49. Stop Tanks With Books
41:58 Share

In the 2024 Jeep Grand Cherokee L, the journey from point A to point B isn't such a rush. In fact, with three rows of spacious comfort, thoughtfully crafted luxurious design, and an available premium Macintosh audio system, you'll find yourself seeking out the scenic route more often, even if it's just another lap around the block. Jeep, there's only one. Visit Jeep.com to learn more. Jeep is a registered trademark of FCA US LLC.

With an hour before boarding, there's only one place to go. The Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club. There, you can recharge before the big adventure. Or enjoy a locally inspired dish. You can recline in a comfy chair to catch up on your favorite show. Or order a craft cocktail at the bar.

Whatever you're in the mood for, find the detail that moves you with curated touches at the Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphire reserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval.

Hello and welcome to Battleground Ukraine's Big Interview with me, Saul David. This week we're talking to award-winning British artist and photographer Mark Neville, who has been documenting life in Ukraine since 2015. He currently lives in Kiev and recently set up a charity, Postcode Ukraine, with Ukrainian writer Tanya Logacheva to support communities affected by the war. So Mark, tell me about your connection to Ukraine. How did that all come about?

Well, Saul, I initially became aware of Ukraine through a different project. So I was an official war artist for the British government, I guess, in Helmand, Afghanistan in 2012, 2011, 2012. And I came back actually with post-traumatic stress disorder. I was there embedded, I guess is the term, with 16 Air Assault Brigade, the paratroopers, for about three months. And I came back

quite heavily disturbed, I would say. And I refused to admit I had a problem with it, with PTSD, until about six months when all my friends were telling me, listen, Mark, you're not the same person as you were before. You're behaving quite erratically, irrationally, and go and do something about it, why don't you? In a lovely way, they said.

And so I realized at that point, you know, that I really had to. And I sought professional help, counseling. I was recommended sertraline, which is a kind of drug that they use to treat a lot of troops returning from war zones and antidepressant. And both worked very well, I have to say, in my case.

But I really wanted something very positive to come out of this experience of being a war artist in Afghanistan. So I decided to make a book called Battle Against Stigma, the aim of which was to encourage troops suffering or veterans suffering from PTSD to come forward and seek professional help. So it's trying to fight the stigma of mental health issues in the military.

And I went to the Ministry of Defence and who knew me already because of my trip to Afghanistan, who helped facilitate it, in fact, and said, I've got this great idea for a book. It's not about criticising the Ministry of Defence. In fact, you can even write a chapter in it celebrating your own achievements in this field. And you can put your logo in it, whatever you want to do. The only thing I'm interested in is getting these books out to veterans who are still suffering.

who haven't sought professional help. And if I found it so difficult to come forward and seek professional help, imagine how it must be for a soldier who's been told to man up all his life since he was 16. So...

I made it very clear that I had a kind of altruistic intention with this book and that it wasn't meant as a criticism of the powers that be. However, initially they were very enthusiastic about this publication, the Ministry of Defence, but in a second or third meeting they said, actually, we refuse to give you permission to reproduce this.

your images taken in Helmand, Afghanistan, with stories from veterans or current servicemen about their experiences with PTSD, because it would imply that everyone you met or talked to or photographed in Helmand, Afghanistan, has PTSD. And I said, well, actually, most probably they do have PTSD, but I'll structure the book in such a way that I don't imply that

And it's really important we get these stories out to other veterans so they recognize that they're not alone. You know, they see a version of themselves in these stories. And they said, we absolutely forbid you to reproduce the images and these stories in the same book.

And so my way around this, which they clearly got very upset about, was to reproduce one book in two volumes. So in other words, it was one book with two volumes in one slip case. So I went to a company in Barcelona in Spain and said, can you make this book for me? One volume of stories from veterans and one book of images of my pictures of Afghanistan.

