No, Trump Isn't Cracking Down on Crime. Plus, How Ukrainians Tell Their Story of the War.

This isn't about crime.

That's not what Donald Trump is doing.

He's seizing power.

President Trump is threatening to deploy federal troops to more cities, and news outlets are falling for his justifications.

From WNYC in New York, This Is On the Media, I'm Michael Loewinger.

Four of MAGA's leading intellectuals just met to debate their visions of a more right-wing America.

The intra-right argument that they're having is not over whether we should be authoritarian.

It's over just how naked, how aggressive, and how weird that authoritarianism should be.

Plus, why a Ukrainian mayor invited the press to her town in the aftermath of a mass tragedy.

When we were burying heroes and when we were burying unknown killed civilians, we did it with the press to record what really happened.

It's all coming up after this.

On the Media is supported by Progressive Insurance.

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This is On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Loewinger.

We turn now to the growing presence of the National Guard on the streets in the nation's capital.

The president has seized control of law, order, and security from the city authorities, who he has framed as failing liberals.

The press says he's a dictator.

He's trying to take over.

No, all I want is security for our people.

Get out of my neighborhood!

You can see in multiple videos federal agents wearing masks during arrests in the district in recent weeks.

The whistles are a new community tactic to alert people that ICE agents are in the area.

You have to scare us to the people who are telling you to do this because it's wrong.

Get her out of here.

Get her out of here, he says to a neighbor woken by the commotion.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

D.C.

Attorney General Brian Schwab now suing the Trump administration over the deployment of the National Guard troops here in Washington as we approach month one of this federal takeover.

The city's top legal officials saying the surge of troops amounts to a forced military occupation.

The D.C.

lawsuit came on the heels of another legal battle in Los Angeles, where some 300 soldiers are still stationed.

A federal judge says President Trump's use of the National Guard in Los Angeles was illegal.

In a 52-page filing that was out today, U.S.

District Judge Charles Breyer found the administration broke an 1878 act that prohibits the use of military for domestic law enforcement.

So far, it's not clear whether these challenges will deter the president, who spent the last week posting lies and exaggerations about the windy city.

New attacks on Chicago from President Trump and a new promise to impose federal law enforcement to fight crime on the ground.

He said, quote, Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the world by far.

He added, I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in D.C.

Chicago will be safe again and soon.

We could do that with New York.

We could do it with Los Angeles.

The president in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Maybe Louisiana.

And you have New Orleans, which has a crime problem.

We'll straighten that out in about two weeks.

It'll take us two weeks.

I would like DC to be a test case for whether we can go into other cities where far too many people are being murdered and help to drive down the violent crime rate there as well.

Conservative pundit Clay Travis on Fox News last month, who along with many others in the right-wing press, have been aping Trump's rhetoric.

We need full military occupation of these cities until the crime desists, period.

I think what's scary to the Dems is not the military.

It's the fact that they know this is going to work and that it's already working.

But even coverage from outlets like CNN, the Daily Beast, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others have been, intentionally or not, making Trump's case for him.

The major media narratives that we're seeing are false.

Jameson Foser is a political consultant and media critic.

He argues that the press is trying to manufacture consent.

By manufacturing consent, I mean the public does not currently agree with Donald Trump or what he's doing, but the media in the way they're covering this story is increasing support for it by suggesting he's trying to fight crime.

Everybody would like crime to be lower, even though it's been going down for the last couple of years already.

And so it's creating this false reason to support what he's doing.

A recent headline from ABC reads: quote, 58 shot over Labor Day weekend in Chicago as governor rejects Trump threat to send National Guard.

That piece quoted the president several times, but waited till the second to last paragraph to offer this context: quote, violent crime in Chicago has dropped significantly in the first half of the year, according to official data released by the city.

Shootings are down 37%, and homicides have dropped 32% compared to the first half of 2024.

The Chicago Sun-Times recently put out this headline: Chicago sees fewest summer murders since 1965, even as Trump cites high crime.

No one's arguing that violent crime isn't a problem in Chicago or in D.C., but why is this context so hard to find?

A couple great examples there of really lousy media coverage of this.

And the first one was particularly bad because it spent essentially the entire very lengthy argument telling the story about crime being out of control.

And then just sort of at the very end, almost as an aside, oh, by the way, crime's actually decreasing significantly.

That obviously gives people a very very skewed sense of what's going on.

But even that second article, which, you know, that's a better headline.

It does make clear that crime is falling, contrary to Trump's narrative.

Even that is helping Trump.

It's keeping the conversation focused where he wants it, which is on crime, as though what he's doing is about crime.

But it's really not.

So even when the media is debunking some of his assertions around crime, they're still privileging the lie that this is about crime.

Similarly, the New York Times recently ran a headline: quote, crime festers in Republican states while their troops patrol in Washington.

I saw some praise for this framing, but I guess it might still run afoul of what you were describing.

That's a decent headline for a bad article that probably shouldn't exist.

Although it correctly notes that many cities in Republican-led states have crime rates comparable to Washington's, it doesn't really emphasize the logical conclusion to that, which is Trump is deploying troops to fight Democrats, not crime.

