kind of the main thing that we were trying to do while we were in Lviv.
But also, wanted to meet with people that were plugged in to some of these local networks, figure out who they were, but also figure out what they were up to and what was the situation in Lviv.
Before I get to any of that, I just want to say, the city of Lviv, I was not prepared for how beautiful it was.
It really is.
Just a gorgeous old city.
It reminded me a lot of Krakow.
A lot of the city was built during the time when it was Poland.
Also, a lot of it was built during the time that was under the Austrian Empire, so that city has gone back and forth again and again over the centuries between who is essentially in charge of it.
Later then, of course, after World War II, it became a Soviet city, and then following the fall of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was given to the newly formed country of Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So traveling through Lviv, just again, really impressed, really stunned by the amount of churches, the amount of Orthodox and also Catholic churches.
We stopped in a good number of Greek Catholic churches while we were there.
We even went into what's known as the Garrison Church.
That's the church where many of the funerals have been held for members of the Ukrainian military and the armed forces as well as volunteers.
Who have lost their lives, not just in the recent fighting, but going all the way back to 2014.
It was very moving to be there in those churches.
And these are active churches.
I want to keep in mind that there are weddings going on in these churches, baptisms, services at all times.
And just really amazing to be able to be there and to say prayers, to pray for the people of Ukraine.
While they're going through this.
But also, when we got to Lviv, one thing I really think that hasn't come across in the mainstream reporting, because most of the mainstream reporters and people who are fakers, like Malcolm Nance, are in Lviv.
And Lviv is quite safe.
Lviv is a hustling, bustling city.
There is commerce going on in the streets.
It's a city of courtyards and cobblestones.
So you're traveling through, you're walking around.
There's cafes open.
There's jazz bars open.
There's people playing music on the street.
Just a whole...
A cavalcade of human life and lots of moving parts, lots of things going on, all happening right there on the ground in Ukraine.
And it almost seems like if you didn't know, right, if you didn't know that there was a war going on in the other part of the country, you would almost think that it was just a regular day in the city, in Lviv.
It rained a little bit while we were there, but for the most part, the sun was shining.
It was only brief rain.
And there was still this sense though.
There was this heaviness that hung in the air.
And everybody walked a little bit quicker.
Everybody sort of picked up their pace.
They held their belongings tighter than you might normally think.
And it just seemed to be this general tension throughout the entire city.
That being said, people were outside.
People were enjoying themselves.
They were enjoying life.
And one of our local contacts there told us that that's normal for Lviv, that that's the normal pattern of life for the city, that it is a very free city, very open, and just has a lot of joy of life.
Can't get over the exquisite buildings and architecture that we saw in Lviv.
I mean, we're talking stuff that rivaled easily, easily the cities and architecture of Budapest, of which I'm an enormous fan.
And we're talking Gothic, Baroque style, architecture, you know, even just apartment buildings that look absolutely gorgeous when you look at them.
Not all of them, obviously.
You can tell which ones were built.
And that's sort of the story of the city.
The patchwork of Lviv is that you can tell which cities were built or which parts of the city were built during which era.
So the Polish era, then followed by the Soviet era, and now the current era.
One thing that was interesting is pretty much every Catholic Church that we went into while we were there, even though they're now part of the Greek Catholic Church, so many of the murals, so many of the plaques that were up were all written in Polish.
My Polish is definitely not the best, but I was able to muddle my way through some of it and could clearly tell that it was written in Polish.
And so we spent the better part of the day in Lviv and then once we realized that the trains were running and the trains were going at the pace they were, we decided that we would buy the tickets overnight to Odessa and see where we could get from there.
Just before that, though, we were able to meet with some local activists.
We had heard about the recent bombing in Dinepro at the barracks there.
Something like 38 killed and wounded at the military.
It was the National Guard barracks in Dinepro the night before.
And we had actually been looking to see if we could get overnight train tickets to Dinepro or possibly take a drive.
But it looked like the direct tickets were all sold out for that night.
And so if we wanted to, we would have had to take a transfer through Kyiv, stay there for about six hours.
