Lynsey Addario on Risking Her Life to Photograph Ukraine

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: As we discussed earlier, Ukraine is bearing the brunt of relentless missile strikes across the country in Kherson, which was liberated last month. Russia is still shelling the city, and authorities say one person was killed over the weekend. Our next guest, photojournalist, Lynsey Addario, has just been on the ground in Kherson documenting the aftermath of Russia’s withdrawal. And she tells Hari Sreenivasan what she saw.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Lynsey Addario, welcome back. As we are talking, there are lots of reports of more rockets being fired throughout Ukraine, and people huddling in the subway systems of the capital city. What are you hearing from your colleagues on the ground of how bad it is at this moment?

LYNSEY ADDARIO, PHOTOJOURNALIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: I think, you know, Ukraine has sort of fallen into this pattern where people have made the decision to live their lives until the siren goes off and then, they go in the shelter, and that has become a reality of life. I think people are not really willing to just stop living. They are not willing to stop going out, going to cafes when there is electricity, of course now. I think that they have just made the combinations to live in their country for the time being while they can, while there is heat, and sporadic electricity. But when the sirens go off, they take them seriously because, generally, it does mean that there are attacks coming.

SREENIVASAN: What does this do to, I don’t know, the psyche of civilians when they are either living in cities or under the threat of a state where they don’t have power, that there could literally be rockets again?

ADDARIO: I mean, I asked myself daily how long can this go on? How long can Russia continue to just, you know, barrage Ukraine with missiles and with all sorts of artillery and destroy the infrastructure? You know, people are exhausted. I’ve never — I’ve said it before and I will say it again, that I’ve — you know, Ukrainians to me are some of the most resilient and strong people I have ever met and photographed. But, of course, there is a point at which that has to wear out. I mean, you know, people have families. People are giving birth in these conditions. People are raising small children. You know, what do you tell them time and time again? I think, you know, for me, when I got to cover Ukraine, I leave my small children at home. People in Ukraine do not have that luxury. And I think, you know, it’s a lot to ask of a population. And so, I just — I don’t know the answer how long people can endure this.

SREENIVASAN: You recently were in Ukraine and you filed some tremendous photography and this work from Kherson, a city that, now, is living without power and approaching cold winter, that’s only going to get colder. Give us a sense of what life is like in Ukraine right now.

ADDARIO: Yes. It’s extraordinarily difficult. I was in Kherson. I arrived there the day it was liberated with several other journalists. There was this incredible euphoria, people were so excited and relieved, and overwhelmed with emotion, really. I mean, almost everyone was just weeping and embracing any soldier or Ukrainian security force they could find because they were so grateful to be free. But that, of course, was very bittersweet because as the Russians left Kherson, they destroyed the electricity, communications, the water supplies. So, people, including all of the journalists covering the situation, have been talking without water, electricity, heat. You know, And it’s extremely cold. But I think, you know, people are conflicted because, of course, they say, well, there are no Russians, which they are very happy about, but it’s difficult.

SREENIVASAN: We spoke back in March of this year. And at that time, you were talking about what you would think is evidence that Russians were targeting civilians. I know that situations on the ground in the places that you visited for these most recent reports are different, but do you still find that the case?

ADDARIO: Oh, yes. I mean, and now, we have seen evidence of war crimes across the country. We have seen them in Bucha. We have seen them in Kharkiv. We have seen them in Kherson. The day I left Kherson, I photographed the exhumation of a father and his mother, you know, as the son looked on. You know, and I think they had been killed around November 10th and their bodies were just placed inside of a bunker essentially. You know, these things are happening all of the time, and civilians are definitely being targeted. And I think, you know, now, if you target the infrastructure, you are still targeting civilians because you’re essentially asking them to live without heat and electricity in a country that is extraordinarily cold.

SREENIVASAN: There is one individual, I’m going to mispronounce his name, Sergie Yosavad (ph), a young man from the outskirts of Kherson. Tell us a little bit about him and what happened?