And then it endorses the legitimacy and really the effectiveness of using military troops to police Americans by suggesting that Republican governors might want this too.

It kind of dismisses what it calls Democrats' rhetoric about the specter of uninvited occupying forces.

Like this isn't actually happening, even though Donald Trump has already sent uninvited forces to occupy Los Angeles.

And that Los Angeles move, by the way, has already been ruled by a judge illegal.

So in kind of dismissing this as Democrats' rhetoric that isn't really coming true, that article really drops the ball there.

But these crime trends do matter, right?

Like, for instance, Trump justified the DC deployment by pointing to a surge in violent crime in 2023, though naturally he failed to acknowledge that it's fallen since then, and it's nearly half of what it was in 2010.

It is going down, and DC Mayor Murray L.

Bowser has already kind of thanked the president and credited him with helping crime go down.

Maybe it would have gone down regardless.

It seems like he's setting the table to take credit and justify more military deployment in the future.

No?

That's exactly what he wants to do.

And even Bowser, there was a Washington Post headline about Bowser's reaction just this week.

It was Bowser welcomes federal enforcement indefinitely.

First of all, it kind of overstates what the mayor of Washington, D.C.

actually did, which is she issued an executive order that said, if Trump's going to keep troops in D.C., local law enforcement will coordinate with them to try to minimize problems.

And the Post framed that as an invitation, as though though D.C.

actually wants Trump to continue.

And that's a significant overstatement because just Thursday morning, news broke that D.C.

is actually suing the federal government over the occupation, saying that Trump has run roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy.

In addition to buying into Trump's framing about crime, you believe that some in the mainstream press have further hamstrung any kind of political response to this occupation by claiming that standing up to the president would hurt Democrats politically.

There's this really common media narrative that Donald Trump's actions here are like a brilliant political move that sets a trap for Democrats.

Here's one from Chris Saliza and the Daily Beast, the DC crime trap Trump is setting for Democrats.

And then a similar one, Trump is leaning in on crime.

Democrats need a better response and fast.

That's from Politico.

And Forbes, could Trump's crime crackdown help him politically?

Democrats' blasting effort risk backfire.

And Anderson Cooper echoed the sentiment on his show last month.

It's the conflict Democrats face when talking about the policing in the District of Columbia.

Do you point out statistics of, oh, it's a 30-year low and thereby sound like you're saying, oh, there's not a crime problem in Washington, D.C.

when there's a crime problem everywhere?

There's a couple really big problems with that.

The first one being, again, this isn't about crime.

That's not what Donald Trump is doing.

But the second is that there have been at least four national national polls released in the last couple of weeks that have found more Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of crime than approve of it.

Quinnipia, which is one of the major national polling outfits, found 56% of voters disapprove of sending the National Guard to Washington, D.C.

And I should note that's even when the question was framed as an effort to fight crime.

So that's a poll question that's biased in Trump's favor, just the same way this media coverage has been.

And even then, only 41% of people approved of Donald Trump's actions.

So this narrative that this is a sure political winner for Trump is kind of another example of the media trying to manufacture consent for what Trump is doing.

The polling question is so fascinating because the way it was framed is effectively: do you support Donald Trump bringing in the National Guard to help alleviate crime in these cities?

It wasn't just Quinnipiac.

This framing was also put to respondents in similar surveys from Reuters/slash/Ipsos and also APNORC.

So much of the public opinion is framed.

Do you support the president fighting crime?

Right.

If anybody has ever worked in polling or worked on polls, which I have, one of the basic rules is you don't write a question that gives respondents a reason to support one position without balancing it against either a reason to oppose that position or a reason to support a different position.

But that's what these polls are doing.

They're saying, do you support Donald Trump's efforts to fight crime?

And even then, the public rejects what Trump is doing.

And yet, there's reason to believe that this setting the trap narrative around crime has been internalized by powerful, influential people within the DNC.

Who is David Shore and how has he been advising Democrats on how to respond to this stuff?

David Shore is a Democratic political strategist and data guru.

He's advised Democrats to not talk about this issue and to talk about the economy instead.

And I think some Democrats have followed his guidance there and some have not.

J.B.

Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, most notably, has been really forceful in denouncing what Donald Trump is doing and speaking very plainly about it.

Mr.

President, do not come to Chicago.

You are neither wanted here nor needed here.

If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

Following that, on Tuesday, MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough pitched a kind of strange idea on his show.

I actually think that J.B.

Pritzker should do something radical.

I think he should pick up the phone, call the president, and say, let's partner up.

These are the most dangerous parts of my state.

Let's work together to save lives.

Bad advice.

One of the things I've been wanting to see more of for a very long time is prominent Democrats explicitly call out bad media coverage.

Frisker has done that in basically every significant public comment I've seen him make in the last couple of weeks.

He's cajoling, urging, almost pleading with news organizations to cover this really clearly and honestly and tell folks the threat that it poses.

In fact, he did that very thing in response to Scarborough earlier this week.

