KHARKIV, Ukraine—Ruslan Misiunia is giving me a tour of this war-torn city as a favor to a friend on his afternoon off. He took me to the site of what had once been a big-box home improvement store, before a Russian glide bomb destroyed it—and killed 19 people—in 2024.
Kharkiv, 20 miles from the Russian border and Ukraine’s second-largest city, remains a distance from the front lines of the wider war, but it has seen its share of attacks the last three years. Russian forces occupied large parts of the city in the months after the initial invasion. The damage inflicted on the Northern Saltivka neighborhood remains, serving as a potent reminder of Russia’s brutality and lack of regard for civilians. The area is dominated by Soviet-era apartment buildings stacked closely together—and there is no industry whatsoever, a fact that would have been apparent to the Russians invading across an open field. It didn’t matter.
“They were using everything to hit [Saltivka], aviation, tanks, artillery, mortars,” Ruslan explained. Nearly every window in every apartment building on the edge of the city was blown out and there was damage to virtually every structure, including a kindergarten that was in the middle of the apartments. Prior to the war, this was one of the most densely populated neighborhoods anywhere in Ukraine.
The counteroffensive began almost immediately for the locals. Misiunia also showed me a burned-out school where there had been a battle between Ukrainian military, police, and local militias, and an elite Russian unit, just days after the invasion in February 2022. The Ukrainians were victorious, which boosted morale in the city. However, the wider counteroffensive didn’t begin until months later, and the city was not liberated until nearly 2023.
Several locals told me that foreign journalists rarely make it this far, preferring to stay farther away in safer areas. But while you can learn a lot by visiting Lviv or Kyiv, you can learn more by getting closer to the action. This reality is difficult to grasp without seeing things firsthand and talking to locals.
Touring Kharkiv itself has become more difficult in recent months, however. Misiunia, my tour guide, used to be employed by the Ukrainian non-governmental organization Kharkiv Media Hub, which sought to work with local, international, and foreign media to ensure the permanent presence of the Kharkiv region, and surrounding areas, in the national and global media space. Facilitating reporting access to the region aids in countering Russian propaganda. The group had received funds from other local and international sources, but those eventually dried up. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) stepped in to fill the gap, but this funding was canceled recently by the Trump administration.
Russian tanks were absent during my visit, but attacks on Kharkiv have remained constant. Strikes were worse before Ukraine was given permission to strike targets inside the Russian border in May 2024, which allowed Ukrainian forces to at least partially neutralize the threat of S-300 missiles. But as evidenced by recent events, the Russian bombardments have not stopped, they’ve just changed forms.
On March 26, the mayor of Kharkiv reported at least a dozen explosions around the city as a result of Russian strikes. One video that circulated showed soccer players running for their lives on a field as a drone exploded nearby. On March 30, Russian drones hit a military hospital and other buildings, killing two people.
The attacks have continued, and this month, things have gotten worse. Last week, there were four separate attacks on Kharkiv, including one that killed four and injured 35, including three children. One of the strikes counted a 12-year-old girl among its victims.
“The value in something like Kharkiv Media Hub to the U.S., and to the world, should be obvious: Without local support, the reporters who are willing to go to a conflict zone like Kharkiv will struggle to make sense of what is really going on and understand recent history, geography, and political context.”
But Kharkiv remains safer than other parts of Ukraine, and this is reflected by locals who live there now. I went to a well-attended church service during my stay, at an Orthodox Church still under the Moscow Patriarchate, which, contra far too many headlines in the West suggesting otherwise, continues to meet openly in spite of decades of close ties to Moscow. A young woman who attended told me that she’d moved to Kharkiv from a city closer to the front. She’d been able to find a job and it remained safer than her hometown. “Unfortunately, our cities are being destroyed. More and more, many people are coming to Kharkiv,” she said. Indeed, Misiunia told me that, while official numbers were hard to come by, Kharkiv, which had a population of around 1.8 million in 2022 shrank to 1.2 million inhabitants after the initial invasion, but had since regained population numbering about 1.5 million.
Since I left, there has been renewed fighting in the wider region. Just this past week, Russia moved on the western bank of the Oskil River in Kharkiv oblast. There is concern that this is a setup to a spring offensive into major cities like Kharkiv and Sumy. Shortly before that, Ukrainian forces entered the Russian territory of Belgorod oblast, a launching point for air attacks on Kharkiv, making modest gains. This is not a frozen conflict.
The American public, and policymakers in particular, need information from reliable sources to understand these complex realities resulting from Russia’s war of aggression. And so the value in something like Kharkiv Media Hub to the U.S., and to the world, should be obvious: Without local support, the reporters who are willing to go to a conflict zone like Kharkiv will struggle to make sense of what is really going on and understand recent history, geography, and political context. But locals can hardly be blamed for not having the time to explain all this to outsiders while trying to make ends meet in a war zone.
Other counterpropaganda ventures are also at risk. One media venture that allowed local reporters in the Kharkiv region to distribute newspapers to their fellow countrymen who don’t have easy access to cell phones or radio was also halted by USAID funding cuts. The on-again–off-again cancellation of the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an outlet so important to U.S. efforts during the Cold War that Communist officials had ordered the assassination of officials in charge, further threatens the wider world’s ability to receive accurate information about Ukraine. Russian officials are openly chortling at the possibility of its end.
Russia’s war is one of annihilation, and the Russians want to trick the West into thinking otherwise. Getting a clearer sense of what events mean will be very important for those who need to know the truth to formulate good policy. Here in the United States, meanwhile, senior diplomats and influential media figures endlessly repeat Russian propaganda as if it is fact.
Later in my tour of Ukraine, I made it to Lviv, 600 miles west of Kharkiv. I toured a facility supported by Save Ukraine, a nonprofit aimed at helping Ukrainian children, including those who were kidnapped, orphaned, or displaced because of the war. I met a 14-year-old boy from Kharkiv who had fled along with his family, first to Poland, and then to Lviv after the Russian invasion. He was pleased to be in Lviv, which he said was “beautiful” and had a “very interesting history,” but seemed to regret the loss of his hometown. “The situation in our country is difficult. … For now, we live here.” When asked if he’d want to go back to Kharkiv after the war, he said, “I don’t know. The city is very destroyed.”
I know he’s right. I saw evidence firsthand.