ADDARIO: Yes. I mean, we — this time, it seems like Russians have learned from what happened in Bucha and Kharkiv, and a lot of the evidence of the war crimes is harder to find, let’s say. And so, we had heard rumors that Russians were burning their own dead. So, we were out in this village on the outskirts of Kherson looking essentially for graves of Russians. And we stopped and talked to these Ukrainian soldiers and said, do you know anything about this rumor? And they said no, but there are two civilians dead in the front yard across the street. And we thought, well, that’s crazy. So, we went across the street. And Sergie (ph) had ironically sort of just walked up at the same time and he told the story of how his father was a father. He lived under occupation. He was in touch with him whenever his father can essentially get signal. On November 10th, he tried to reach him. It coincided with when the Russians were pulling out. He couldn’t reach him. He made the — he made his way down from Kyiv, it was a two- to three- day journey. When he got there, he went to his home, there were Ukrainian soldiers living in his home. He said, have you seen my father? They said, no, but across the street there’s a small wooden cross in a bunker or near a bunker. And so, he went. And, of course, very wisely, he called the deminers first because when the Russians left, they left everything mined and booby trapped. Once it was demined, he immediately recognized the feet and the legs of his father and the cane of his grandmother. And then, had to wait for the prosecutor to send a team of police to come and actually do a proper exhumation so they can identify the wounds and the bodies and do a sort of autopsy on the ground there. And so, that took two weeks. So, essentially, his father and grandmother laid dead in this bunker for two weeks and he had to wait for them to be exhumed so he could give them a proper burial.

SREENIVASAN: Did he have an idea of how they died?

ADDARIO: Well, they both had bullet wounds to the head. His father had several bullet wounds all over his body. And apparently, his father was killed first. And the grandmother was found in her flip-flops or her slippers on top of her son. So, you can only imagine what that scene looked like in the final moments that probably, and I’m guessing here, the mother came out because she heard her son, and she was also executed.

SREENIVASAN: Another thing people are discovering in the wake of the withdrawal is torture chambers, what evidence did you see of that?

ADDARIO: Oh, I mean, we visited several. There are zip ties, there are ropes hanging, there are field phones often used to give electrical shock to people. So, this is something we have heard over and over from people who were tortured and held, that they were shocked with electricity and they’re used with sort of army field phones. That’s how they administer enough current so that they don’t kill them, or try not to kill them but they put them in extreme amounts of pain. And so, we saw these places. They’re often in police stations. One of the places we visited was actually in a normal building, a sort of business on the ground floor. Residence is upstairs. And the basement was a torture chamber. There were different cells. There were carvings on the wall marking how long people had been held there. People drawing pictures, etching their homes into the walls. You can imagine what was going on in their minds.

SREENIVASAN: The pictures that you have taken of torture chambers, of shallow graves, these could easily be evidence of war crimes. But besides you and the foreign press, what efforts are being made to preserve all of this, to catalog this, to make a case in the future?

ADDARIO: I mean, that is hard for me to answer? I would say the Ukrainian government is doing an amazing job of making sure there are teams of prosecutors on the ground every time a place is liberated. And, you know, for example, when I was in Kherson, I was working daily with the prosecutor on the ground there from the day after the city fell. And, you know, he told me, they do interviews, they have teams around the region and, you know, he kept saying, OK, in this place (INAUDIBLE), there will be an exhumation of a 14-year-old girl, or of a young girl. They — you know, but that exhumation took two weeks because it was raining. And for — they wanted to make sure they had the team, proper team, to do the exhumation correctly so that everything in the war crimes tribunal checks out. And so, the Ukrainian government is being very careful about how they do things. And I think that that is a testament to the fact that they will not let this go and nor will the International Community think?

SREENIVASAN: One of the other sets of photographs I want to talk about is a situation I don’t think that nearly as much of the world is watching. You recently traveled to Somalia, and you could start with a list of reasons why the people are in the streets that they are in, between a civil conflict and famine. But tell us about where you went and what you saw?

ADDARIO: Yes. So, you know, this year, as we know, has been dominated mostly with Ukraine, but before I was covering climate change. Climate change and conflict. And, for me, the Horn of Africa has been facing one of the worst droughts in the past 40 years. Somalia is a country, as you mentioned, that’s been, you know, rife with conflict, drought. Now, with the war in Ukraine, there are — you know, there was a lack of wheat and grains being exported from Ukraine because of the conflict. So, less food was getting to Africa. There’s inflation. So, there is so many factors leading to the dire situation in Somalia right now. Right now, what you have is about 2 million people in Somalia are facing emergency food levels, and 300,000 are facing catastrophic levels of food shortage, which is basically famine. And so, I’ve started my trip in Hudlan (ph), in the north, there are over a million people displaced within Somalia because of this drought and because of conflict, of course. You see the carcasses of dead animals everywhere. And that is something that is incredibly noteworthy because people in Somalia depend on their animals. They depend on them for milk, for food, for sustenance. And so, when you see animals in a mass dying across Somalia, that is something that is very noteworthy because people are dying because their animals are dying.