And they said yes, and they made a beautiful job of it. Battle Against Stigma, two volumes, one slipcase. And the first consignment of books came over in early 2015. So it was eight years ago.

and were seized by UK Border Force, who go figure, have strong connections to the Ministry of Defence. And I contacted the Border Force and I said, you know, what's the problem? There's no graphic material in these books. There's nothing, you know, offensive. It's just people's stories and some non-graphic photographs, you know. And they said, listen, we don't have to give you a reason about why we're going to release these books or if we're going to release them.

but we're holding on to them for now. However, a second consignment came via a different route and arrived safely in my studio in London in summer 2015. And then I furiously spent all summer sending out that book to mental health charities, to homeless centres, to prisons. I did a tour of prisons and prison libraries, trying to get this book into the hands of people who would be encouraged to come forward and seek help. Veterans who had fallen through the cracks, who

would somehow lost everything through self-medication. And that's what happens when you develop PTSD. You quite often lose your family, friends, and you start drinking or self-medicating.

So anyway, all this was going on around me in 2015, a great big storm of activity and controversy and so forth. And then out of the blue, I received an email from Kiev Military Hospital saying, we heard about your book about war trauma. Do you have a Ukrainian language version of it? And I was like, what? Where's Ukraine? The Ukraine in Russia?

You know, I was totally ignorant. But then I did some research and I was so blown away that this post-Soviet country would be so forward thinking in its desire to treat war trauma and mental health issues in their own military. Because by this time, of course, they'd already had a year of the invasion from Russia and people coming back with these awful injuries from Donbass, not just physical injuries, but psychological injuries as well, of course, deeply traumatized.

I was so impressed by their desire to treat their troops that I said, I don't have a Ukrainian language version, but I'm going to get it translated into Ukrainian, send you a copy as a PDF,

And I thought, no, that's not enough. I'm going to go and I'm going to visit. And I went to Ukraine for the first time. I got a Ryanair flight for, I don't know, very little money from London to Kiev. And I immediately fell in love. I fell in love with the country, the people, the architecture, the food. And I started coming back regularly ever since then, basically. I gather, Mark, you're now married to a Ukrainian. Is that right? Yeah.

That's right. Yes, Leukeria. So we live together, incredibly happy. And it's a big reason for living here. Although I have to say, I was always saying before I moved here in 2020, that I would, you know, I was telling all my friends for five years, I'm going to move to Ukraine one day. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course you are, Mark. Yep, yep, of course you are. You're going to leave London and go and live in Ukraine. Yep, yep, yep, of course.

And, you know, I was literally spending more time in Ukraine than I was in London for quite a long time. And then, you know, when Lukira and I met during the pandemic, actually, that was it. That was the final thing that tipped me over, of course, into coming here and setting up my life here. So I moved everything. It's not like I have a home in France somewhere or in London or that was it. I moved everything, my studio, my home, my belongings, everything.

And everything can set up a new life here nearly three years ago. Now, the odd timing of, I suppose, the culmination of some of your work since you moved over to Ukraine was the book Stop Tanks with Books, which obviously has a collection of your photographs. Yes.

It came out, you know, terrible sort of coincidence, I suppose, or ironic in a grim way, almost at the same time as the re-invasion or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I suppose, as we need to think about it, in February 2022. What was that? Tell me a bit about that book and what you were trying to achieve with it. Well, as soon as I arrived in Kiev in 2015, I immediately recognised, because I'd experienced it myself, the trauma of

not just on an individual level, but on a national level, basically. All Ukrainians were traumatized by this war right from 2014. You know, even in Kiev, several hundred kilometers away, you could feel it even back then. And so I was determined even then, back then, to make a book, a free giveaway book, again, not for sale, but...

particularly, but for targeted dissemination to a target audience in order to impact on something that I felt very strongly about. And I felt very strongly in 2015 that the West wasn't paying attention to this war. It wasn't doing enough. It wasn't supporting Ukraine. Instead, what was happening was that a whole host of

of European, American and British newspapers were perpetuating these myths coming out of the Kremlin about Ukrainians being fascists, being baby eaters, being paedophiles, you name it. And so many of these stories were being reproduced in the British press with no fact-checking,

People hadn't even visited the country to find out. And yet, you know, we both know how powerful the Kremlin propaganda machine is. But nevertheless, we were extremely guilty of just allowing these stories to filter through into our perceptions of who Ukrainians are. And I knew for a fact from my visits here that they're just not like that. So the aim of the book, right from 2015, I started it.

It was always going to be called Stop Tanks With Books, to make this book, which kind of changed that perception of Ukrainians, but also was a kind of call to action for the international community to support Ukraine and its fight for independence, you know, which has been going on for over 30 years now, and which they really deserve help with. And they always have deserved help for, but we just haven't been listening.