So it really would have only given us maybe half a day at best in Dinebro, which just really wasn't long enough for us to be able to see anything that was on the ground there.
So we decided to end up going to Odessa.
But after meeting with some of the local activists and kind of seeing some of the situations that were there, You know, you're hearing these stories about this humanitarian aid coming in through Lviv from the West, but really it just seemed like such a hodgepodge and a patchwork Of efforts on the volunteer front and the humanitarian front.
So, you know, piles of tourniquets and quick clot and bandages just stacked up on a guy's living room couch.
And, you know, somebody else saying that they were going to throw it in.
These are Americans.
And people saying, oh, I'm going to throw it in my car and drive it down to the people who need it.
Right?
And so your question, of course, is, well, where's the normal supply line?
Where's the regular supply chain?
Why are you driving it directly and taking that risk on?
And people saying, well, either one, that the supply chain wasn't working, or number two, we were told a story from a guy who was able to procure AR-15s from a Polish arms dealer, obviously much more expensive than usual, bring them into Ukraine across the border, Then hand them to a local defense unit that wanted them for defense around Kyiv.
And this was a group of Ukrainian volunteers.
And so the contact was saying, all right, well, let me see if I can get you weapons, but I'm not sure if I can get the ARs because we've sold so many of them lately, but I can definitely get you AK-47s.
But then this group suddenly said, well, if you can't get ARs, then we don't want them.
And they said, oh, okay, fine.
But then they turned around saying, Oh, you know what, though?
We're going to need some of these ARs for defense of our apartment building in Kyiv in case the Russians come there.
Which, of course, Kyiv is a city of, you know, three million people.
So if the Russians are, if they're at the point that they're at your house in an apartment building in downtown Kyiv, you're going to need something a little more powerful than AR-15 at that point.
But what the guy said back to the contact was, you know, we also need some humanitarian aid here in Kiev, to which, of course, raised a bit of a red flag.
What do you mean?
You're a volunteer defense unit.
What do you mean you need humanitarian aid?
And then they said, well, can you just cut us a check for about...
You know, about a hundred thousand Grivna.
I say, what do you mean a hundred thousand?
And then it dawned on him that about a hundred thousand Grivna was the price for, and they've been discussing five AR-15, so 20,000 Grivna each.
And so basically what he thinks had been happening was that the thing was a scam and they were trying to get the ARs off of him so that they could sell them and then pocket the money in You know, in the middle.
But because he was saying no, that perhaps these guys had already promised people that they were going to be getting the ARs.
And if they didn't get them, then they obviously had a problem on their hands.
So they were hoping to buy their way out of that problem by getting whatever money they had been fronted up front for the ARs.
So asking for the money for the exact price of about five AR-15s.
So this is the kind of stuff that we hear anecdotally that's going on kind of behind the scenes coming through Lviv.
Obviously a lot of weapons, a lot of materiel coming through and that's the big point of it, right?
So Lviv is where the supplies come in through the west and then they are distributed throughout the country following that, whether by hook or by crook.
Networks of journalists and activists and partisans that are working together to put this whole thing together, get it down to people who are fighting at the front.
Now the front for the most part right now is the Dnieper River and then beyond that the front contact line in Donbas.
So a lot of the supplies that we were hearing about were coming across the line and then going towards that front line along the Dnepra River really to maintain that.
And if you look just on, obviously there's been a lot of conflicting maps and conflicting information that's come out in terms of where the lines are, where things are drawn.
But if you look on the map, really the only place that the Russian forces and the rebels have been able to establish across the Dnepra River is right at the mouth of it at Kherson.
And so, in some of the other areas, as you go up the river from the Black Sea in Crimea, which are at the end of the river, and Kherson at the end of the river, all the way up towards Kiev, and then, you know, it eventually goes up towards Belarus and the Russian border.
So, Kherson is really the only place that the Russians have been able to cross the river.
And so, a lot of these towns, like Dnepro and Zaporozhye, You know, these are potentially what people think may be the fallback positions.
Should Donbass go down?
Should Donbass fall this cauldron situation that the Ukrainian army and the Russian army are fighting out right now?