I refuse to pretend that any of this is normal.

I refuse to fall into the pundit trap that demands we sacrifice vital constitutional rights if it's being done in the fake guise of fighting crime.

We all have to navigate the reality that we're in right now, where we have a government that's trying to seize power through an aggressive propaganda campaign.

Like you can't play along with that and succeed.

Why is it so important that we get the language and framing on this right?

Because if we don't, you really risk having a country involuntarily agreeing to slide into fascism.

And by involuntarily, I mean based on false pretenses, not really knowing what they're agreeing to.

It goes back to the idea of manufacturing consent, of getting the public to accept something that they wouldn't actually accept if they knew what it was.

Jameson, thanks so much.

Thanks so much for having me.

Jameson Foser writes the newsletter, Finding Gravity.

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This is on the media.

I'm Michael Loewinger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

So, we just offered an analysis of the latest muscle flexing by the Trump White House, the latest attempt to wield power it doesn't legally possess.

But to what end?

For the big thinkers of the far right, the expanding power of the executive goes far beyond Trump to the ultimate goal of a sustainable, quote, quote, post-liberal America.

Zach Beacham, a senior correspondent at Vox, got an unvarnished look at what that might mean when he happened upon a recent panel hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, created to educate and connect young conservatives.

It featured four deeply influential members of the MAGAverse sharing their visions for a very different America.

All four of these people are extremely influential.

Chris Ruffo has been a leading policy voice in the Republican right, but all of these other people also have influence.

There's another Chris, Christopher Caldwell.

His work on civil rights has prefigured a lot of what the Trump administration has done with civil rights law and the Justice Department civil rights division.

Then you have Patrick Denin, who's a professor at Notre Dame.

Denine is an avowed influence of J.D.

Vance.

Vance went to an event for the book Regime Change when it came out in D.C.

You wrote that in Regime Change, Change, Denin merely proposes replacing liberal elites with conservative ones.

I guess Vance liked that.

He described himself as a post-liberal who saw regime change as his purpose of his time in government.

Let's move to Curtis Yarvin, because he may be the most extreme.

Oh, he is.

There's no doubt about that.

Yarvin is very important in the tech rights scene.

People like Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, and Elon Musk, most importantly.

The Washington Post published a piece describing Doge as being inspired by Yarvin's ideas.

He really believes that the purpose of the state should be ordered towards encouraging economic dynamism, innovation, and stratification between better and worse kinds of people.

You will hear over the course of this conversation who he believes the better and worse types of people to be.

So let's get there right now.

What did they propose?

I want to start with what was, I think, the wildest exchange in the whole interview.

It's about 20 minutes in.

And Yarvin proposes this schema where there's a pre-modern America and a modern America, and those consists of two different kinds of Americans.

And one of those groups is basically capable of self-governance and managing their own lives.

And another one, the pre-modern America, needs the whip hand of community or the state telling them what to do in order to function properly.

He says, let's take a, the exact term he uses is gangbanger in Baltimore.

And he then starts talking about a system by which churches will be put in charge of this person's life.

You have to be part of a society.

And being part of a society means that you are going to get your welfare check or however you support yourself from your minister.

Your relationship with the state is intermediated through your church.

Your minister can drug test you.

He can assign you work.

He can put an air tag on you.

He can tell you where to go, where not to go.

That sounds like either being in prison or being enslaved.

And not to mention how illegal it is.

Oh, extremely illegal.

I've struggled with exactly how to term it.

Slavery is, it's not quite right, but it's close.

Maybe making somebody into a ward of the church, property of the church, a prisoner of the church.

All of those seem rough approximations for what we're talking about.

But the point is, it is a schema for the state empowering religious institutions to be dictators of individual people.

That's what he wants.

And the rest of the panel

says nothing about that.

Not in the sense that they don't comment on it.

They have thoughts.

But those thoughts are not, this is incredibly authoritarian and racist, and I can't believe we're talking about this.

No one even comes close to using those terms.

In these kinds of right-wing discussions, calling someone an authoritarian or a racist has no force.

Those terms that have been designed that have been stigmatized specifically to prevent the recurrence of historical evils.

Those terms have become destigmatized on the right.

They no longer have their force.

So the man you call the moderate on the panel, Caldwell, notes that Yarvin's proposal would probably be stymied by the Constitution.

We can't establish a religion and the rules have to be the same for everyone.

Whereas I think you're looking at something where you have a two-part country, you're distinguishing between modern and traditional people.

In fact, I think you have to repeal the 14th Amendment.

And then Yarvin responds.

Religion, of course, in the original Constitution was established, and the First Amendment was written to allow for the establishment of religion in the states.

Now that they had established churches until the, what, the 1830s?

So yeah, it went away of its own accord, but it was not forbidden by the original Constitution.

It was an interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

It's not stated in the 14th Amendment.

So I looked up the establishment clause in the Constitution, and it explicitly prohibits the establishment of an official religion.

And the second clause of the First Amendment immediately follows the Establishment Clause by saying Congress should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the exercise thereof.