And I attempted to merge, mix my pictures of Ukraine that I'd taken over the past eight years now.

with stories from Luba Yakimchuk, this incredible writer who was displaced from Luhansk region herself during the first wave of the invasion and knows what it's like to live under Russian occupation. And it wasn't fun even back then. You know, she tells stories about people being raped, set on fire on the streets, kidnapped, just going missing, you know, basically. So it was awful, absolutely, then. So it's got short stories from Luba. It's got ethnographic research from the

Center for Eastern European Studies in Berlin, who did a massive research investigation into who Ukrainians are, what they believe politically, what their thoughts on Maidan are. And this research data came out in, I think, 2018, 17, something like that. And it also mixed all these forms of documentary reportage, if you like, which is my pictures, these stories,

ethnographic research with my own call to action about what support I wanted to see from the West. And it was reproduced in three languages. So in other words, every single word in the book, in one book is reproduced in Russian, English and Ukrainian.

And on top of that, I did this huge research into who the book should be sent to, you know, who should be the recipients in order to get that change. So I came up with this, you know, vast list of 750 recipients, which included the super rich, the media.

powerful politicians, celebrities, everyone I thought possibly had it in their power to somehow support Ukraine. So I got this book together about a year and a half before the invasion began. I had one publisher who kept on delaying, delaying, delaying, delaying. And I said, listen, I can't wait anymore. So it came to about November 2020.

And I dropped one publisher and I went with another fantastic publisher called Nasraeli Press, a guy called Chris, who recognized the urgency of getting this book out. And we literally worked, you know, him in California and me in Ukraine remotely every night for all over November, December, January. January, we finished the PDF book.

The book went to print in Istanbul in early February, and we sent out 750 copies literally a week or two before the invasion began. And it's a big book. It's a massive book, you know. And I guess it cost me about 15,000 euros of my own money to print and another 10,000 euros to send the thing out from Istanbul to this target audience. And I had book hubs all over the world saying,

I would send 200 copies to Paris, 100 copies to London, 100 copies to New York. And from those hubs, they would disseminate them to this hit list of important people. But I'm no military strategist, Saul. I'm just a photographer who fell in love with this country. And if I saw the war coming eight years ago, this full-blown invasion, then you can bet your bottom dollar lots of other people did as well. But they just chose not to see it.

For obvious reasons, you know, they didn't want to get involved or whatever their financial entanglement might have been with Ukraine. You know, they just decided not to do anything about it.

And we'll never know the full impact your book might have had, Mark, because of course, in a way, it was too late. But what has been the response since publication? Well, it's, you know, it's very hard thing to gauge his response. And I do, you know, I've made maybe six or seven of these targeted book projects where I'll do a piece of work culminating in a book, and I'll send the book out for free to a target audience in order to impact on a particular issue. So,

So this, I think, is the seventh project using that kind of strategy where I'm really trying to weaponize the form of the photo book, if you like. So it has a particular mission. And that's why I send them out for free, because I think, you know, you can't ask people to go into a bookshop and spend 50 or 100 bucks on a book if you want to change something, you know. So it's very hard to gauge. I mean, you know, Justin Trudeau received a copy.

NATO members received copies. Members of the European Parliament in Brussels received copies and took them on marches in Brussels, in Parliament Square during March last year. I had a huge response from media as well, wanting to talk about the project. That included online conversations, newspaper reproductions, etc.

So I'm grateful in the sense that it gave me that platform. But I also am so incredibly sad that the book didn't come out just one year earlier and then it might have had some impact in real terms. I still think it helped reconfigure people's impressions of Ukrainians in some way, because up until last year, most people were very ignorant about who Ukrainians were and are.

And, you know, I knew right from 2017, for example, I did a huge project about the 2.5 million Ukrainians who had already been displaced by the war by 2017. And I went all around Donetsk and interviewed people. And not once, and this is absolutely exceptional, and I've been to some terrible, awful, desperate places in my life, but not once did any of these Ukrainians ask me for any help.

All they wanted to do was sit me down, make me a cup of tea and tell me what had happened to them. And normally when I'm in that situation face to face with people who have lost everything, who have no pension, no money coming in, they've got no heating or electricity, they're in a kind of abandoned sanatorium somewhere in the East. It's human nature. I would do the same. They want help and they see me and I appear to be an affluent or a Western in many, many respects. And I have to say, no, I can't help, you know.