Should they be forced to evacuate retreat, they would eventually head back to that Dnepa River.
And that would be obviously as a natural boundary and a fallback line for Ukrainian forces and the volunteers who are going there.
Some other anecdotes that we heard were going on was that the training, right?
So the conscription is in, but it's not that every man who's, you know, of fighting age, I think it's 18 to 65, that doesn't mean you're all in the military automatically.
So there is a draft in place, and it's kind of like a selective service system.
Where your number gets called at a certain point for...
now you can go and volunteer for one of the volunteer units or as a man you can wait and be drafted when your number is called and if your number is called you're sent into a training pipeline and that training pipeline we were told consists of about two months of training in field operations in ammunition weapons training As well as some basic medical training.
So this is just some of the stuff that we were learning in Lviv.
Obviously lots of communications, lots of intelligence fusion cells, and then of course the supply lines are being run through Lviv.
And so our next step, though, was once we realized we had these tickets, that we could take the overnight train from Lviv to Odessa, and that it would really only take about 14 hours, which, when you think of it, isn't really that bad.
We jumped all over it.
We said, yeah, we want to take that train.
And so 8 p.m.
to 10 a.m., right?
So you're up for a little bit, you sleep, you wake up, you're where you need to be.
So we decided to take that train, the overnight train, from Lviv to Odessa.
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And so what can I say?
The people of Aviv treated us very, very well and helped us out with the train, helped us make sure we get there on time, make sure we get some food, had some provisions for the trip.
Obviously, there's not food on the train.
But what was nice was that for a pretty low price, we were able to get a sleeper compartment with two bunks, not much bigger than I had when I was in the Navy, to be able to sleep overnight, myself and my brother.
On this train car all the way across to Odessa.
And so it's very nice, great air conditioning, by the way, which for me, huge, huge plus.
And I know, I know, don't worry, folks, because I had still, even on an overnight train to Odessa, the best night's sleep in the whole wide world, thanks to MyPillow.com and the fact that I brought my travel pillow along with me.
So, I'm there, sleeping on my MyPillow, sleeping in my undertax.
Yeah, that's right, I'm sleeping in my undertax.
Need that comfort.
Especially when you're being frisked by the World Economic Forum's police force.
Funny enough, I ended up being treated better in Ukraine by the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian police than I ever did when I was at the World Economic Forum, so go figure.
But...
Take the overnight train.
Signal was spotty at best, getting across all the way down past, so through Moldova.
It's a longer train than you would think going in a straight line because you can't go in a straight line from Lviv to Odessa via train because Moldova's in the way, so you've got to go all the way around Moldova.
But I always wanted to be able to see the Black Sea myself.
When I was in the Navy, I was a PACOM guy, China guy, so Given all the focus there's been on Ukraine, all the focus there's been on Odessa over the last decade, I said, I got to go down and see it for myself.
I got to go see what's going on.
So we hopped the train.
Probably the whole first car ahead of us was soldiers.
And then we got on ourselves and we were in car number two.
And we're able to go down, had an excellent night, really great night.
Of course, that's the American in me talking when I say, oh, the Wi-Fi was going in and out, right?
So I've got a, you know, a hotspot set up through my SIM card because I was able to get that local Ukrainian SIM. But right, the signal was spotty going in and out as we were coming across.
And so...
Good night all the way through.
Coffee on board the train.
Not the most austere conditions you can think of.
I've been on overnight boats and ferries in China that were far, far worse than this.
But the fact that we were able to get a sleeper compartment really, really helped us out for ourselves.
I'm actually recording this.
in a sleeper compartment on the way back right now and what I did was because they didn't have any individual sleeper compartments what I did was I bought four tickets there's four beds inside them so I bought four tickets so we'd have the room to ourselves so it's just me and Kevin and uh actually the room next to me was empty so I ended up uh I'm recording in there and he's he's resting right now We're taking the overnight train from Lviv to Odessa.
Great ride all the way through.
Very smooth.
Love the air conditioner.
Had plenty of food, plenty of water all the way through.
So we were fine.
We get in.
They're the train station in Odessa and pop out immediately.
