Article
Comment
War & peace
3 min read

Letter from Lviv

Loss, resilience, and a hope one day to count blessings not missile intercepts.

Iryna Dobrohorska is Christian Aid’s Country Response Director for Ukraine.

A woman stands at the back of an armoured military vehicle, the door of which is open.
Iryna stands by a displayed military vehicle.

Ukraine is only two years older than I am. My personal history is intertwined with Ukraine’s history. Instead of the carefree fun I should be having as a young Ukrainian woman, on Saturday I was reflecting that my last two years have been dominated by war since Russia began its full-scale invasion. Over those 730 days, I have witnessed the best and worst of humanity.  

I was evacuated from Kyiv to the sounds of explosions nearby, fearing I would be raped or murdered by Russian soldiers if they entered the capital. I’ve wept over losing university friends in combat. I’ve despaired at how Ukrainian writers are being deliberately targeted by the Kremlin.  

But I also observed the speed that we Ukrainians built trust and social connections with unknown people. I was proud of the warmth of my hometown, Lviv, which welcomed people from the east of the country - it crushed the myths that Russia was trying to ooze into our national life that we were a divided country that didn’t have the right to exist except as part of Russia. 

Not just in Lviv but all over Ukraine. This month in Odesa I felt the same warmth extended to elderly displaced people when I hosted a visit to our local humanitarian partner Heritage Ukraine by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. He saw for himself how the team, funded by the Scottish faith charity Blythswood, had opened their doors and their hearts to these traumatised strangers facing an uncertain future. 

One of those displaced people, Nadia, told me: “We want to go home, but our home is being shelled. At least here we stay with dignity.”  

The violence inflicted by Russia is not becoming any easier in the prolonged war we now face.

t’s a scene of resilience I’ve grown accustomed to as I’ve crisscrossed the country to play my small part in the astonishing humanitarian effort powered by the UK public’s incredibly generous donations.  

The Iryna I saw in the mirror in 2021 wouldn’t recognise the young woman I see looking back at me today.  

In Kherson, I was recording the stories of illegal detention of civilians to the sound of artillery fire. In Mykolaiv, my window view was an apartment block with the roof blown off and clay-coloured water was the only drinking option.  

I never thought that I would learn the types of weaponry used in modern warfare. Now I know the difference between the motorbike sound of a drone from the missile whistle above my head followed by the clank when it detonates nearby.  

Security awareness is an everyday reality in Ukraine. We often debate during an alert whether choosing to sleep in our own beds instead of going to a shelter may turn out to be our last night. A six-months pregnant teacher friend of mine in Kyiv was killed in her sleep from a drone strike.  

The violence inflicted by Russia is not becoming any easier in the prolonged war we now face. Yet I also sense the paradox that we’ve accepted the war becoming everyday normality and so has the rest of the world. 

Global attention today is not focused only on Ukraine. A host of other crises are taking precedence in the need for a humanitarian response. My biggest fear is that the long-term nature of our crisis reduces global actors to sympathizing observers.  

What I do know is that my generation of young Ukrainians who have lost so much will not allow that to happen. More than ever, I feel the need for a just and resolute peace for Ukraine. With the help of our international friends, the day will come when those who have suffered can go back to rebuild their homes and communities.  

As I move on to engage further in Ukraine’s recovery efforts, I feel privileged to have worked for Christian Aid as part of the humanitarian response. I’m most proud of our role in being a catalyst for local people to help themselves by setting their own community priorities in the kind of support they need, giving them a sense of dignity and self-worth.  

It’s that kind of world that I dream about - where one day I will count my country’s blessings instead of how many drones and missiles were intercepted the night before. 

Article
Comment
Film & TV
Politics
Purpose
4 min read

BBC scandals turn the spotlight on its lost mission

When it's good it's great but when it's bad it’s Babylonian

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tim Davie in a blue suite smiles
Tim Davie, BBC boss.

I’m a great fan of the BBC. Generally speaking, I like and admire its journalists and its output and, occasionally, I take its and the licence-payer’s shilling. 

