Myroslava Gongadze

On February 23, Myroslava Gongadze met for dinner with some Ukrainian combat medics who had come to Washington under the Open World program. She tried to convince them that war was certain to break out, as she’d recently heard the information from her own sources. The medics did not want to believe her. However several hours afterwards, Russia did indeed invade Ukraine.

"My flight to Ukraine on February 23 was cancelled,” Myroslava recalls. “The invasion began in the evening of that very day, Washington time.”

In January, Myroslava posted on Facebook about her plan to move back to Kyiv. She had been appointed to establish and head the new Voice of America bureau in Eastern Europe. During January and February, Myroslava had been finishing her last preparations to relocate. In January, she went to Ukraine together with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. The latter warned about Russia’s likely invasion in an exclusive interview with Myroslava, which was broadcast live on several national TV channels, but a few minutes later, President Zelensky made his own appeal denying such a possibility.

“That was very difficult to accept,” Myroslava admits. “Unfortunately, few would listen to American experts and officers then, or maybe people calculated the risks differently. Two months before, my sources had already begun warning about the war. My friends in Washington realizing what the Ukrainians were about to go through. Nobody wanted to believe that full-scale war could really happen.”

After Blinken’s visit, Myroslava returned to Washington to sort out matters concerning her work. She was expecting the worst, but preferred not to cancel her plans for relocation until the last possible minute. In March, she came to Warsaw to set up her office there. Since then, Myroslava has been working from Poland, visiting Ukraine from time to time.

The focus of her work has shifted as well. Once, Myroslava used to explain the situation in the USA and the world to Ukrainians, as host and head of VoA's Ukrainian service in Washington; now she explains the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe to the global audience. Her materials are translated from English for 47 other VoA services. She is happy that her long-held dream has finally come true. For ages, Myroslava had tried to convince her supervisors that a VoA bureau had to be set up in Eastern Europe because that region was worth more consideration; and now, finally, she is managing this process herself.

Sometimes she has to explain what’s going on in Ukraine to audiences who know little about it. Thus, some time ago she spoke about the tortures, murders, and war crimes in Bucha on Columbian TV. It’s a common thing, she claims, in countries with pro-Russian governments and media in Asia, Africa, or South America, where the Russian-Ukrainian war still constitutes an unexplained issue; those regions are rather difficult to work for. Yet Voice of America has sizeable audiences there, so Myroslava has a good opportunity to tell the truth about Ukraine to these people too.

“I was sure that my mission was to be here, because we definitely needed to stay in Ukraine,” says she. “The war has somewhat altered our plans, but we are staying on the course I’d settled for us long before.”

At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, she was initially broadcasting from the Polish-Ukrainian border, and she also covered President Biden’s visit to Poland. It was then that she first observed how unprepared the international humanitarian organizations were to accept the fact that the Ukrainian refugees were mostly good-looking and well-educated people, though many of them had truly lost everything. People came in an endless stream, and the Poles were the first who came to help, constantly providing Ukrainians with food and transfers.

“And then it was no less interesting to watch the reverse flow,” Myroslava recalls. “There is a common expectation that a refugee must be ragged, starving, and never willing to return home. Ukrainians, instead, appeared to be quite the opposite. Besides, the Ukrainian mothers instantly began searching for schools, even though their children continued studying in Ukraine remotely. Europeans could not fathom this. Ukrainians wanted to look good, take care of themselves and be responsible for their families. I do not want to romanticize people, though: sometimes, of course, there have been different cases.”

Myroslava’s first journey to wartorn Ukraine was in June. She had no clue what to expect, but at the end, her experience of staying in sunny and lively Kyiv was incredible. The fear she had strongly felt at a distance gave way to a distinct sense of community. Myroslava visited the Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kyiv regions, where she saw a lot of grief and misery, but also resurgence.

In the village of Moschun, for instance, Myroslava and her team met a woman whose house had been destroyed and whose son had been killed by Russians. She said that she had lost the meaning of life – but then she treated the journalists to strawberries grown in her own garden.

