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Johan Nel: There were thousands of people storming. You got bomb sirens going off every 12 minutes, every 15 minutes. Then you're in the train station, then you have to run outside, go to the metro for a bomb shelter. Then the sirens stop, then you go back into the train, so then we try to compromise and we got a taxi to the border of Poland for $1,000.

David Remnick: As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has gathered in intensity, something like a million refugees have left the country. Not only Ukrainians, but foreigners too. People who are in the country to study or travel. Johan Nel is South African and he was only in Kyiv to get a visa. He'd been there a few days when the fighting broke out.

Johan: We got to the border of Ukraine, or not exactly because there was a line of cars, traffic going into the border about 25 kilometers long. They said it would take us 70 to 80 hours to get to the front of the gate. We did not have enough food or water to wait in the car for 70 or 80 hours so we decided, okay, we're going to walk because if we walk it will take us 14 to 15 hours.

Eventually, we got to the Polish border and then it was complete chaos, thousands of people. People telling us that they've been here for five days. They've been here for four days, for four nights, with no shelter, no water, no food, no toilets. They prioritized Ukrainian people. Ukrainian women, and children. You've got women from other nationalities that's standing there in the cold. They're not doing anything to them. They had us in this small block where everyone had to stand.

People were fighting, breaking bottles. I was concerned for my safety there. Then eventually someone, so some guy in the military told me like, "Dude, just go to another border because they're not going to let anyone in. The people freaking out here." Then I decided to go back to Lviv. I turned around. I spent $1,000. I walked for 25 kilometers. I wasted almost two days and here I just go back to Lviv as if I wasted everything. Everything to waste.

By then, I almost had like 50 hours with no sleep so I really needed one full night's rest before I can take on another plan for the next day. Then I met up with a fellow South African that was also in Lviv and he said he needs to go. I told him, "Yes, man, I'm also alone. Let's leave together," so we go to the Lviv railway. Same story. Absolute chaos. The boards are wrong.

The boards in the railway station tells you, yes, this train going there is coming this time on this platform. Then you go there that time, on that platform, and then another train arrives going into the eastern direction, back to Kharkiv or back to Kyiv or back to Zaporizhzhia. We get this taxi driver we're telling him like, "Yes, man can you take us?" He's a Bolt driver. "Can you take us to Uzhhorod?" Uzhhorod is the town where you can go to either the Slovakian border or the Hungarian border.

He says, "No, there's too many military checkpoints. There's too much snow. It's snowing. I can take you. The people will charge you like $1,000 again." I was like, "Oh, no. I don't have this money anymore." He's like, okay, he might have an idea. He calls a bus driver. The bus driver tells him he already left from Lviv to Uzhhorod but he's not far. The taxi driver offers to catch up with the bus driver. We're like, "Yes, thank God."

David: Johan got to that bus and made it across the border, but countless others are stuck in a situation of utter terror.

Johan: We've got at least 350 South African students that studies medical and whatever and most of them are in their fourth year. You've got universities being bombed. What's going to happen with their four years of studies? Where are they going to go? They wasted four years money, four years of studies. They have no plan. Nothing. South African people do not have a lot of money. Most of them, they're on scholarships. I can just imagine what that must feel like.

David: Johan Nel. We reached him in Budapest last week.

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It's a privilege to speak to you both. We're speaking on Thursday. The city of [unintelligible 00:05:27] has fallen. Kharkiv is under bombardment, as are other cities. Now Josh, you spent the night not in a bomb shelter, but in a metro station, which is now in effect a bomb shelter. What were people saying?

Joshua Yaffa: People are there because they're seeing, especially in places like Kharkiv and Ukraine's North East, they're seeing apartment blocks being hit with cluster munitions. They're seeing people fall dead in the streets as rocket fire rains down on them from above. To get to the point where you're coming night after night, and sleeping on a rolled-up blanket on the cold cement floor of a subway station, suggests or belies a level of really terror and dread that is quite real and quite palpable in the city.

It really makes people quite angry and I think that's, on the one hand, totally understandable, if not obvious. There's the degree of absolute fury that I found among just about everyone I talked to in Kyiv these days. Certainly the people who were spending the night in this metro station, how angry they are at Putin, how angry they are at Russia. That really gets to the issue of the utter futility of this war.

Not just in its human cost, and the horror that is already inflicted and will continue to inflict for some days, and I'm afraid weeks to come, but it just beggars the mind as to what Putin was thinking here. In other words, all wars have some kind of political solution. Clearly, Putin had something in mind when he invaded Ukraine, and that something presumably was some sort of new pro-Russian government, built in the ashes of the Ukrainian state that Putin was sent on destroying.

The degree and passion and depth of anger here that people have toward Russia, and these are not people-- I'm not pushing or prompting people. I'm asking the most open-ended questions, even just sometimes as simple as, "Hi, how are you?" in the metro. There's the degree of absolute anger you get toward Russia, makes this whole idea that this country could ever go along with or submit itself to rule installed at the barrel of a gun for Moscow, just makes the whole project seem so impossible and therefore so much more futile and really dark.

