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‘I had this deep inner confusion’. How an aspiring Russian war correspondent changed her view of the invasion after visiting Ukraine’s occupied Donbas region
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Nineteen-year-old Maria is studying to become a war correspondent at a university in a major Russian city. This past winter, she volunteered as a medical worker in Ukraine’s occupied Donbas region, where she had conversations with local residents that changed her views on the Kremlin’s “special military operation.” Now, Maria is repelled by her university’s militarization and wartime patriotism. Still, she plans to continue her studies, even if it means enduring professors who blindly support the war — and tell female students to marry and have children. The independent outlet People of Baikal recently published Maria’s firsthand account of her experiences as a student and how her views on the war have developed. Meduza shares a translation of her monologue, edited for length and clarity.
Note: Maria’s real name and that of her university have been changed for security reasons.
‘I wanted a thrill’
I grew up in a small town in southern Russia. I’d wanted to be a journalist since I was 12. I went to a journalism school for kids, and as a young teenager, I started publishing in local news outlets. After a couple of years, I decided I wanted to become a war correspondent. That was before the start of the special military operation.
Why a war correspondent specifically? Honestly, I didn’t really know what military journalism even was. I hadn’t read or watched any reports from conflict zones. At the time, there weren’t any wars going on anyway. But I felt like something extreme, something risky, was missing from my life. Skydiving or riding a motorcycle didn’t feel right. I wanted a thrill that somehow went hand-in-hand with journalism. And I decided that being a war correspondent was the solution.
My mother and stepfather (I call him my dad) are both engineers, and they were against my dream of becoming a war correspondent. But they weren’t overly worried — they were sure I’d never end up in a war.
Then the [full-scale] invasion happened. At first, I was horrified; I didn’t understand how it was possible. Then at school, they started telling us all the time that everyone else was bad, and only Russians were good. I accepted it.
Journalists in wartime Russia
In September 2022, my stepfather was drafted. I was in the 11th grade. I remember a video online: a huge crowd of men standing by the local House of Culture, buses arriving to take them away. My stepfather may have been among them. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye; at the time, I was living with my grandparents.
When they took my stepfather, I decided it was a sign and felt even more drawn to military journalism. I believed that becoming a war correspondent was my calling. I dreamed of going to Donbas. I was ready to face bullets, though of course I didn’t want to die.
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Eventually, I found a university with minimal standardized test requirements (I’d missed a lot of school while volunteering as a camera operator), but I had to pass an in-person interview. I thought they’d ask me about social media marketing, but instead they asked if I was religious. Me — with my short haircut, bright red pants, and tattoos on my arms. I said something like, “Well, I both believe and don’t believe.” I also mentioned that nobody in my family really went to church, but if the university told me to go, I would. I think they liked that answer.
After that, they explained that although the major was officially called “journalism,” they planned to focus it more on military reporting. The special military operation had already been going on for a year by then, and I think training war correspondents had become sort of trendy. The university clearly wanted to gain recognition by leaning into topics like war and patriotism. They told us, “We’re going to turn you into top-notch military experts.”
I really liked that idea. I asked if students would be sent to the “new territories.” The rector said we’d first meet with war correspondents, and then, eventually, students would go there too. I believed him.
‘My drone got tangled in a classmate’s hair’
In September 2023, my studies began. There are nine people in my group — eight girls and just one guy. That’s unusual for a war correspondent program. A lot of the instructors were put off at first by how many girls were in the course. But eventually, they got used to it.
I didn’t really enjoy the first year. We had basic subjects like history, philosophy, cultural studies — boring. But the second year got more interesting. The dean brought in a bunch of new people. For example, one of his friends, who runs a popular Telegram channel, started teaching a course called Information Wars. He taught us how to analyze media and identify fake news. He didn’t talk about Bucha or Mariupol, but he did say that, thanks to international funding and support, Ukraine’s information warfare is much more effective than Russia’s.
Russia’s siege of Mariupol
One cool thing was that we started tactical training already in our first year. Once a week, we practice shooting with pistols and rifles. The sessions are held in a specially equipped basement with insanely expensive gear. We use standard AK-47s, but they only shoot lasers. One time, they let me shoot with blanks, but it was super loud, and the sound of gunfire in the city center wasn’t a great idea. After that, they stopped giving blanks to students.
I’m less into the drone training. It’s not just flying them — you have to get through an obstacle course. We use Mavics, the small, quiet ones. I struggle with it. The drone repeatedly crashes into things, I get nervous, and then I have to start all over again. Each time I try to pass the test, it takes me five or six hours.
We practice in a big gymnasium. One time, my drone got tangled in a classmate’s hair. Some of her hair actually got singed. I’m not sure how painful it was, but she didn’t scream; she was more shocked than anything.
We also have hand-to-hand combat training. We learn things like chokeholds and joint locks, and we practice them on each other.
‘I felt uneasy about how Orthodoxy justifies the war’
Our university really emphasizes traditional values, patriotism, and Orthodox Christianity. The university requires students to wear combat uniforms — to church services, to events, and whenever high-ranking guests come, like officials from the regional administration.
All of our professors hold very traditional views. They often talk to us about marriage and having children. One of them even said during a lecture that if we marry well, we don’t even need an education — our husbands will provide for us. I wasn’t prepared to hear something like that, and it didn’t sit well with me. It sounded like a friendly piece of advice, but with a passive-aggressive undertone.