Place is crawling.
Police, law enforcement, territorial defense, and armed forces, as you can imagine.
At one point, facetiming with Tanya.
Now Tanya didn't stay with us.
Tanya stayed behind.
She basically found a hotel room up in the Tatra Mountains, which are part of the Carpathian mountain range in Slovakia.
So she stayed at this mountain chateau not far from Krakow, about two hours out of Krakow.
And we've journeyed further into Odessa.
So at that point...
Doing a FaceTime with her just to let her know that we got in safe, that everything was fine, no problem, totally on schedule.
Get approached by officers at the platform.
Why are you recording?
Where are you going?
What are you doing?
We explained to her media.
I showed them.
I was talking to my wife.
She was able to speak to them in Ukrainian, explain the situation.
And they said, okay, they understood and let us go on about our way.
At that point, we were met by two local contacts in Odessa, and they said, what we can do is, if you want, we will take you around Odessa, but also, we can hop in the car, and because we've got the documentation, make it through the checkpoints, and drive all the way up to Mikolayev.
Mikolayev, about an hour and a half, depending on how you drive, looking at the map, It's closer towards the Kherson region.
And the Kherson region is currently occupied by Russian and rebel forces.
Nikolaev is really the last Ukrainian-controlled city before you get to Kherson.
And so I said, well, of course, I said at first, you know, is it safe?
And I said, we're not going to do anything unsafe.
We're going to go through.
But, you know, you have to understand, keep your head on a swivel, pay attention to what's going on.
And do as we say.
I said, sure, no problem.
So we make it through.
I can't even imagine.
I can't even begin to tell you how many checkpoints we had to go through just to get to Mikolaev.
That town is completely on lockdown.
We're talking at least half a dozen checkpoints where we actually stopped and had to show our passports in order to get to Mikolaev.
And probably another...
You know, another half dozen just makeshift checkpoints that we had to drive past where people were still waiting while armed.
And so keep in mind that the Russians have attempted to take Odessa once.
They've also attempted to strike out at the highway that's between Mikolaev and Odessa.
And so they've attempted to take, they've attacked Mikolaev multiple times.
And so this is a place where, now just a full disclosure, there were no attacks while we were there, but we have heard about recent attacks, recent shelling, some attacks going on, even counterattacks being reported along the line towards Herson outside of the city.
And so we wanted to get some of that local color and understand what was happening, understand what it's like to live in a city that's essentially under siege.
And even the support of Odessa, Although it's under siege itself, I haven't talked too much about Odessa because we didn't really spend that much time there.
There's a lot going on.
They have the beaches open for the most part.
If you're downtown, the beaches are open.
If you're outside of town, all those beaches are closed.
And there was a sign up warning about mines on the beach.
So mine implements that have been installed at many of the beaches.
So Various areas.
You're not allowed to go to the beach.
Some people still, though, were jumping off the docks.
People were having a nice time in Odessa, walking up and down the pier, getting food, getting hamburgers, getting ice cream with their kids.
And again, with that same tension, and you realize that people, when they have the nice weather, you want to relieve that tension.
You want to burst that bubble a little bit.
So being able to go to the shore, being able to jump in the ocean, being able to hang out with your friends, just grasp on to a little bit of normalcy.
Amid crazy times.
Amid war.
That's what we saw going on.
People walking around with their families.
And of course, moms and dads.
Looking nervous.
And looking anxious.
And I gotta say, as a father myself, You know, two little boys.
I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like waking up every morning, I'm speaking about Odessa at this point, but waking up every morning and really speaking in general, and not knowing if you're going to have to run, not knowing if there's going to be an air raid, not knowing if there's going to be some shell.
that or other type of weapon that could impact near you and you're living with that constantly day in day out and it's been going on now for three months for three months into this thing and so what else can you say my heart goes out to the people of Ukraine And for those who are interested in raising money for the people of Ukraine, we're going to find some links.
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And regardless of your feelings about this war and about which side, you know, there's obviously very heated discussion about which side started it or which side's in the right and which side's in the wrong.
But you got to put that aside for a second.