David: Masha, you just left Moscow. Tell me what kind of support this war has. We know that the airwaves are flooded with pro-war propaganda, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Western propaganda. You're actually speaking to people. Who's for this?

Masha Gessen: Well, it's hard to tell. Actually, can I pick up on something that Josh said first?

David: Sure.

Masha: Because I was thinking as I was listening to Josh, it makes no sense that he would imagine that he could bring Ukraine to its knees. What would he do, even if he bombs Kyiv out of existence and installs what he thinks is a puppet government. The thing is that, I think what he's thinking is that he has the experience of having done that. In 1994 and again in 2000, Moscow bombed everything out of Grozny and then it installed a puppet dictator who somehow manages to-- I mean, not somehow. Through sheer terror manages to run a Putin fiefdom in Chechnya.

If you go to Grozny, you will see portraits of Putin and it is the absolute image of a land where people fought a people's war of resistance that has been completely subjugated. I think that's what he imagines will happen with Ukraine. I think he's probably been assured, to the extent that he consults with anybody, but I think has been assured by his military men that they could take Ukraine fast and do the same thing. I think he believed that Ukrainians were waiting for him with open arms.

Now, to the question of who supports this war. I have talked to people who support the war, although it's not the war as we see it that they support, because what they're seeing on television is very different. The newscasts in Russia tell you that Russia is involved in peacekeeping. I kid you not. A peacekeeping operation. Sometimes they call it a peacekeeping operation, sometimes they call it a special operation for the cessation of hostilities. It's a really Orwellian sort of framing, and Russians are convinced on the one hand that they're fighting pure evil, that Ukrainians are Nazis.

They also think that they're fighting the United States and Ukraine is a proxy, but on the other hand, they have no images of the actual war. What Russian television is showing are refugees from the [unintelligible 00:11:19] area who are saying that they're fleeing Ukrainians, who are receiving gratefully humanitarian aid. There's really no blood and gore. There's very little imagery of damaged buildings or streets, but even if you see them, you don't see the devastated cities. You see a village that has had a missile hit it and the Russians claim that it was the Ukrainians. They imagine a completely different thing.

David: Masha, this is the digital age. Speaking about whether Putin can stay in control as a leader, the former British ambassador to Russia, Sir Roderic Lyne, told the BBC recently that Putin's biggest weakness now is the mobile phone. Ukrainians are calling up their friends and relatives in Russia, and they're sending pictures of the truth into Russia, so the truth is going to get in and Putin can't stop that. That's what Roderic Lyne said. What do you make of that argument?

Masha: I think it maybe overstating the facts for two big reasons. One is that people are often really resistant to factual interventions in their belief systems and in their ideologies. I have talked to people in the last few days who have relatives in Ukraine, but in some way or another, pretty much anybody you run into in Russia has a connection to Ukraine. If it's not family, it's somebody that they knew through work, somebody they studied with. For a lot of middle class and higher people, it's people who provided domestic help, often nannies that raised them, so close connections.

What they say is that those people have been brainwashed by the Ukrainian Nazis and they don't know what's happening. They dismiss the images that they receive as fakes, so that's one reason, is this desire to push away any information that interferes with a worldview and an ideology. The other possibly even bigger problem, is that Putin has really destroyed the public sphere, including the digital public sphere.

When we talk about people getting pictures of the truth, we're not really talking about individuals. We imagine that there's networks and people exchange these pictures, and they make their way online, and they bubble up to bigger media, and then they trickle down again to individual people, and that information circulates, but information doesn't circulate. Just in the last week, Russia has lost two of its main independent media outlets, and a third one, Novaya Gazeta, led by the Nobel peace prize winner Dmitry Muratov, today announced that it had decided to submit to censorship.

David: Josh, you've lived in Moscow now for 10 years. Lots of people you know have left the country. Lots of people you know, Masha, have left the country. A person I talked to who was a presenter on TV Rain, one of the outlets that's been shut down, said the country has been completely transformed. That sanctions and the feeling of wartime Russia as an invader, has completely transformed the economics and the psychology of the Moscow they knew. Josh, can you respond to that? I know that you're in Ukraine, but I'm sure you are wired into Moscow as well.

Joshua: It's been interesting to listen and read Masha over the last few days to get a glimpse into a city and a world that I've known so well for years, and following with just absolute horror and confusion at how quickly things have changed. We always knew that any war that Russia launched in Ukraine would not just be absolutely devastating for Ukraine, but utterly transformative for Russia as well, and that seems to be exactly what's happening, and it's been disorienting and strange to watch that from afar.

I've been in Ukraine now for almost a month and I've seen, and certainly heard, in terms of talks with friends and following along with what's happening in Moscow from people I've known well and known for some years just what an utterly-- I don't want to say unrecognizable place it is because we've been on this trajectory for a while. You've written about it. Masha has written about it at length. Russia was not a flourishing, open, healthy democracy two weeks ago. Far from it, but the phase we're entering into now is quite dark.