That is, she wanted to share whatever she still had with others. A girl of three was jumping over the ruins repeating, “I am not afraid of anything”, because that was what her mother had taught her while they were hiding in the basement. Another man had lost his amazing home where he used to shelter his neighbors. The house itself, the pond, the rose garden, the library – everything was destroyed, but the landlord aged seventy was already planning its reconstruction. Myroslava was impressed and inspired by such faith and hope despite all the tribulations those people had suffered.

And so was the whole outside world, after all.

“Ukrainians are treated today like cyborgs with angelic wings,” says Myroslava. “They are proponents of faith, inspiration, and a very strong idea of creative responsibility. Ukrainians are considered cool people now. Ukraine had remained in the dark for centuries, so now it’s time for it to rise from the ashes and shine.”

Nobody expected that Ukraine would endure, that Zelensky would not flee into exile, that Kyiv would be defended. The people organized themselves and followed their President and the army. Not a single expert was counting on that. Today, President Zelensky personifies the heroism of the Ukrainian people. Myroslava remembers his recent visit to the U.S., Zelensky’s very first foreign trip in the ten months of the full-scale invasion.

“He is seen as a god now,” says she. “I’m only recounting what I have heard myself. Everyone wants to touch a god.”

From the political perspective, that was a crucial visit for strengthening American-Ukrainian relations and demonstrating that the U.S. is investing in Ukraine’s victory. It was important for the rest of the NATO allies to see that they were not helping enough, for the other countries of Eastern Europe – and for the nations who are not members of the transatlantic coalition as well – to know that the U.S. supported them. Ukraine’s victory will eventually be part of Biden’s political and presidential heritage.

While much of the world sees Ukraine through the lens of the media, Myroslava has an opportunity to witness its existence personally. Thus, she has been surprised by some other things – like, for instance, people swimming in the sea full of mines. Myroslava happened to see them from her balcony in Odesa.

Of course, Myroslava has to cover plenty of grief and pain. She was particularly overwhelmed by the mass graves in Izium.

“That smell, that energy is never to be forgotten,” says she. “It is something that will remain with me forever. I never thought I would be that shocked, given that I have already seen a dead body.”

Myroslava is referring to the identification of her own husband’s body. Georgiy Gongadze was a journalist killed in autumn 2000; his headless body was found in the woods of Tarashcha near Kyiv. The culprits have still not been punished. It was after Georgiy’s murder that Myroslava and her daughters moved to the U.S., where she later became the head of the Ukrainian service of VoA.

Georgiy had warned about the danger of Russia back in the 1990s. He made documentaries about the war in Georgia: that’s why Myroslava remembers Sukhumi and Abkhazia in the years 1991, 1993 and 1994 very well.

“In 1994, Georgiy said that Russia was involved in the war in Abkhazia, but his statements weren’t considered worth publication,” she recalls. “He said that Russian aggression against Ukraine would begin from Crimea, but nobody took him seriously. In the early 1990s, Ukrainians did not want to know anything about the war-torn countries in their vicinity. Had we ever cared about Moldova as Transnistria was occupied? Of course, we had many other problems, but these countries were experiencing the same things then as Ukraine is today. Instead we just turned a blind eye to that.”

Later, in 2008, Myroslava also saw the Ukrainian media repeating the Russian narratives about the Russian-Georgian war. She thinks that Ukraine’s society and media community are now paying the price of the lesson they failed to learn.

“I hope that we will be wiser this time,” says Myroslava, “and prevent ourselves from falling into the same trap.”

Still, she believes that Ukrainian society has grown mature enough over the years of independence, and that the two revolutions have shaped a new generation of conscious Ukrainians who are now defending their country in the war.

“It’s something truly unique that we are witnessing now,” Myroslava insists. “I hope that at least some of this sense of community and mutual assistance will remain with us.”

She hopes that the people in Ukraine will remain constructive after the periods of mobilization and mutual assistance, because they will need to rebuild everything that was destroyed, and restore Ukrainian journalism after it recovers from the restrictions dictated by the military situation.

“Then I’ll have enough work for half my life,” she says in jest.

Meanwhile, Myroslava is working on footage from Ukraine. Her plan is to stay in Ukraine to mark the first year of the invasion, and to completely relocate the Eastern European bureau to Kyiv later in 2023.