And you gotta understand that there are real people that are being affected by this thing.
And there are people who are there just trying to live their lives.
They didn't do anything wrong.
They're completely innocent.
And they are caught up in the middle of it.
Many of them, they don't have a place to go.
They don't have the ability, the luxury to be refugees.
They're stuck.
They're trying to live.
They're trying to live their lives while all this is going on around them.
And so that right there goes to show you Not only the tenacity of the people, but the real heart that people have.
They feel like they're fighting for their homes.
They really do.
And you see it everywhere.
You see the flags up, you see billboards up, people walking around with pins, people walking around clothing, you know, speaking Ukrainian, not speaking Russian.
Because, of course, during the Soviet Union time period, everyone was required to speak Russian, both at school and in business and, you know, in the workplace.
But now there's been a big push for the Ukrainian language.
And so while a lot of people are still speaking both, and there's a lot of similarities, you really do hear a lot of people speaking the Ukrainian language a lot more.
And so these austere conditions that you're in, living day to day, it has to take a toll.
It just has to take a toll.
And that's something that really struck me.
That really struck me emotionally seeing that and just thinking about Myself, my own situation, if my kids were there, my wife was there, what would I do?
How would I go about every day?
And so, and there's honor in that.
There's absolutely honor in defending your family, defending your home.
You can't deny it.
So even in the city of Odessa, almost every single street corner, pillboxes, barricades, fighting positions, and bunkers.
Bunkers dug in even in the city parks.
You saw that at some of the city parks in Lviv as well.
Why?
Because in case something happens, you'd be able to run into the bunker as fast as possible.
We saw bunkers up and down the highway as we were driving to Mikolaev.
Just something, hey, something happens, you're worried that your car might be targeted or might be hit, not targeted, but, you know, hit up, caught up in something, caught up in an explosion, park your car, run out, get into the bunker as fast as possible, you might just survive.
It might be enough to protect you against shrapnel, against, or if a bomb isn't hitting you directly, you might be able to live, you might be able to make it through.
But just understanding that this is something these people have to live with day in, day out.
They're not just coming in to report on it and then being able to go back home.
No.
For them, that is their home.
And for them, this is something that they have to live with constantly.
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Well, I mentioned before about how the minute we left Odessa, the first thing we had to do was show our documents at the first checkpoint.
And this went on again and again for the entire hour and a half as we drove along Coastal Road there towards the city of Mykolaiv.
Now, Mykolaiv has been attacked already, most recently passed in March, about two months ago.
At that point, It seemed like the Russians fell back, tried to consolidate their forces more towards the Donbas region, but they do still receive intermediate fires in and around Mikolayev.
And Mikolayev, of course, as I said before, is the last Ukrainian-controlled city in the south just before the front line between Mikolayev and Kherson.
As we drove down that coastal road, we could see the Black Sea to one side, salt marshes to our left, a lot of open grassland, farms, settlements here and there, little villages dotted the landscape, cows, sheep.
Gas stations still in operation.
For the most part, it seemed as though people were eating.
It seemed that people had food available when they needed it up and down the roadway.
But, of course, multiple checkpoints and even in multiple places along that, the road from Odessa to Mikolaev, we saw bollards and hedgehogs that could be deployed, you know, steel girders in X patterns that could be utilized at a moment's notice to drop across the highway to stop or at least hinder any type of mechanized advance.
And as we got closer and closer, security grew tighter and tighter.
And just before we got into the city, we were stopped, we were questioned.
But again, still not detained or frisked like I was when I went into Davos to report on there.
Still people just asking for your documents.
You turn them over, say here they are, go in.
So we make it to the city of Mikolaev.
Huge industrial city.
One of the largest shipyards of the Black Sea is right there.
Of course, this is where...
During the Soviet times, a lot of the Black Sea Fleet was actually built.
And so a lot of the ships that even, obviously, the Russian Federation inherited from the Soviet Union, a lot of those ships were built right there at Mykolaiv, a city now controlled by a separate country.
And so really speaks to the complexity of the situation there on the ground and on the situation here in this war that there are these competing claims.
