Vadym Karpyak is a journalist, TV and radio host. He speaks about his own experience of returning to Bucha, living in the newsroom while working on the national TV news marathon, and the Ukrainians’ professional capability to survive.
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First days of the war - thoughts, experiences, actions
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On February 24, Vadym Karpyak forgot to switch his phone off for the night. He came home late from his evening show, and it was past midnight when he went to sleep. And so it happened that his editor woke him with a call at around 5 am, and said that “it had begun”.
“I remember asking myself, ‘What on earth has begun?’,” says Vadym. “And then I heard the explosions.”
His family house in Bucha was located just a few kilometers from the airport at Hostomel.
Vadym woke his wife and told her what was going on. Together they woke their children. The kids understood everything. They knew that Ukraine had been at war since 2014, that Crimea was occupied, but they were frightened anyway: what if the Russians attacked Bucha? Vadym reassured them that they wouldn’t, but he would soon be proved very wrong.
His wife took her own children and her acquaintance’s daughter to Kolomiyia, as they planned beforehand: she and Vadym had prepared cash and kept the car’s tank full just for such an event. Vadym himself went to work.
In the evening, he was about to go home: his father-in-law, who’d come earlier to spend some time with the family, planned to return to his native city of Kherson on February 25. Vadym had tried to convince him to move westward, too, but to no avail.
Nevertheless, Vadym had to spend the night at work. In the morning, it turned out to be impossible for him either to get to Bucha or to take his father-in-law out of the town. The latter was evacuated as late as on March 11 through a humanitarian corridor.
“He got to know all my neighbors while hiding in the basement,” Vadym recalls. “And then, me and my colleagues picked him up from the railway station in Kyiv and took him to stay with us in our newsroom.”
By that time, the whole crew of the national news telethon had already settled there. Vadym slept on a couch, and they found a folding bed for his father-in-law. The latter was incessantly monitoring the reports about Kherson, so Vadym had to explain to him how to distinguish fake news, why the excessively high level of optimism was not that relevant, brought him books and recommended movies to watch.
Very soon Vadym found himself part of the non-stop live broadcasting marathon. Six hours a day in the studio was seriously challenging, even for an experienced broadcaster like him. But eventually, the whole team learned to cope. Vadym bought himself socks and underwear, some items for personal hygiene, and took extra pants and a T-shirt from a dressing room at the TV channel HQ. In the office there were a bathroom, a washing machine, and a kitchen where the colleagues gathered for dinners. The chief cameraman had gotten hold of a commercial stove and cooked for everyone. Moreover, they made a joint effort to set up a bomb shelter in a neighboring building: they spread linoleum there, insulated the walls, provided an internet connection, and brought a few heaters. Vadym resumed his piano lessons for the first time since the pandemic lockdown in 2020. The very possibility of learning a new melody seemed like a saving grace.
“It was about more than personal relations: it was about survival,” Vadym speaks of his cohabitation with his team. “We’d never had any conflicts or controversies. We felt like a flock in a purely biological sense, and we had to row in the same direction, like oarsmen on a common boat.”
Along with the casual chores, every day the team faced journalistic dilemmas. They had to pick the most important news from the deluge of information and explain to the audience what was going on, constantly checking against disclosing secret matters, or asking speakers too much on the air or making some other mistake – because its price in wartime would have been much higher than in peacetime. Vadym did all this in accordance with his own understanding of good, evil, and professional standards.
His appearances gave a calming effect to the audience; however, that wasn’t his main objective.
"The TV multiplies your emotions because it’s a model for many people,” Vadym explains. “If you are worrying and see a TV host worrying too, you become twice as distressed. So we ought to hold our emotions back, so the audience can focus on the information as such. A number of my colleagues do the opposite because it’s far easier – and they enjoy much more active feedback. Even so, I always try to control myself.”
In his book The Dehumanization of Art, José Ortega y Gasset compares art with glass. Once, glass had to be transparent so that people could see the real world through it, but then the emergence of photography pushed the realism of the image into the background. Vadym considers this an appropriate metaphor for journalism, since its main goal is to act like a magnifying glass, giving people an extended but still honest view of reality, unvarnished but devoid of excessive blackness at the same time.
He still lives in the newsroom, but tries to get back home as often as possible. There’s no internet connection or convenient public transport there thus far, but the water and electricity are back, and Vadym’s father-in-law has already returned to stay there. On April 3, Vadym visited Bucha for the first time since its liberation. He came there immediately with his colleagues once journalists were allowed into the town.