Is he giving a kind of bizarro interpretation of the Constitution or what?

I mean, look, it is true that in the colonial era, some of the colonies had official religions, right, or state-sanctioned religions.

And some of those persisted after independence, but not for very long.

This was not a major part of the American political tradition.

And it went away, I think, along the lines of the self-understanding of the First Amendment and of the American state, which was that religion is not something to be governed by political institutions.

Jefferson was very clear and Madison in their fight over religion and the Virginia Constitution about what their vision was, not just for Virginia, but for America.

Which was a secular state, right?

Which is a wall of separation between churches and states.

And Washington, there's a very famous letter that he writes, a Jewish community in Rhode Island.

He outlines his vision of religious toleration, not just for Jews and not just in Rhode Island, but for all religious minorities across the United States, To portray the idea of the American Constitution as one that wanted to, for any reasons other than political convenience or to avoid a fight, allow there to be kinds of established religions is to totally misread the character of the founding.

But Yarvin, he started on this idea of giving clergy control over these pre-modern American gangbangers by qualifying it, saying he's coming at it from an un-American angle.

But he seems deeply taken with the ideas and systems of Elizabethan England, where you would be penalized for not going to church every week.

You were actually fined.

Your name was written down in a little book.

It was in a way, it was a system of, you know, you would almost call it totalitarian in a way.

They certainly did not have a free press at that time.

And yet, you know, Elizabethan society, you know, produced the most, you know, amazing, you know, sort of artistic works of all of history.

Yeah, but Genghis Khan had freedom of religion, wrote a legal code, unified a nation, promoted a kind of meritocracy.

Dictators can do amazing things.

Right.

This is a characteristic tick of Yarvin's, one that I've noticed a lot in his work, is that he throws out these historical references and he expects people not to be familiar with them because his knowledge of the world is a mile wide and a centimeter deep, perhaps.

There's a reason practices like that died out because they're corrosive of not only a well-functioning society, but of basic human freedom that that people want.

But I don't want to just get on my soapbox and say, I think Curtis Jarvin is bad, because that lends it a degree of seriousness it ought not to have.

These are not actual arguments.

They're the musings, the ravings of a man who is a sort of glorified internet troll, but has managed to carve out a niche of success for himself by convincing wealthy people in tech that their success should be a model for America.

By doing that, he has turned himself into someone who gets invited to these kinds of conversations.

And then he changes the conversation.

I mean, look, before the ascent of Curtis Yarvin, a gathering of Denin, Ruffo, and Caldwell would be considered a relatively right-wing gathering.

Yarvin is, he's beyond what even those people are willing to do.

So much of the conversation ends up being a debate between Yarvin and the other three.

And yet, Yarvin is setting the terms for the conversation.

It's not that they're rejecting the authoritarianism.

They're really only objecting to this sort of anti-American quality.

But isn't that the point of this discussion, that true democracy isn't their goal, nor is upholding equal opportunity under the law?

They imply, they sometimes more than imply, that that's the moment where America went wrong.

Well, equal opportunity, yes, right?

But they think that's severable from democracy.

It's actually, I think, at the heart of Caldwell's work for the past several years.

He's gone around the world and written about various different right-wing populist movements, but he invariably defines them as actually true exemplars of democracy because they speak to

the silent majority or perhaps the not so, in the case of India, the not so silent majority when it comes to minority rights.

And so his view is that a politics that caters to ethnic majorities is a true democratic politics.

I see.

Right.

Even if what they propose are restrictions on freedoms that we would see as fundamentally undemocratic.

Aaron So even though the polls all say that a lot of what's been going on, the mass firings at Doge, the deportations of non-criminal immigrants, the family separations, these are not popular, but these men believe that this is what America wants.

I mean, there's a really telling moment late in the conversation where Ruffo and Caldwell, who've mostly been agreeing, get into a fight about Doge, right?

And the fight is not about whether Doge was a good idea or not.

The fight was about branding.

The terms are whether it was good for Doge to bill itself as an ideological purge openly or an efficiency engine.

Right.

Caldwell says

it's a much less acceptable story to present to the public after we're saving money.

That's right.

Right.

But he agrees that it's an ideological purge.

What he and Rufo both call systematic extirpation of liberals from the state.

Now, around the 40-minute mark, the conversation turns to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Rufo worked closely with DeSantis, particularly his attempt to impose state controls on higher education, and he spent much of his conversation singing the governor's praises.

His biggest critique, in fact, was that DeSantis erred strategically by running against Trump.

He would have been better off saying, hey, I'm very popular.

Florida should repeal term limits, and I will rule Florida for 25 years.

I think that would have been maybe good.

Now I'm possible.

And Yarvin, without prompting, in the middle of the discussion of DeSantis, adds this nugget.

I think that one thing that we agree on is that when you're in the pursuit of power, every step you take needs to generate more power.

Everything you do needs to make further actions easier.

I mean, talking about ruling Florida for 25 years, it struck me that Rufo was faulting DeSantis for being insufficiently authoritarian.

But setting aside that point, what I found really fascinating was the next thing that Yarvin said.

