2025-01-07
13 分钟Hi,
my name is Valerie Hopkins and I'm a foreign correspondent covering Russia for the New York Times.
We're coming up on the grim anniversary of almost three years of the war in Ukraine.
I'm one of the few New York Times reporters who has reported from both sides of the conflict,
both in Ukraine and in Russia.
In Ukraine, no matter where you are, you can feel that it's a country at war.
I remember arriving in the summer of 2023 at the Kyiv train station and it was full of soldiers.
And almost immediately I saw an amputee.
All over cities in Ukraine and all over social media,
I would encounter former soldiers and families that were struggling.
By contrast, in Russia, where it's illegal to call the invasion a war,
you don't see veterans in wheelchairs.
You don't really even see people in uniform.
Major streets have billboards that celebrate soldiers as war heroes,
and there are new TV shows that invite officers
in well pressed uniforms to speak about the war in heroic,
almost cliche terms.
But most of that stuff feels very, very removed from the harsh realities of the front.
It's really hard to estimate the number of Russians who have been killed and,
and injured in the war in Ukraine.