“There was such a smell everywhere…” Vadym recalls. “A strong smell of burning. The wrecked equipment and dead bodies were still scattered all over the streets. It was a gray, drizzly day; the low heavy clouds gave a cinematic effect, and put a great deal of stress on my mind.”
But what impressed Vadym the most was his fellow citizens, who told him that there had been some “good Russians” in Bucha too. By ‘good’ they meant those who simply had not slaughtered them. Vadym didn’t even need to ask them to talk: those people started the conversation themselves because they desperately wanted to speak out. Listening to them, he felt that he would never be able to understand them because his background was different, even though the Russians had shelled Kyiv as well.
“They did not make excuses for the Russians, but when it came to their personal trauma, they tended to see them as good guys,” explains Vadym. “It was some form of Stockholm syndrome.”
That was the first time that Vadym saw his own house after the occupation. A missile had hit it, but luckily nothing had been burned. The house was just a little broken by the missile fragments. His drunkard neighbors had survived the warfare too: they said that they’d even boozed with the occupiers.
Vadym hasn’t entertained a single thought of moving elsewhere. He has been living with his family in Bucha since 2013, and the town is still associated with peaceful times in his mind because Vadym never witnessed its occupation. His children grew up in that house. The family planted flowers and trees in their own courtyard. That was their happy life. Vadym considers the very idea of leaving his town as treason and surrender. He wants to reclaim his home, and he still loves the maimed town of Bucha, as if it was a dear person with a postoperative scar.
Reclaiming your own home epitomizes your longing for life, despite all the enemy’s attempt to destroy it, says Vadym. He is convinced that Ukraine is headed in the right direction, as its people have chosen to break off ties with the Soviet past and promote their own culture instead.
This is the way things must proceed, although some issues are still rather far from being perfect, says Vadym; he recommends looking at the dynamics of changes in the country.
“We Ukrainians have made huge progress even since 2013, not to mention 1991,” Vadym ponders. “It’s clearly visible in the dynamics. The main thing for us is not to stop halfway. I see us as people who have great potential for survival, because we are the direct descendants of professional survivors.”
Over the last hundred years every generation of Ukrainians has had their own trauma, be it WWI, the Holodomor, WWII, Chornobyl, the collapse of the USSR, the 1990s, or the Russian-Ukrainian war, he goes on. It’s impossible to invest resources in survival and development at the same time; yet today, our country is professionally engaged in survival. Vadym is convinced that the Ukrainians have mastered the impossible. Now they know how to survive whilst contributing to their own progress. The country’s economic condition is quite poor now, but, now they have had an idea of the better life, they’ll do our best to regain, reclaim, and rebuild everything that has been lost.
The same goes for the culture. Russians sought to exterminate it for centuries, but nonetheless, they’ve managed to preserve it.
“It’s bloodlands, according to the definition by Timothy Snyder,” says Vadym. “Russia is a curse on our land. We’ve been at constant war in different forms throughout the last 350-370 years because Russia is permanently seeking to exterminate us. Now we have two options – go all the way to finally close this issue, which will cost us dozens of thousands lives, or accept some territorial compromise and get prepared for the next war. Only one can be left alive: either independent Ukraine or imperial Russia. Russia’s forces are way too small to exterminate us, but our forces aren’t enough to bring this imperial project down. Still, I believe that we will prevail. We gave rise to them, and we must destroy them. Though we as a society are faced with a terrible choice: sacrifice thousands of people now, or pass the war down to our children and grandchildren.”
Presently, Vadym considers art the easiest way to invest in development for Ukraine. Its spontaneous manifestations are fast and effective. ‘Good evening, we are from Ukraine’ is an easily accessible message. His favorite definition of culture, among hundreds of others, runs as follows: culture is a superbiological form for the organization of humankind. In the case of Ukraine, its culture today can yield a more efficient result than its economy or education, though nobody knows for sure whether anything of this current creative array will last long. It often depends on mere chance.
As for now, Vadym dreams of restoring the pre-war map of Ukraine in his memory. He wants the cities he regularly mentions during his appearances on TV to stop being hotspots at last.
“Izium, Mariupol, Avdiivka… Severodonetsk… My God, there are plenty of them. I want to see them all from the normal perspective, not that of wartime.”