Yarvin starts talking about how

what needs to happen is that DeSantis needs to, in his language, 10x or even 100x, what he's doing, you know, multiply it by 10 or 100 times, be more and more aggressive.

That's what he should have done.

He cites an example.

Can we have a picture of what Ron DeSantis times 10x, Ron DeSantis times 100x is?

You know, is Ron DeSantis going to start, for example, a Florida branch of the Boy Scouts, where they're the Florida Scouts, where they wear Florida uniforms?

That's going a little bit farther than Ron DeSantis has gone.

And so when we basically

free ourselves from the- It's a good idea from

I took that as a reference to the Hitler youth, as you did.

But then Jarvin butts in and says, no, no, no, we should call them the young pioneers, which was the name of the youth movement in

Soviet Russia.

Exactly.

And communist China.

It's like, oh, no, we're not the bad thing that it sounds like we're talking about.

We're the other totalitarian thing.

That's what I'm proposing.

When we talk about right-wing policies or pundits on the show, we often get feedback saying, why talk about this?

Why cover the very conversations you say our guardrails used to keep at bay?

Yeah, that fight's been lost, right?

Like these people are all in power now.

Rufo, I believe, is directly wielding power.

There's been a significant amount of reporting that he has been working with the Trump administration on some of their purge efforts and their attack on higher ed.

The other people, the vice president described himself as a devotee of Denin's ideological movement, right?

If we can't talk about the people who the vice president reads regular, he's also said he reads Yarvin, by the way.

I mean, what are we even doing here?

At one point, at the very end of the conversation, Rufo says something really telling.

He says that he believes that the right has won the battle with the left.

The battle with the left is won, and now we can go on to have these inter-right arguments, right?

But the inter-right argument that they're having in that conversation is not over whether we should be authoritarian, in essence.

They wouldn't use that language, but I'd say that's a fair description of the politics that were on display in the conversation.

It's over just how naked, how aggressive, and how weird that authoritarianism should be.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Obviously, we're now talking in a time when the National Guard is being deployed to democratic cities and a banner of Trump's face is draped over the side of the Department of Labor.

On the question of American authoritarianism, do you think we have crossed that line in the sand?

I don't.

I think we're on the way.

It's not at all unreasonable to say that the United States can be better regarded as an authoritarian state at this point.

The reason I think it's not is because I take a simple two-part test for whether a country is a democracy.

Does it have free and fair elections?

And when those elections are concluded, does the ruling power leave?

Right.

So far, since Trump has been elected, we've had a number of different sub-national elections.

Democrats have done very well and Republicans have left office when they've lost.

Now, you might say, well, we haven't gotten to the midterms yet.

Well, look at what's happening, right?

There are efforts by the Trump administration to weaken the conditions that make an election free and fair.

They've gone after certain components of the press, the gerrymandering that's happening in states like Texas.

But if you look holistically, those efforts have not systematically compromised the way in which American elections are held, right?

The majority of the media yet, right?

Yet, I want to return to that yet point in a second, but like we're able to have this conversation.

Neither of us are afraid of Trump cracking down on our heads because we've criticized the government or of a visit from the tax agencies.

Well, they've already defunded public broadcasts.

Yeah,

that's pretty bad.

But you're still talking, right?

You're still talking.

You're still talking.

But the way in which power is determined, the systems for that are still meaningfully democratic.

There's a term for a similar system like this.

The late political scientist, Guillermo Donnell, calls it delegative democracy, right?

A democracy where when a leader is elected, they are essentially expected to smash the rules and act however they please and maybe even commit abuses in pursuit of whatever their movement's goals are.

A sort of system of government that he observed happening in the late 20th century Latin American democracies.

And it doesn't always become authoritarianism, but it does in some cases.

So you can see it as a wastage into an authoritarian system.

It wasn't always that.

Sometimes things might revert to a more traditional democratic system or maybe maintain in that uneasy equilibrium for quite some time.

We are a degraded form of democracy.

And whether it goes further, whether we take the next step, I mean, ultimately, the first real big test will be the midterm elections.

Zach Beecham is senior correspondent at Fox and author of the article, The Right debates just how weird their authoritarianism should be.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

That was wonderful.

Coming up, the war in Ukraine is being fought on the ground, in the air, and on our screens.

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I

am

confused.

This is on the media.

I'm Michael Lellinger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

The news about Ukraine is mostly bleak, but there was a glimmer of hope following the Paris summit this past Thursday because a group of European countries announced that they're ready to provide a, quote, quote, reassurance force if there actually is a ceasefire with Russia.

Vladimir Putin's immediate response was to say that any troops would be legitimate targets if they appeared on Ukrainian soil before an agreement was reached, which he doesn't seem inclined to work on anyway, saying Russia could accomplish its goals militarily.

And thus, the diplomatic sniping and the conflict grind on.

Veteran foreign correspondent Deborah Amos went to Ukraine earlier this year to hear how Ukrainians are fighting a different war.

Over which side ultimately sets the narrative, tells the story of this war.

I mean, the version of the story that prevails.