It's dark because of the economic effects for real people. These are millions of people who already have seen 20 plus years of Putin's rule. Now we'll see that continue for an indefinite period of time, but in a much harsher reality, living in a country that's essentially akin to Venezuela or Iran in terms of its international isolation. It's hard to get money into Moscow these days. It's hard to fly in or out of Moscow these days. In fact, that's almost impossible, really, to get anywhere internationally from Moscow. Whether that actually raises a real political danger for Putin and the stability of his rule, I'm not sure.

I think that Putin has organized his system in such a way as to really disassociate or prevent discontent from actually reaching the political system itself and causing any direct threat to him. I think we may be stuck with this really dark system and dark arrangement of power, more close to a military dictatorship than the postmodern authoritarianism we've seen in Russia of late. I'm afraid the story for Russia itself is quite dark.

David: Masha, you were recently at some protests, but the crackdown seems to becoming hard and fast, and there's even talk of martial law in Moscow, if not the throughout Russia. That's entirely speculative, but that's very much the talk of Moscow as I understand it and beyond. What would that mean?

Masha: Well, we don't know, but people fear most that the borders will close. The rumor that's circulating is that tomorrow, Friday, there's going to be an emergency joint session of parliament. [unintelligible 00:18:08] that there's going to be an emergency joint session of parliament and that they're going to declare a state of emergency or martial law and prevent people between the ages of 18 and 50, people of both sexes, from leaving the country. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find out that this was a rumor spread to induce all the people who would leave the country to hurry up and leave the country.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we don't actually see martial law or a state of emergency come down tomorrow, but I think right now the regime is doing everything to force all of its enemies out of the country. Then at a certain point, yes, they're going to close the borders and put everyone who's perceived as the enemy who's still inside, in prison.

David: I hear from a lot of Ukrainians, Masha, saying Russia can't win this war. Even if they win the cities in the short term, and they subdue and pulverized these cities, that they will be engaged in a prolonged guerilla war with Ukrainians. What about this claim? Are the Ukrainians just trying to get themselves to be brave and endure? Which would be perfectly understandable, or strategically or even tactically, can they win a war against Russian aggression?

Masha: I wouldn't say that they can win a war, but I'm certain that Ukrainians can prevent Russia from winning the war. I think there's no way for Moscow to come to dominate Ukraine. I think that that image of Chechnya that Putin has, is not transferable to Ukraine. That was an even more unequal contest, and it also cost Moscow a lot of money to basically buy the shell of a country, shell of a land that was left after Chechnya. I shudder to think that Putin plans to do the same thing in Ukraine, but I don't think he can succeed. I think the best case scenario is that Russia just gets bogged down in a prolonged conflict with guerilla fighters.

David: Josh, how do you think this ends? Is there any way to even know?

Joshua: I'm afraid not. Like Masha just said, I don't see Ukraine capitulating. It may be militarily defeated in the sense that at a certain point it's regular army may be overwhelmed by the military might that is, or are the Russian armed forces. That's a big if. I don't think that's necessarily inevitable. It's clear from the first days of the fighting that the military aspect of this war has not gone at all like Russia thought it would, but in the end, especially if Russia is willing to ratchet up the level of brutality and the level of firepower they're using against Ukraine, they could force through a really ugly military solution, but like Masha just said, I don't see how that translates really, ever into a political solution.

What you'd be left with is a Northern Ireland scenario, but absolutely on just incredible steroids. On incredible and really terrifying steroids, in terms of the degree and depth of the violence that could follow for a generation or more. What I think could happen, and I'd be curious to have Masha speak to this, is are there breaks on Putin's behavior in Moscow?

Are there any voices who could impel or convince him of a path that I don't think would involve Russian forces packing up and leaving tomorrow. I think that the best in a way we could hope for, is a kind of negotiated solution, but here too, it's hard to think of what Ukraine, given the mood in the country, would be willing to give up at this point.

I think Ukraine feels like this is an existential battle for its own sense of statehood, so expecting Ukraine to give up on some aspect of that statehood, say forswearing NATO, for all eternity, I think would be a hard thing to get Ukrainians to agree to. I think how this ends and the nature of this war going forward, really depends in a terrifying way off of the mental space and worldview and understanding of one person, and that's Vladimir Putin.

David: Masha, can anyone penetrate that reality?

Masha: I don't think so, but I think even worse than that, as Josh said, Putin has staked his entire political future on this war. There's no way for him to exit it, to find a non-triumphant solution and retain power. I don't think there's a way for him to survive not retaining power. To humanly, physically survive not retaining power. He is really cornered and that's a terrifying situation for the world, not just for Ukraine.

David: Masha Gessen, Joshua Yaffa. I just want to take the opportunity to thank you for all the work you're doing and be well. See you soon, I hope.

Masha: Thank you.

Joshua: Thank you.

David: Masha Gessen, who just left Moscow, and Joshua Yaffa, joined us from Kiev. We spoke late on Thursday and you can find all their reporting on the assault on Ukraine at newyorker.com.

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