There's the people who live there, there's the government of Ukraine, there's the government of Russia, the history.
There's so many overlapping claims to this area.
But again, I just emphasize the thing that's not overlapping, the thing that's immutable, the one factor that's completely immutable are the people caught in the middle.
So driving around Nikolaev, our contacts showed us to multiple buildings that had received shelling, fire.
We were able to document those.
We were able to photo those, some of which had just been in recent days.
Obviously, we're not able to tell how those areas have been utilized prior to them being hit, but we could tell what they were designed for.
One seemed to be a hospital, one was a residential building, and another was in an industrial area down by the river.
Now, that river that Michaliev is situated on is actually the Bug River.
And the Bug River runs through southern Ukraine and then all the way up to right in between Poland and Belarus.
The Bug River forms the current barrier between Poland and Belarus.
So one of the largest rivers in Eastern Europe.
And it empties out into the Black Sea there.
But sort of meets up with what's called the Dnepr Gulf.
So that's the Gulf of the Dnepr River.
The Dnepr and the Bug River both meet and then flow into the Black Sea.
Eventually right across.
So Mikolaev is right across from Crimea in that aspect.
Atmospherically speaking, once we got in to the city of Mykolaiv, if Odessa seemed like a city that was intense, this Mykolaiv seemed like a city under siege.
Military everywhere, bunkers everywhere, barricades everywhere, and yet civilians.
Civilians still moving around, much less people than Maroon in Odessa, and certainly far, far less people that you would see publicly than Lviv.
But carrying groceries, shopping in open air markets, almost like flea market type situations.
Shopping for groceries, shopping for food, shopping for the local meats.
One thing that in Eastern Europe, just in general, even outside of wartime, even in regular peacetime, that they do, is people will shop for...
It's not like the American conception of you go to the supermarket on a Saturday or Sunday, and you stock up for the week, and you throw everything in your fridge, and you just eat it.
Now, people in Eastern Europe, they don't do that.
It's much more farm-to-table.
You go out, Some point in the morning and then you buy the things that you're going to eat through the day.
You eat that through your day so it's fresh.
You have smaller refrigerators and then you go out the next morning and do it all again.
So you're buying the food that day.
Food that is either freshly picked, meat that's freshly butchered, fresh eggs.
It's fresh caught fish.
Of course, fish being a huge staple of the diet they are rolling the Black Sea.
So you still saw some vestiges of that, though obviously far diminished from what it would be in normal times.
And yeah, sometimes cars...
I noticed that cars were not really following the traffic lights.
In some areas, you'd see cars speeding, just zipping down the streets.
Other times, cars just putting along.
We saw older cars a lot, cars that looked like they'd been around for 30, 40 years.
But still with original license plates on and they're still going, still keeping them running.
So again, speaking to the tenacity of the people, the tenacity of the people of this area.
Now we asked at one point of our guides, we said, well, how close can we get, you know, how close can we get, right?
What's the limit that they put on you?
And they said, look, the road to Kherson is completely blocked off right at the front.
You need very special permission to be able to get to do that.
We were on a tight timeframe.
And so the closest we were able to get to anything like that was actually being on the road of the Kherson Highway, which leads out of Mikolaev to Kherson.
Of course, right now, cut off by Russian forces on that front.
And we've seen...
Even in the past few hours, right before we arrived, there was a reported counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces along the Kherson line, probably about an hour from where we were driving time.
And there had been intense fighting along that line.
And that remains to this day to be the contact line.
But of course, you're seeing artillery fires, you're seeing missile fires going back and forth along that line, some of which we were able to document.
And I'll have the videos and photos from this up afterwards.
You know, just wanted to sit down with you guys while I was on the train here, report all of this, get it back out, while my memories were fresh, so that I would have it down.
And hey, gives me something to do while I'm on the train, right?
So, even in there, even in the city of Micolaev, the city under siege, families, children, animals, pets, You got people there.
You got people that are right in the middle of this thing.
So, that just really remains for me to be my main focus.
That for the humanitarian organizations, the volunteers that are willing to go in harm's way, To put themselves in harm's way to be able to get supplies, medical supplies, food, keep that open, and just the workers, right?
