Dispatches from Ukraine

Dispatches from Ukraine
Russia
Ukraine
war

A collected series of dispatches from Paweł Pieniążek, translated from the original Polish by Łukasz Chełmiński.

Admiringly called “the poet laureate of hybrid war,” Paweł Pieniążek is a journalist and regular contributor to Tygodnik Powszechny, a Polish weekly. He covered protests in Kyiv’s Maidan square–where he was badly beaten by the Berkut riot police–from their beginnings in November 2013. Paweł spent years embedded in the Donbas, reporting on a conflict that became the topic of his first two books, Greetings from Novorossiya (available in English) and Wojna, która nas zmieniła (The War that Changed Us). He has since reported from Afghanistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Iraq and Syria. Wydawnictwo Czarne published Paweł’s Po kalifacie. Nowa wojna w Syrii (After the Caliphate. A New War in Syria) in 2019. Pieniążek has also been published in Gazeta Wyborcza, Dziennik Opinni, and New Eastern Europe. In 2015 he was awarded a Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale University and in 2021 a Milena Jesenská Fellowship for Journalists at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.

Fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian, Pieniążek has been reporting from Ukraine for nearly a decade. He had returned to cover the escalating threat of Russian military buildup on the country’s borders for Tygodnik Powszechny and was in the eastern city of Kharkiv when the invasion began. His reports cut through the cacophony of conflict to shed light on the tragic and pointless human cost of war.

We will keep adding translated dispatches here:

February 19th, 2022 – The first day of the end of the world

February 22, 2022 – Residents of Kyiv: We want to know how to defend our families

February 23rd, 2022 – Kyiv residents are buying military gear

February 24th, 2022 – Russia has attacked Ukraine

February 24th, 2022 – When they shell your home

February 26, 2022 – Increasingly difficult to find bread in Kyiv

February 27, 2022 – House keys

February 28, 2022 – Wartime Maidan

February 28, 2022 – “It’s hard to shake off negative thoughts.” Kyiv lives under threat from rockets

March 1, 2022 – Territorial Defense of Ukraine: Defending our Neighborhood

March 2, 2022 – Kyiv: a rocket falls near the train station