I may be increasingly unusual in choosing to be woken by Radio 4’s Today, but love it because of, rather than despite of, its presenters’ impertinent and interruptive style with politicians. Its radio drama is seductive. I admit to having assiduously followed The Archers, until (literally) I lost the plot at Covid. Short radio drama series can be compulsive listening, such as Al Smith’s first-class Life Lines, featuring Sarah Ridgeway as an ambulance call handler. 

As for TV, I’m showing my age – The Repair Shop, Antiques Roadshow and Professor Alice Roberts’ archaeology in Digging for Britain. Ancient Top of the Pops repeats accompany Friday evening drinks. 

But back to the journalism. Say what you like, the BBC’s news output is the world’s benchmark. It has consistently hired best-of-breed reporters, particularly on the foreign stage. Whatever politicians of both the left or right claim, depending on their circumstance, it is even-handed in its analysis.  

Newsnight under Victoria Derbyshire is immeasurably improved by its slick, half-hour, after-dinner sofa format. It disassembles the pompous and hypocritical, from Trump apparatchiks to Jeremy Clarkson at a farmers’ demo, his stammering and panicky “classic BBC” attempted dismissal now cheekily deployed in its own advertising. 

But – and you’ll know the “but” was coming – there’s the dark side. There has recently been a litany of managerial let-downs, any of which could have put a more commercial enterprise out of business. Conservative governments have customarily been most prone to traducing the BBC, possibly because they think it should know its place, which is not so much below the salt as serving at their table. 

So it’s quite the new thing for a Labour culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, further to undermine the credibility of its Director-General, Tim Davie, by listing its “catastrophic” failures on his watch. The BBC has just had to apologise (an occurrence now as regular as Gary Lineker’s controversial tweets) for failing to discover, let alone disclose, that the 13-year-old narrator of documentary Gaza: How to survive a Warzone was the son of a Hamas high-up. 

A separate external review has also found that BBC bosses failed adequately to protect staff on MasterChef from presenter Gregg Wallace’s invasive behaviours. And the corporation has had to apologise this month for broadcasting antisemitic chants by the vile act Bob Vylan at Glastonbury. 

It’s not all about Davie’s alleged shortcomings. As the BBC itself might put it, other director-generals are available. George Entwhistle resigned over a Newsnight crackpot report on a child-abuse scandal; Greg Dyke over Lord Hutton’s report into how the BBC reported the David Kelly suicide affair under the Blair government. Then there was the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand “prank”. Let’s not, please, lift the coffin lid on Jimmy Savile again. And so, one is forced to say, it goes on. 

Is the BBC uniquely wicked and/or mismanaged? No. But it’s huge and visible. I have a theory that it’s a British institution which, like others, is a victim of its imperial past. It was nurtured in a post-Reith period, when being of the BBC was like carrying a British passport (“His/Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires…”). It not only believes in, it was a child of, its own propaganda. The derring-do of its great foreign correspondents was founded on the unquestioned might of empire. 

That leads, inevitably in a post-imperial age, to hubris. It’s like Babylon, the metaphor rather than the great Mesopotamian city. Once indestructible under emperors such as Nebuchadnezzar, sacker of Jerusalem, it was destroyed by its own vulnerabilities. The scriptural allegory from Genesis is that Babylon raised the great tower of Babel to reach the sky and oversee a world that spoke its one, true language. In his wrath at their pride, God scattered its people, now unable to understand each other, for they’d come to form their own languages. 

See how that works? The BBC has come to believe in itself, rather than its mission. And consequently, it has lost the ability to communicate, both internally and externally.  

It’s not alone. The Church of England has the same post-imperial problem. So does any elected government after about a decade. It’s the jobs of Archbishop of Canterbury and Prime Minister, as well as Director-General of the BBC, that can only end in tears. 

They should get together, these people. Work out accountable corporate structures that can work in the 21st century. Create top leadership jobs that are possible to do, rather than appoint emperors who turn out to have no wardrobes. 

The point surely is not that they are humiliated, but that they have to be humbled. They need to demolish their towers, stop babbling at each other and learn to speak a common language again.  

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