SREENIVASAN: You talked to a woman named Idaba (ph). Tell me a little bit about her.

ADDARIO: Idaba (ph), I was working in one of the camps for displaced, you have to work very quickly because al-Shabaab is around. So, you only have about 30 minutes, 40 minutes on the ground. I heard that there was a child, a four-year-old child who had just died that morning from malnutrition. I went to that camp, I met Idaba (ph). I was speaking to her, she said, yes. He had measles and malnutrition and he was so weak because he had been hungry for so long. And then I said, how many children do you have? And she said, well, less than one month ago I lost two other sons in the village to malnutrition. And she said, I decided to leave my village and come to Baidoa, which is a dangerous journey, of course, because you are leaving and passing through al-Shabaab territory to get to Baidoa where there are aid agencies. I was working with Save the Children. And she said, you know, my two sons died in the village. I said, I have to get to a place where I can just get food so no one else dies. And she got you a camp, and her third son died. That is three children in one month.

SREENIVASAN: It’s hard, I think, for a lot of people to visualize what these different levels of starvation mean, right? I mean, we can say catastrophic, we could say famine. But what is — how much food or water the does this woman have access to when she’s not in Save the Children camp? I mean, what was her life and what’s the average life like of people trying to live in such arid conditions?

ADDARIO: Well, I think it goes back to what I said about the cattle — I mean, about the animals. You know, a lot of people that I interviewed had 200 animals, goats, sheep. You know, and then, they go down to 30. And what do you do as your source of milk and food that feeds your children dies off because there is no water? You know, the other thing is, people who don’t have cattle who are dependent on pastoralist, who — people who provide them or sell them milk, they also leave the area because they have to go in search of water because there is no rain. And so, I think, you know, a lot of the families I interviewed, I say, so, what are you eating now? Porridge, some of them have porridge. The water source is not clean. You know, you’re — you — they don’t have access. Sometimes they move just to get to Baidoa because they know that organizations like Save the Children and Mercy Corps and WFP are there providing water, food. There are water trucks coming and filling giant bladders with water so people can actually drink water. But I think it’s hard to imagine, you know, one mother said, she gives her children one meal a day, that is it, and it is usually porridge. And if there is anything left over, she will eat herself. You know, we’re not even talking about the mothers who were malnourished, you know, because, of course, the children are more vulnerable, so they die first.

SREENIVASAN: Is there a sense of things are getting any better?

ADDARIO: No. This is — you know, there have been consecutive failed rainy seasons. This past rainy season also failed. Even if it rains a sprinkle in some place, that is not going to undo, you know, years of drought. And so, no, it is not getting better at all.

SREENIVASAN: Whether it is in Somalia or Ukraine or any other places, how do you create the kind of mental distance necessary to function when you see, as a mom, that could be your kid, had your child not been born where they were, right? I mean, it’s — some of the imagery is just so hunting when people connect with that human being that’s in the image. But there you are, you can feel her grief. How do you keep working through that?

ADDARIO: I — look, I cry all the time when I am working and I get really embarrassed because I think, oh, I have to be tougher. And often, I don’t want to cry because I don’t want the person I’m photographing to realize their situation is as bad as it is. You know, so, I am always trying to collect myself. But, of course, the first thing I am thinking of when I approach a woman like Idaba Yusuf (ph) is, it’s so unfair. You know, she has this life because she is born in a place that, you know, she doesn’t have the opportunities that we have, one, for example, because I was born in America, you know, I have access to food and water, and shelter, the opportunity to work, the opportunity to do what I want for a living and to make my own money. And most people around the world do not have those opportunities. And I think that is one of the things that drives me to do this work year after year, no matter how devastating it is, because I don’t believe it is fair. You know, I think that there is so much injustice in this world. And I just hope that sometimes these stories will make a difference.

SREENIVASAN: Lynsey Addario of “The New York Times,” thanks so much.

ADDARIO: Thank you so much for having me.