At the front line in eastern Ukraine, the fighting is intense, mostly trench warfare and artillery bombardments like World War I, where gains are measured in inches at a staggering cost.

At night, drone warfare is the war of the future that expands the frontline west towards the capital as Russia launches hundreds and hundreds of drones and missile strikes.

Attention, increased air threat in your area.

Proceed to the nearest shelter.

Attention.

Increased air threat.

It's June, and my reporting partner, Joanne Levine, and I are spending the night in the bomb shelter of the Radisson in downtown Kyiv.

It's a converted parking garage, two floors below street level with rows of beds and beanbag chairs.

Ukrainians are advised to shelter in bathtubs, in basements, or deep underground subways.

After almost four years of war, a dark humor pervades.

Attention.

The air alert is over.

May the force be with you.

In the morning, we head to a residential neighborhood that took the brunt of the overnight attack.

Wow.

There are no windows left.

The balconies are caved in.

All you can hear is the sweeping up of broken glass.

This is definitely downtown Kiev.

A nurse named Olga is shaking as she gives testimony to an official team.

She says she headed for the shelter just before the drone hit.

Magical center.

Medical center.

Surgery.

Cancer, cancer.

Center, here.

The

medical civilians absolutely.

Day by day attacking civilians, but there's definitely no rules now.

They're definitely aiming civilians, and they have no problem with that.

At the bomb site, we run into Jeff Belzel.

He's the security advisor for our trip.

He served in the Canadian Army for a decade, decorated for his actions combating the Taliban.

Now, he advises journalists on personal security and risk management.

He says Putin's change in strategy is reflected in the numbers.

232 civilians killed and thousands injured in June alone.

This is just one snapshot of the war, nighttime terror, followed by the next day's rapid cleanup.

This is another picture, in the daytime, an embrace of normality.

It's part of the rhythm of this war.

After a night of heavy drone strikes, Ukrainians walk their dogs, jog around the neighborhood, and go for morning coffee.

By the afternoon in Kyiv's Botanical Gardens under a canopy of trees, the seats are full for a concert, classical versions of some 1980s hits.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians say a concert is a kind of cultural resistance.

I came to Ukraine to explore the different forms resistance takes here.

I found an example in Bucha, a leafy bedroom community just a short drive from the capital.

For one month in early 2022, it was the scene of staggering brutality by Russian forces.

Local authorities said 458 bodies were recovered in Bucha that month, the vast majority killed up close.

Locals took photos that showed corpses of civilians, hands tied behind their backs, shot at close range.

Many bodies were found mutilated and burnt.

Girls as young as 14 reported being raped.

Russian officials called it fake news, just actors playing dead.

Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Levrov, repeated those charges at the United Nations.

Despite the denials, Bucha became a symbol of Russia's savage tactics, in part because of the actions of a former city council member.

My name is Mikhailina Skoroshkarivska.

I was deputy mayor of Bucha in 2021-2023.

She's known as Micah.

She worked for two decades as a journalist before entering politics, and she understood Bucha's grief.

Her husband was killed in 2014 fighting the Russians in eastern Ukraine.

When the invaders finally retreated, her town was in desperate straits.

She organized humanitarian aid, diapers, baby food, water, and she invited the media in.

Other towns nearby suffered equally, but they stayed closed when the Russians retreated, so those names are unknown to the outside world.

Bucha was very open and people were ready to share the pain.

Reporters, domestic and international, swarmed the town of Bucha and broadcast what they found everywhere.

Ukrainian national police showed us this mass grave in Bucha, saying they believed up to 150 civilians might be buried here, but no one knows the exact number.

Like so many victims in the town of Bucha, their identities are not yet known.

When we were burying heroes and when we were burying unknown killed civilians, we did it with the press to record what really happened.

Micah then went to New York to visit the 9-11 memorial and meet with the staff there to ask how does a town get past a mass tragedy?

Start by honoring the dead, they said.

Start by building memorials.

A fountain in front of the mayor's office opened a year ago.

It's the backdrop for a memorial with life-size posters.

You will see fresh flowers near some posters.

That's the way how families are memorizing their killed relatives.

Can we go see that?

Okay, let's go.

The line of faces paints a vivid picture of enormous loss in one small town.

The youngest person is 1.7 years old.

The oldest is 102 years old.

They were staying at their houses and they were killed.

Your advice is you must embrace the media.

You must let them be here to help tell your story.

A lot of cities didn't say it that way, but you did.

I know that sometimes municipalities don't understand that, but that's very important.

Without media, we will not be so successful now.

And Butcher could be the model of Ukrainian success in the future after the war.

How to measure success?

In the short term, memorials, mental health support, especially for children, collecting evidence and identifying witnesses.

After the war, maybe the ones who are bearing witness now will define success.

Since the invasion began, the world has seen a barrage of narrative films from Ukraine, most notably the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, reported and directed by Miseslav Chernov in 2023.