We saw so many trucks, obviously driven by truck drivers, and that goes to show you, right?
Even in, you know, we saw the trucker There's convoys being held up in Canada.
Some were held in the United States as well.
And you saw how they were treated.
Well, here we are in a time of war.
And the Ukrainian people are in a time of war.
And who is it that's keeping the supply lines moving?
It's the truckers.
The truckers who are willing to go in day in, day out.
They know.
They know that they could be headed in to a potential conflict zone.
They know they could be headed in towards receiving fire if they need be.
They went all the way in because they want to be able to keep showing up to work, doing what they're doing, get the supplies to the people who can't get out.
And so let's just take a moment.
I'd like to take a moment to remember not just the people of Ukraine, but the truckers of Ukraine.
The truckers who are keeping this whole thing going from the highest ranking general to the lowest ranking private.
If you're eating something, If you're being protected, if you're being aided, that something came off a truck.
So you better thank that trucker.
Ukraine is seen in many ways as the bulwark, the buffer between East and West when it comes to Europe, but also the Greater West, which includes the United States, Canada and Australia.
And there on the front lines, depending on how you look at it, is it a war simply between Ukraine and Russia, or is it a war between the East and the West?
As we now see, Russia and China are joined militarily, although China and the West are joined economically.
This is a very strange situation for China to be in, where they represent a real military threat to the United States, and more precisely, America's allies in Japan, South Korea, but also potentially to the United States, which has outposts in Okinawa, Guam, Singapore, Philippines, off and on.
So the question then becomes, Which side is the greater threat?
I was at Davos last week.
I was able to hear the speech by Dr.
Kissinger.
He said that Ukraine should sue for peace with Russia and be willing to cede territory.
I also heard the speech from President Zelensky in the Q&A that he conducted with Klaus Schwab.
And President Zelensky said that he didn't want to cede a single inch of territory.
And certainly from the fighting spirit that I saw there on the ground of the people defending their homes in Ukraine, they did not seem like they were interested in ceding any territory either.
And so it looks as though if Russia continues forward in this, Which they certainly seem intent to.
That the fighting will continue.
And the fighting will continue for some time.
I don't intend to have any specific overall answers as to what this means.
I don't want to pretend to say that I did anything special in going to visit these areas.
Odessa, Mikolaev, Lviv...
I saw an opportunity.
I was literally in the neighborhood and I wanted to see for myself what was going on on the ground to see what I could see, talk to who I could talk to, and find out what I could find out on my own without having the filters of Twitter and Telegram and YouTube and Rumble and everything else in front of me.
Be able to see with my own two eyes.
I'm very blessed not only To have been able to do so safely, but to have a brother who was willing to come with me, same brother Kevin, who was willing to back me up two years ago, almost two years exactly, when we went into Chaz out in Seattle, reported on there day in, day out, to see what was actually happening on the ground.
Turned that into a mini documentary.
And so, I'll leave you with that.
My observations, musings, and some of my initial thoughts of having been on the ground in those various places in Ukraine at this time, three months into the Russo-Ukrainian War 2022.
We'll see what happens.
Both sides do not seem like they're quitting.
Neither side seems ready to give up anytime soon.
Russia is drawing upon their fast natural resources and their military strength and population.
Ukraine is drawing on their relations with the West, the military alliance there, and the humanitarian aid.
But I do want to emphasize this above all else.
It is the people that should come first.
When you're a government, your job is to defend your people and to defend your national interests in the interest of those people.
In the interest of the people that are in your care, that are in your stead.
And that means that your decisions should be made for the good of the people.
Not the good of the elites.
Not the good of the oligarchs.
Not the Kremlin.
Not Washington, D.C. But for the people on Main Street.
If no one speaks for the people, do the people truly have a voice in government?
Whether that be the Lao Bai Jing of China, whether that be the hard-working people of the West, people of flyover country as they call it, or whether that be the innocent men, women, and children of Ukraine.
It's Jack Posobiec from Human Events Daily, powered by Turning Point USA, coming to you from a night train to Odessa.