The most I can do is try and tell your story. With Ukrainians, never. They never asked me once for help. And that is absolutely exceptional. And I realized when I came back in 2017, from that journey of meeting people who had been displaced by the war, I realized that I was changed as a person, you know, and I'm over 50, you know, so it's quite rare that I change.

that I would change from an experience, but that really changed me. And I knew then that that was one of the reasons why I wanted to come and live in this country. And I would dedicate several years of my life to making this book and trying to have some impact with it. What we're also trying to do now, of course, is move forward from the book. One of the recipients of the book, actually a family who collected my photographs, who are primarily based in London,

They'd received a copy of Stop Tanks and he got in touch with me. The family got in touch with me and said, how can we help? And I said, well, you know, actually, I don't think it's enough just to send me to make more photographs, Bill. You know, I think I need to do something else. I need to combine this somehow with humanitarian aid.

And because you see these people on the front line and they've lost everything. And I'm damned if I'm going to be one of those people who just goes up to them, takes their picture and disappears again and makes money from the picture. You know, I'm not going to do that. I refuse to do it. So now I kind of I propose to Bill and his family in London. I said, well, how about a hybrid of photography and humanitarian aid?

And to my amazement, delight and inspiration, he agreed. So he's core funding this charity now called Postcode Ukraine, which I set up. And we deliver aid all over the frontline towns to both military and civilians. And we also give grants to other charities who we see are doing the best work on the ground. And these are quite often very small groups of Ukrainians who have been working nonstop since the day the war started without wages, without nothing.

You know, and we deliver. I personally go in my car and I deliver food, medicine, sleeping bags, drones, military uniforms, clothing of other descriptions, cigarettes, toys, you name it, twice a month. And we go to some of these frontline towns and villages and do what we can.

And it's been going now for about a year, since May or June last year. Sounds like a great idea, Mark. And if any of the listeners to this podcast, both now and as people are listening in future, want to donate, they should go to, and I've got to get this right, so make sure I do, www.postcodeukraine.com. We're also going to put that web address on the page for this particular episode. That's correct, isn't it, Mark?

Yes, that's correct. Thank you. And I have to say as well, Saul, that actually it's, you know, it is core funded, our charity. So any donations we receive on top of that from anybody go directly on aid, by which I mean they go directly on all the items I've just listed. They don't go on wages. They don't go on administration. They go directly on helping Ukrainians.

Okay, that's all we have time for now. Join us in part two when we'll be hearing more from the award-winning British artist and photographer, Mark Neville. With an hour before boarding, there's only one place to go, the Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club. There, you can recharge before the big adventure or enjoy a locally inspired dish. You can recline in a comfy chair to catch up on your favorite show or order a craft cocktail at the bar.

Whatever you're in the mood for, find the detail that moves you with curated touches at the Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphire reserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval.

Why is it that with sparkling water, I'm always playing guessing games with what flavor I'm drinking? Is it citrus? Is it aluminum can flavored? Not sure. Sparkling ice though, they really mean flavor. Like in your face flavor. Orange mango, black raspberry. Don't even get me started on the strawberry lemonade. Kiwi strawberry slid right into my taste buds DMs last night and let them know who's boss. No subtleties there and no sugar either. But it does have vitamins and antioxidants. Find sparkling ice at a major grocery store or club retailer near you. Sparkling ice, anything but subtle.

Feel your max with Brooks running and the all new ghost max too. They're the shoes you deserve designed to streamline your stride and help protect your body. Treat yourself to feel good landings on an ultra high stack of super comfy nitrogen infused cushion that takes the edge off every step every day. The Brooks ghost max too. You know, technically they're a form of self care Brooks. Let's run there. Head to brooksrunning.com to learn more.

Welcome back to The Big Interview. This week, we're talking to British artist and photographer Mark Neville. This is what he told us.

