By Gabriel Michi (*)

Covering a war is indescribable. You experience each moment with indescribable force. Witnessing a unique event is exciting and intense, because the eyes of the world are watching, and being on the ground to cover it for thousands –or even millions– of people is an experience no reporter wants to miss.  

I spent the first days in Poland, where I had arrived on March 1, five days after the war began. At the time, trains and buses were packed with crowds of Ukrainian refugees. They were mostly women and children: men had to stay behind and join the fight. Those first vignettes of heartbreak were the most immediate and palpable images of those exiles’ pain and emotional desolation. 

There were thousands of refugees in the first few hours, and they soon turned into millions in the days that followed the invasion, which started a year ago today. Warsaw Central Train Station was brimming with people who, weeping, resigned, wondered about their fate. It was a sort of improvised refugee camp that served as a distribution center for people who had had to leave their homes, carrying their few bags and memories with them. 

Some of them would stay in the crowded Polish capital. Others would board trains to other cities, other European countries. The Old Continent’s worst exodus since World War II was in motion. Had it not been for the help provided by humanitarian organizations and some State agencies, the exile and the tearing apart of families would have become unbearable.    

After three days in Warsaw we started to approach the Ukrainian border. Our mission was to cross that forbidden line. We passed through other Polish cities where the picture was the same: train stations turned into improvised welcome centers for Ukrainian refugees in the freezing temperatures of a cruel winter that wouldn’t let up even for a war. 

When we got to the border, the picture we saw in train stations extended endlessly. On the Polish side, soup kitchens tried to ease the hunger and cold. Dozens of volunteers from all over the world were offering their hands and hearts to the suffering refugees. In rows of charity tents packed side to side, some gave out food, while others distributed warm clothes. All offered the warm embrace of solidarity.  

Every story was a piece of history, and at the same time, they were one single story. The story of hurt. Uprooting. Fear. We could hear all that in every testimony. Even though we’d covered so much suffering before, they broke our hearts.  

To get to Ukraine, first we tried the Dorohusk (Poland)-Starovoitove (Ukraine) crossing, but we couldn’t, they wouldn’t let us. Its proximity to the Bielorrussian border, an ally of Russia, had made everything more dangerous in that area.

We persisted the next day at a crossing further 200 kilometers away, along the road that connects Hrebenne (Poland) with Rava-Ruska (Ukraine). After several hours, we made it. As crazy as it sounds, we celebrated. We had achieved one of the most difficult goals in our mission. 

The picture was the same at every border crossing: huge numbers of women and children who had managed to cross into Poland and men who stayed on the Ukrainian side and had reached the final frontier –the family separation line– hugging those who were leaving with the bitter taste of “the last time”, a final good-bye. This is the place where families break apart. Where stories break apart.   

In Ukraine the picture was unequivocal. We were the only ones going in, entering a country under bombardment. An endless line of cars was going in the opposite direction, trying to escape. We were definitely going the wrong way. 

On the way to Lviv we started to notice more signs that the war had arrived: trenches by the roadside, barricades across the roads –like the typical scenes of war we see in films– road signs covered to disorient the enemy, giant posters appealing to Ukrainian nationalism and cities under blackouts to protect themselves from nocturnal bombings. And, of course, an endless convoy of military trucks. 

In Lviv came more images of war: sirens wailing at night forcing everyone into bomb shelters, walled-up public buildings, militarized streets, an 8 p.m. curfew and a population living amid uncertainty and terror. Lviv train station had turned into “the goodbye station”, the diaspora’s last stop in Ukrainian territory. 

During our reporting, we saw how this way of life, incredibly, became second nature: a “normality” out of the abnormality, at least during the day. Night was a different matter. Then the only beings alive were the ghosts. 

I tried to show the other side of the war, together with my partner Leo Da Re, an Argentine documentary maker resident in Moscow. The places that had been bombed by the Russians. We went to Lutsk, where the airport had been destroyed just hours before. And there, as on the road, we could sense the mistrust, even towards the international press. The Ukrainians – especially the soldiers and the more radicalized civilians crewing the barricades – saw Russian spies in every foreigner.

And that is how we ended up being detained by the Ukrainian army while trying to cover a bombing in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, two hours from Lviv. We were interrogated by a head of the feared Intelligence Services. Our sin: accidentally arriving at an airfield that was supposed to be secret. In truth, that’s where our GPS led us. 

We were incommunicado for 14 hours. They erased all our camera footage. They took our phones. The Argentine Foreign Ministry had to intervene to guarantee our lives. Leo’s Moscow residence made his situation worse – he was almost taken prisoner, and got deported to Poland the next day. I went with him all the way because I feared the worst for him.

After 36 hours of uncertainty, we were able to cross the border, to speak of our experiences and continue this exciting and often dangerous job. But that’s what journalism is about. Living to tell the tale. And telling it to live.   

(*) Gabriel Michi is a journalist specialized in international correspondence. He is the director of www.mundonews.com.ar. He worked as a C5N correspondent in Ukraine at the start of the war.