Also that year, the first dramatic film called Bucha that tells the story of Konstantin Godaukis or Kostia, known for his daring rescues during the early months of the invasion.

we meet the real-life Kostia, a bulky 40-something businessman with short graying hair, in a basement storeroom he calls his fortress.

It's now a hub for his team and his charity, Bucha Helps.

The fortress is decorated with patches from Ukrainian military units and stuffed to the ceiling with boxes filled with humanitarian aid, toys for kids, cartons of small backpacks.

He says he's collecting for the fall when first graders go to school for the first time.

And we already provided 8,500 children with that.

Kostia's background is complicated, like so much of the region's history.

In 1947, Lithuania was under Soviet control, and Stalin exiled his Jewish family to Kazakhstan, where he was born.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, Kostia took part in opposition politics, got in trouble, went to jail.

He eventually escaped to Ukraine six years ago with just one suitcase.

Ukraine granted him political asylum and he rebuilt his life in Bucha.

He created a thriving business charging stations for electric cars, successful enough to buy himself a Tesla, his dream car.

He had it shipped from California.

The arrival of Russian troops in February 2022 changed everything.

He witnessed the horrors of the Russian occupation firsthand.

He photographed dead bodies on the street with a hidden cell phone.

He volunteered for risky evacuation missions, rescuing the most vulnerable from the Russian occupation zone, including an 80-year-old Ukrainian composer, his wife, and the family dog.

How many people did you save?

It's 203 person, but you know, two women were pregnant at the time, so now we can count it's 205.

Now he laughs off the dangers

but some things he cannot forget he directs us to a traffic circle in butcha where costia recounts the day in march 2022 after a successful evacuation he was driving back to his home in butcha when a russian shell hit his car

this is where you were shot

so that's the place where i was driving my car and then suddenly the Russian shell hit my car and I was unconscious.

I don't remember anything after that.

Did they ruin your Tesla?

Burned out totally.

Kostya's story became the central drama in Bucha, the movie.

It's a portrait of the unimaginable, of terror and sudden death, of Russian tanks parked in the backyards of Ukrainian summer homes, of frightened civilians hiding in the basement running out of food, water, and hope.

In the film, an actor playing Kostia calmly approaches a Russian checkpoint in his Tesla.

Your identification?

He is waved right through.

The film was shot on location in Bucha, less than a year after Russian soldiers were murdering civilians and executing prisoners of war.

The identification of the dead was still going on, and so was the wider war.

The film had a worldwide premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival and private showings across Europe and even in the U.S.

But in Ukraine, the dramatic portrayal of events still so raw led to questions in the Ukrainian media and in the film community.

Was it too soon?

I wanted to put that question to the film's writer.

We meet in a film studio in the heart of the capital.

Welcome, welcome.

It's a bustling complex with with room after room of sets, a restaurant, and thousands of props.

One of the biggest movie production houses in Europe.

I'm Julia.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

She settles us into a room with a set designed to look like a radio station in New York City.

There's a wide window on the back wall with a New York street scene.

Hello, nice to meet you.

Are you Sasha?

Alexandra, yes, Sasha, there is.

45-year-old producer Oleksander Schurer, or Sasha, wrote the script.

It's his first dramatic film.

Back in the day, he was a comedy writer for then-comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelensky.

And he became the president.

I became an independent producer.

As a joke, his career a little better than mine.

When Russian troops invaded, Schurer said he focused on Bucha because the Russians had already made a documentary with their version of events, repeating the official Russian line that atrocities and Bucha were staged.

He found a central character when he read an online interview with Konstantin Gudowskis, recounting his rescues, impressed by the fact that he'd saved over 200 Ukrainians.

Schur says his movie is part Dante's Inferno and part Schindler's List.

He is a foreigner.

He could leave Ukraine.

He could go to another country.

But he decided to stay to risk his life.

And for me, this is a very powerful message that nobody can stand aside when such evil things happen.

Is this movie for insiders or outsiders?

But for insiders, those who were actually experiencing the war, he wanted it to stand as a document to the horrors they were living.

That audience had a complicated reaction.

This wasn't a film about events 50 years ago, like Spielberg's film about the Holocaust.

In Bucha, the trauma was fresh.

The first showing of his film, Bucha, was in a Bucha theater, with an audience of about a hundred survivors of the Russian occupation.

We ask them two questions: Is this movie truthful?

They say yes.

The second, do you want us to show this movie?

Wouldn't this movie dramatize you or your relatives, but all these people?

And they say no.

We wanted this movie that everybody in the world know what happened in Bucha.

There are people in Bucha who said, I can't, or drama is too early.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this.

And this is, for me, this is the main answer.

A movie, it's not a monument.

If you don't want to watch it, you don't watch it.

But many outside the country will watch the movie with distribution deals for theaters in Germany, Poland, France, Canada, Latin America, and Japan.

Yeah, my name is Yaroslav Lodigin.

I make documentaries, fiction films.

Right now I'm I'm working on the concept for a museum.

Yarosov Lodigin is a producer, a director, and a writer.

His one-line social media bio reads, I was born in dystopia.

I now live in Kyiv.

Perhaps dystopia also describes his former job as the head of the state-controlled national television and radio network.