Okay, I'll come back to a little bit of your work in just a sec, Mark, what you've been doing since the full-scale invasion. But tell me about your own personal experience, because it's one thing you going out to war zones and putting yourself in danger for professional reasons, and it's another sitting in a major European capital with your wife when a huge invasion is happening all around you. So what was that experience like? We were so busy making the books and getting it out that

But I stupidly completely, more or less, ignored the ramifications on myself and my partner. So having, you know, tried to alert the West of this impending war, I kind of neglected to alert myself. So, of course, it's one thing to predict a war. It's another thing for it actually to happen, you know. And, you know, we woke up in our apartment at 5am.

six or seven in the morning on the 24th of February to the sound of sirens. And of course, you put on your phone and you see this map of Ukraine with the explosion symbols all over it. And you text a few friends and you realize it's actually begun. And then I went out onto the street. And the first thing I noticed was all the shops were closed. Cashpoint machines weren't working. And it was a, you know, a very bizarre atmosphere.

And then we had a very fraught day, Lukira and I deciding what to do, you know, and it kind of froze into sharp relief. The notion of responsibility, you know, when a war begins, who are you responsible to and for? You know, should I start fighting?

Getting my partner, Lukira, out of the country as quickly as possible. Should I donate blood? Should I pick up a, you know, a Kalashnikov and start fighting? Should I, you know, where's my allegiances in all this? Should I get out of the country immediately and start reporting on what's happening from a distance? Or try and support other people to try and get out of the country? What should I do? And it's horrific feeling, actually, I have to say. I just felt totally wracked with guilt all the time.

Not paralyzed with fear exactly, more just paralyzed with, you know, what should I do? You know, what's the best course of action? We were here in Kiev for about a day and then we drove for 24 hours to, with hundreds of thousands of other people, I might say, to the west of Ukraine, to Lviv. And then we were there for about a week before we successfully managed to cross the border by foot. My partner and I, we went to Poland for about two weeks there.

And then after about two weeks of, you know, in shock, I would say, we just stayed in an Airbnb for a bit. But as I explained, Ukraine is my home. You know, I moved here for a reason. It wasn't just a flirtation. It became my home. And I really felt those very deep feelings of belonging about my home. Probably for the first time ever in my life, I would say, I felt these particularly strong feelings and I felt them for Ukraine. And I thought, well, I want to go back. I need to go back.

And to the absolute horror of Lou Keiria, who was saying, don't return, you're going to get killed. I said, well, listen, I want to go back. I need to get my camera equipment. I want to go back to the apartment.

And so I hitched a ride effectively with Polish aid workers who had this big coach, which they ran full of things like baby milk, pampers, toys, food, medicine from incredibly generous Polish people who were donating, donating, donating nonstop.

So I hitched a ride with two riders, this big coach and me, you know, and that was it. And they were kind of, before we left, everyone was looking at me and the driver's like, we were heading to certain death actually. Yeah.

And I think Kiev was surrounded on three sides at the time. This was in March, I think. And we got, you know, I arrived back in my apartment. I mean, we just rent here. You know, I don't own any property. It's just a rental. But nevertheless, it's my home. You know, it's our home. And I arrived back and there was a half-finished cup of coffee on the table. There was a half-eaten sandwich. You know, all those things of a kind of life hastily interrupted, you know, were there. But I just felt this euphoria there.

that I'd come back and the trauma that I felt having been forced to leave my home so quickly and so abruptly, all that trauma kind of slowly drifted away, I have to say. And then, you know, at the time Kiev was desolate. There were no cars on the streets, there were roadblocks every 10 meters. There was machine gun fire in the distance. You know, there was, you knew what you were getting into effectively.

But I felt relief. It sounds bizarre. I felt relief to be home. And then out of the blue came this message from Bill, this collector of my photographs, saying, you know, what can I do to help? And I proposed Postcode Ukraine. And to my amazement and astonishment, and I was so impressed with this man and his family, he agreed, you know. And out of all the recipients of the book, 750 recipients, he was the one person who in very real terms stepped up

and said, I want to do something substantial to help.

And we've been doing it. We've been delivering aid ever since and trying to combine it with photographic imagery and trying to get those images out into the West, into resonant contexts in order that we can somehow combat compassion fatigue, Saul, because as we all know, you know, it's very difficult to sustain support and sympathy for anyone, especially, you know, under such stressful circumstances. So,

It's really vital that that support that the West is giving at the moment in terms of both military and humanitarian aid continues. There's not, you know, if you travel along the front line as I do, you see it's not enough just to make one aid delivery. You know, it needs to be constant. And it's the same with guns and ammunition and tanks. This support in order to win this war, and it needs to be won, that support has to be continuous, I'm afraid.

