DON GONYEA, HOST:
Over the past few months, Ukraine has been caught in geopolitical jostling at the highest echelons of power. Just this week, the Trump administration signed a deal to share revenues from Ukraine's mineral wealth, tying the U.S. even more closely to negotiations over the country's future. But these are political machinations. What about daily life on the ground in Ukraine, more than three years after the Russian invasion? Well, Kyiv, the capital, is bustling, at least by day.
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JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: It's a city that's absolutely alive and full of creativity and resilience. There's wonderful coffee shops, wonderful restaurants. You see people on the streets all the time during the day, people going to work, kids going to school.
GONYEA: That's Joanna Kakissis, NPR's correspondent in Ukraine.
KAKISSIS: On weekends, I'll go to the theater. We'll walk along the Dnipro River. You'll see these elderly couples dancing on the shore, like, doing the waltz and, you know - and you think, like, this doesn't feel like a city at war.
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KAKISSIS: But every night, practically, there are drone attacks. You're, like, jarred awake by the fact, like, oh, yeah, this is war. We're at war, and it's happening practically every night.
GONYEA: This is the strange duality of life in Ukraine right now, the daily rhythm that's hard to grasp from just following news of the latest political negotiations. So for our weekly Reporter's Notebook segment, we wanted to get on the ground with Joanna, who's been living and working in Ukraine for almost the entire war. We'll pass it off here to our co-host Scott Detrow, who started by asking Joanna about those near nightly aerial attacks.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: People in the early months, everyone - an air raid siren would come and the whole city would troop down to air raid shelters.
KAKISSIS: Yeah.
DETROW: Does that still happen after several years of this?
KAKISSIS: Not that many people go like they used to go. In the beginning, it was every time. Now it's not as often. People have just gotten really used to it. I've - I remember interviewing this woman who said that she was so tired after days and days of not sleeping that even though the explosion, like, was rattling her windows and actually blew out one of her windows, she didn't want to go downstairs to the shelter. She was just like, honestly, I don't care if I die. I'm just too tired (laughter). I'm too tired. I need to sleep. It's really worn people down, the fact that they hear this every night, so - and they've just gotten used to it, as have I.
DETROW: So that's life in Kyiv. What is the best way to describe what it's like when you leave the capital, when you go elsewhere in the country, especially as you move more toward the eastern front where the active, increasingly trench warfare war is taking place?
KAKISSIS: Right, right. You can really tell. There's a big difference. When I'm in Kharkiv or in the Donetsk region, I definitely notice the difference. And for one, there are many, many more explosions. And you also have the fear of something called guided bombs - like, glide bombs - which are very, very destructive, and Kharkiv has suffered from a lot of them. And I've also visited Kherson. There, because the Russians are also nearby there, they'll send over drones that, like, attack people, like, hunt them down and attack them on the street. So it's much more dangerous. I know a couple in Kherson who I've been in touch with for a while. He's a journalist, and she's an illustrator. And she hasn't left the house in two years because she's too afraid to leave her apartment.
DETROW: You know, it's such a strange war, and I'm wondering how you see this from your perspective because on - in some ways, it is a very old style of war - right? - with this static battlefield and trenches and land mines. And then it is a war that is being fought in so many ways by this modern technology, like, both sides aggressively using drones and fighting a war that way.
KAKISSIS: Yeah, that's true. It's incredibly modern in some ways and incredibly World War I in other ways. Drone warfare is really the main stage right now. I'm not saying that infantry don't have a role anymore, but drones are increasingly becoming the weapon of choice by both sides. And especially, you know, the Ukrainians have invested a lot of money in making cutting-edge drones or using drones in cutting-edge ways because they - let's remember, the Ukrainians are vastly outnumbered by the Russians. There are many more Russian soldiers than there are Ukrainian soldiers. And Ukrainians can't lose soldiers, so to them, investing in warfare that will help them get an edge on the battlefield without losing more soldiers or investing more soldiers - that's where it's at for the Ukrainians.
DETROW: And I understand you recently did some reporting where you saw some of these new drones up close, specifically something called a land drone. Tell me what a land drone is.
KAKISSIS: I saw two of them, actually. I should explain. Let's start with the big drone. The big drone is like - looks like a truck with six wheels, and it's about the size of a large bumper car at an amusement park, if you can think of that. And then there's a small drone that looks kind of like a child's play truck, like one where a little person could fit, you know, sort use a steering wheel to move it around. Although there is no steering wheel on this one.
The big drone carries supplies, and it has, like, you know, ammunition, it has food, it has - you know, whatever the soldiers need, they load it up, and they send it in there. The smaller drone - that one is just filled with explosives, and it's got a one-way mission, and it's to kill the enemy. So it's sent in there, and the explosives are detonated once they're close to Russian infantry.
DETROW: Tell me a little more about the specific unit that you spent time with, with these land drones.
KAKISSIS: Sure. Yeah, they were part of the Khartiia Brigade, which is based in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, and it's, like, part of Ukraine's National Guard. It's got a lot of innovators in its ranks, like, a lot of young men in their 20s with Ph.D.s in mathematics and engineering and molecular biology. I spent a lot of time with this 26-year-old evolutionary biologist whose military callsign is Pan, like the Greek god of shepherds and hunters. And he had this thick, black hair and a gaze that just reflected a lot of steeliness and a lot of pain. He'd lost close friends in the war. And he's from part of Ukraine in the East that's been under relentless attack. And he told me a lot about how these land drones work because he himself has modified them so they can work for Ukraine.
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KAKISSIS: What is he doing right now? He's setting up his...
PAN: He's preparing his equipment for testing.
KAKISSIS: OK.
PAN: They're testing how far can it go.
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PAN: Our war is a competition between quantity and quality, and we are quality. This is not only because we have no choice. It is also because we have a capability to use such technology. We have smart people who can use it.
DETROW: Joanna, I want to end with this. This war's been going on for more than three years now. I'm wondering how you approach this beat and how you think about finding new stories in a war that just keeps going on and how you fight the fatigue on your end and how you think about it editorially.
KAKISSIS: Well, I think the challenge is that you still have to keep up with the news, and there's only one of me, so the news is - always takes precedent. But what I really want to do and what I really try hard to find time to do is to tell stories about people. This is about human beings and how they're living through it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I was giving them the food, and they were, like, crying because they said that, I had no food for the three days because I was running from the bombing, and...
KAKISSIS: This isn't a war just about, you know, politics or who kicked who out of the Oval Office or, you know, things like that.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Through interpreter) Because of the attacks, I am very worried. So is my family. But I live close to the subway, and so the way to rehearsals is also underground.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Through interpreter) It's very hard for me to sit here while my fellow soldiers are out there. This is my country, and if I don't defend it, who will?
KAKISSIS: You know, at the end of the day, I don't need to listen to politicians and to - even to policy wonks so much. I need to talk to people because it's people who are experiencing this.
DETROW: That is NPR's Ukraine correspondent, Joanna Kakissis. Thanks so much for talking to us.
KAKISSIS: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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