He and his team transformed it, including building a modern newsroom that Ukrainians came to trust, challenging Russian propaganda from right next door.

He sat down to talk at a cafe called The Idealist about his new documentary, A Faith Under Siege.

A faith under siege is focused on the persecution of Christians by Russians on occupied territories and moreover the life of Christians, evangelical, especially under Russian occupation.

All across Russian-occupied Ukraine, soldiers are shutting down places of worship.

Vladimir Putin uses the false claim that Ukrainian Nazis are a threat to Christian values to justify his invasion.

Lodigin's film, made with American financial backing and for an American audience, bears witness to Putin's persecution of the Ukrainian church, including the arrest and torture of the clergy.

The documentary premiered in May on the Christian Broadcasting Network, the U.S.-based media company founded by Pat Robertson, best known for producing the 700 Club.

Before the very conservative evangelical would be asked,

you want to help Ukraine, you want to, United States provide assistance to Ukraine,

they would say no.

And then if they see this movie, they turn their minds completely and they would rather ask the Senator Congressman to support Ukraine.

That's how it works.

Putin's Russia has mastered the disinformation game perfected on state television where every day they construct their own version of this war.

But filmmakers like Lodigan believe that you can win if you can tell the story first and tell it well.

We are outnumbered, we have less money, resources, weapons, but we have some

ability to tell stories.

The battle of narratives defines this war.

We are the products of narratives.

It's hard to imagine what would be with the whole concept of justice without this work.

Within Ukraine, documentaries don't often find an audience, says Elizavetha Smith.

No, it's obvious that they don't want to see this and they don't need to see this for now.

That's why most of us filmmakers realize that we do films that will stay in time and also that are

that important now to show for an audience and that will stay in time for Ukrainians.

This year, the Cannes Film Festival dedicated its programming to Ukraine, premiering three films, including the documentary Militantropus, that tracks profound changes in Ukrainians as their country is torn apart.

Militan is a soldier from Latin and Andropos is a human from Greek.

So this new kind of human is important

inside this war.

Smith, one of the film's producers and writers, explains the title at a coffee shop.

She says the film is about how the ongoing war becomes an internal reality, even for her.

Yeah, it's my life, and I start to count if three years more, five years, or how old I will be.

Can I make one more baby?

Can I make one more movie, you know, because your future is not anymore like in your hands, and it's not fun.

The Ukrainian she's interviewed insist that the architects of the invasion must and will be held accountable.

This is not negotiable.

But for now, justice obtained through the world's courts seems remote.

And I wondered, can documentaries help people assuage their impatience and sustain their hope, bridge that gap in time between crime and punishment?

The amount of crimes in this country is so big.

In this way, documentary works a bit of therapy.

Do you really feel that when you're in the middle of a long interview with somebody who's been through this?

Yeah, I feel this a lot.

When persons start to speak, he needs to be listened to.

And then you do this work for him, just for helping, you know, just for letting people speak.

And some, lacking a platform, may shout or hunk their horns.

This is a weekly protest in the capital demanding the release of Ukrainian war prisoners from Russian jails.

Every week, Sasha Kirko comes holding a sign that says, we can't be silent.

We here because of everyone who is in this horrible captivity is our people.

We here for everyone because

they protecting us.

An estimated 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers are still held in Russia.

The two nations carried out the largest prisoner swap this summer with more than 2,000 exchanged.

It's the only positive wartime diplomacy.

I've been

in captivity two and a half years.

Former prisoners come here too.

Some in wheelchairs, some are amputees, many visibly diminished by the conditions they endured.

Mikhail Chapla clutches a picture of himself when he was first released, a gaunt face and haunted eyes.

At these rallies, he wears the Ukrainian flag like a cape, as do the other former prisoners gathered around him.

All these men

have been in captivity one year, two and a half years.

When you see this, when you come here, does it make you feel better that

everybody remembers you?

Okay, yeah.

Ukraine is desperately fighting for its very survival, but it may not win.

If it doesn't, does it matter whether it can claim a moral victory in the memories of those who lived the war and those who merely watched?

Whereas elsewhere in places like Serbia or Cambodia, generations still clash over what happened.

The atrocities and Cambodia, many young people doubt they happened at all.

In parts of the U.S., 150 years after the Civil War, the cliché remains that the North won the war, but the South won the narrative, causing no end of turmoil.

This conflict has reshaped the battlefield where memories are turned into history and justice hangs on a story well told.

That old adage about war that the victors get to tell the story, Ukrainians aren't buying it.

They are determined to keep telling it and telling it better than their foe.

until the pursuit of accountability, of justice, is transformed from a narrative hook, a hero's journey, to a verdict, gaveled out and engraved in history.

Deborah Amos is the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton.

Her reporting partner on this trip was Joanne Levine.

Support for their reporting was provided by the International Women's Media Foundation in partnership with the Howard C.

Buffett Foundation.

That's it for this week's show.

On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong.

On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios.

I'm Brooke Gladstone, and I'm Michael Owinger.