And in order for that to happen, you know, we have to sustain compassion for Ukrainians. So thus far, the images I've made through Postcode Ukraine have been exhibited in two major contexts. One is the V&A Museum in London. And then that exhibition immediately went on to the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office where the pictures are at the moment.

And tell me about some of those pictures. Presumably we're getting all sort of shapes and sizes and ideas of life, particularly on the front line or all over Ukraine. All over Ukraine at the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office at the moment in the reception area. There's six images. One of them features an amazing guy called Alexander, who I took a picture of him actually five years ago.

And he runs a goat farm in Zhitomir region, west of Ukraine, west of Kiev. And he was actually captured by Russians in 2015 when he was delivering aid as a volunteer. Both him and his wife were captured there.

He was tortured. He lost his leg and his wife was mock executed in front of him. This is way back in 2015. They released him and his wife after six months. Very sadly, they separated. But Alexander went on to set up a goat farm and incredible courage, you know, and physical strength as well to do something like that. Very successful farm, made goat cheese and supplied all sorts of products as well.

And I went to photograph him over the course of two or three days in 2017. And I found out last year he'd been shot dead, basically in his wheelchair at home where I photographed him. He'd been shot dead by Russians in March. For why? Who knows? There's no logic to any of this. And it's extremely difficult to get one's head around. I have to say, even now, sometimes I can't believe it's happening.

And that's really one of the very sad things about this project, this book project, is normally I do a book project and, you know, I look at my work. I think, oh, that nightclub doesn't exist anymore or that building has changed or, you know, that street doesn't look like that anymore. With this book, so many of the people I've made portraits of are dead now, you know, so many. I mean, several, several people in the book have now been killed as a result of this war.

And I have to say, everywhere I go in Ukraine, and it's a massive country, I see the same thing, which is schools deliberately targeted, kindergartens deliberately targeted, museums deliberately targeted, hospitals deliberately targeted. Not just in a few towns. I'm talking about the whole fucking country has been devastated by

And it's words seem inadequate somehow to describe the feelings that you have when you see this and the lack of logic behind it. It's very difficult to comprehend the reason, the rationale behind it. Yeah, well, we've discussed this many times, Mark, I can assure you on the podcast. And by the way, we're pretty determined to keep going with the podcast to keep as much awareness as we can in the West. We're sort of increasing our coverage worldwide.

all over the Western world, actually, Europe and elsewhere. And it seems to me to be pretty important that we have people like you on, giving such a, you know, kind of moving and sort of visceral account of the experience of the Ukrainians. Let me ask you about the mood of the Ukrainians at the moment. We're obviously entering quite a crucial bit of the war, the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive. How would you characterize it? Generally speaking...

Ukrainians are extremely resilient people. It sounds like a bit of a cliche to say that now, but it's true. And it's not just a result of, you know, a kind of innate response to the war. They've always been like these people. And I saw that, as I just said, in 2017, when I talked to these people who've been displaced, you know, as a result of the conflict.

So you've got that on the one side, which is this incredible resilience, pride in their country, belief in what they're doing. And that, you know, that...

That's just incredible. I mean, you know, money can't buy that. There's nothing to beat that, basically. But on the other hand, of course, you've got the incredible psychological impact of this war. So it's not just people losing lives, losing property. It's the trauma and it's the generational trauma that's going to cause that worries me quite heavily.

And it is terrifying, you know. So I remember being in my home on October the 10th. I just woke up. It was about seven or eight in the morning. And it was something about the combination of being at home, just waking up, making a nice cup of coffee in my lovely sunny flat in Kiev. And I heard this huge sound of a rocket passing over. And it landed about 100 meters away from where we live. And it hit a children's playground, actually.

You know, I've never been so terrified, even when I visited Bakhmut in November, December this year, and there were explosions every 30 seconds when I was there delivering generators. I never felt as scared as I did at that moment when I was in my kitchen in the morning, you know. And I told everyone I was fine and I was fine. And then about three days later, someone asked me, are you really OK? And then I started weeping.

And a bit of the problem is this is how trauma works. You know, you think you're OK, but you're not really. And it has physical as well as psychological effects. So I really hope at some stage there's some kind of huge campaign to treat the mental health issues that must be Ukrainians must naturally be experiencing. I mean, trauma is nothing at all to do with being weak or strong.

It just is. It doesn't matter how resilient you are. It's natural. You know, if you put a cat in the field and let off bombs all around it, you know, the cat might survive, but it won't be the same animal at the end of the day. And it's the same thing with people, whether you're Ukrainian, British or American or whoever. So I really hope that support comes through at some point. But to answer your question about the mood,

The mood is still very strong. There's still, you know, a real confidence that Ukraine will win. But we do rely on that constant supply of weapons and aid coming through from the West. And we're fighting, you know, we are fighting for everyone's freedoms here.

Because if we don't win, Putin won't stop at Ukraine. It'll be Poland. It'll be Lithuania. It's all our wars. And we have a responsibility, as you know, to support Ukraine in every way possible. So when I visit, you know, the troops on the front line, they say, we don't need food. We don't need medicine. I mean, they do, of course. But they say, give us weapons. Just give us more weapons, please.

Because as soon as there's a hesitation with that support, as soon as that support stops, even for a few days, then Russia pushes back a little bit. So I guess you could say that. I think Ukrainians, generally speaking, are innately positive and convinced of their own abilities. And they will win the war. I have no doubt. I've absolutely no doubt.

But it's not just enough to win the war. You know, the sovereign territory of Ukraine has to be maintained. So that means we have to retain all the territory in Donbass. We have to retain all the territory in Crimea. And Ukraine has to be whole again.

If it isn't, it's going to be very difficult. If there's any kind of peace negotiations that go on involving, all right, we'll let you have Crimea. All right, we'll let you have, you know, the territory you invaded in 2014. You know, there'll always be this kind of destabilized sense of who Ukraine is. And that will deter foreign investment. That will cause internal political problems as well. And it'll just go on and on and on and on. So, yeah.

For me, in my eyes, in my opinion, and that of many of my colleagues, a complete sovereign integrity of Ukraine has to be restored. And I'm not so sure that can be done now.

in one counteroffensive. You know, I hope so. And I'd like it to be, of course. But I think in that sense, Ukrainians are cautious. And of course, there's going to be a lot of pressure from certain parties in the West to accept any kind of peace negotiation offered by Putin, you know,

But it's not to be trusted, whatever it is. It really isn't. And I think, you know, in the West, we've always been we've always underestimated the kind of the lack of trust that Putin should be given. Really, you know, we've really underestimated his propensity to lie and deceive and dissimulate and to perpetuate complete myths.

and disinformation. And we've completely underestimated it. And we've seen the impact on Brexit. We've seen it impact in our own political situation time and time again. We've enabled the Kremlin to have influence all over the West. And it's only now we feel we're paying the price for it. But of course, Ukraine's been living with that

kind of propensity for deception and dissimilation since it existed. So, you know, I feel very strongly that any kind of peace negotiation with Putin, you know, is not to be trusted. The West really has to be aware of that. And of course, we want peace. Of course we do. But, you know, the integrity of Ukraine has to be restored. Otherwise, it's not peace, is it?

Well, that was pretty powerful stuff, wasn't it? And I have to say, Patrick and I feel that keeping this podcast going during the duration of the war is our bit. When you think of what Mark sacrificed, both emotionally, financially, professionally, not only to go and live in Ukraine, but also to do all the wonderful stuff he's doing there, the setting up of the charity Postcode Ukraine, it rather leaves us in the shade, I suspect.

Great emotion in his words, really. I mean, you know, a huge feeling of love for the Ukrainian people and the country, a kind of sense of what they're trying to do there. Of course, he's falling in love with the Ukrainian, which is naturally going to make you a little bit biased. But, you know, it's tremendously powerful to hear him talk about the effect of people that he's photographed. Some of them are no longer with us now, quite unusual for his projects.

and how determined he is that not only Ukraine wins the war, but is given a chance to be rebuilt afterwards. His personal experience, of course, of post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in Afghanistan gives him a real insight into what the whole country is going to be going through as it negotiates this war and how important it is to heal those wounds when it's all over. Okay, that's all we have time for. Do join us on Friday when Patrick will be back

Unfortunately, he's still on the move in America, but he will be back for the news and listeners questions on Friday. Do join us then.