A Meduza journalist in Russia
I don’t have any illusions about the Church. Before my trip to Donbas, I did an internship with an Orthodox TV program. We traveled to monasteries around the Moscow region. That’s when I saw what priests can really be like, and I heard a lot of stories — about them cheating on their wives, going on drinking binges, covering things up for money. I’ve long since stopped seeing priests through rose-colored glasses.
After the special military operation began, I started feeling uneasy about how Orthodoxy justifies the war. I talked about it with our university priest, the one I used to go to for confession. I told him I had a conflict in my mind: religion isn’t supposed to say this [war] is a good thing, right? In response, he told me about a clergyman he knew who refused to say prayers for the soldiers and was defrocked for it. I think what he meant was that priests are given orders from above: what to do, what to say. You can share your real opinion, but only privately, with certain people.
‘Finally, I would see how people in Donbas live’
After months of asking when we would go to the new territories, I gave up on waiting for the university to send us. Then one day, I randomly came across a post on a banned social network: a religious charity organization was recruiting volunteers to go. I filled out the application, and they invited me for an interview. They accepted me, and this past winter, I went to Donbas. Finally, I would see how people actually live there. I really wanted to talk to the locals.
For my volunteer work, I was sent to a hospital. For my first 10-day shift, I was assigned to the neurosurgery ward. After just a couple of days, they taught me how to give intravenous injections. They were short-staffed and trained us just in case. It was tough. A lot of volunteers couldn’t handle it, fainted, and left early. I was the youngest, but somehow I managed to stick it out.
A historian discusses Donbas
I only had one day off, right before leaving. I spent it walking around the city. There were barely any people on the streets, and the shops and cafes were mostly empty. But the Orthodox churches were completely full. That was really moving. I remember one cathedral in particular — modern, beautiful — and right across the street from it stood a totally destroyed apartment building. The whole city felt like it was hanging by a thread.
After that first shift, I asked the coordinator if I could stay another 10 days. This time, I was placed in the burn unit. That’s where I really saw the raw reality. In neurosurgery, we didn’t talk to patients much — most were unconscious or in critical condition. But in the burn unit, I spoke with a lot of people, both soldiers and civilians.
We never had Ukrainian soldiers brought to our hospital. Though they did warn us that it could happen. Honestly, I wasn’t quite emotionally prepared for that. The idea of seeing “the enemy” unsettled me. Still, I would have tried to stay neutral — that’s important for a journalist.
‘The anesthesiologist’s ringtone was the Ukrainian anthem’
At the hospital, I can say with certainty: not all the doctors were pro-Russian. Some were clearly pro-Ukrainian. Someone told us a story about an anesthesiologist who treated military patients with contempt and had the Ukrainian national anthem as his phone ringtone. I don’t know if he’s still working or if he’s been arrested.
They hire pro-Ukrainian staff simply because there aren’t enough people. Many are afraid to go to the new territories. Right now, hospitals are mostly being kept afloat by medical students — they’re essentially filling in for nurses.
Our Orthodox volunteer group had a supervisor who would gather us and give serious talks. He told us to be prepared: some patients might push back against our opinions or worldview. And that did happen — we had a few impulsive women in our group who were extremely patriotic, and the locals sometimes reacted pretty sharply to that.
The coordinators told us not to talk about the war — neither with the staff nor with the patients. You couldn’t always tell which doctors supported Ukraine, but you could overhear a lot, especially during the night shifts. In the ER, doctors and nurses would talk about how exhausted they were, how sick of everything they’d become, but also how they had no way to leave.
Looking back at the Donbas war
Even during my first shift, I started having this deep inner confusion. I wasn’t sure anymore whether Russia had done the right thing by going into Ukraine. At the time, my closest friend there was a male volunteer. He had come in all fired up, super patriotic — and then, overnight, he changed. It was like something inside him broke. He started tripping over things, forgetting stuff.
One time, we stepped out for a smoke on the stairwell. I asked him what was going on. He told me he had visited his sister, who lives in the new territories. And she had said she didn’t feel any difference between the Ukrainian government and the Russian one. That nothing had changed. The only things she noticed were that there was less water from the tap, and prices had shot up — even higher than in Moscow. She told him, “We would’ve been better off staying with Ukraine.”
After that smoke break, it felt like we really understood each other. We tried to take shifts together after that, even though we didn’t talk much more about it. I never discussed any of this with the other volunteers or supervisors — who knows, they might have sent me back. If I ended up on a blacklist, I’d never be allowed to come back here again.
On the ground in 2014 Luhansk
But what struck me most were two elderly men I met during my second shift. They were in the trauma ward, on the same floor as the burn unit. One had been bitten by a dog, the other run over by a forklift. I walked into their room by accident, and they lit up, asking if I could bring them some water. After that, I kept visiting. They were so lonely. Their room didn’t even have a TV.
One day, I took one of them to surgery. When I got back, the other one started asking me questions — how old I was, why I’d come here. I told him I wanted to help people and also see the city for myself. He asked, “And what’s your impression?” I said, “It’s confusing — some people support the special military operation, some are against it.” Then he asked what my own opinion was. I told him it was changing every day.
He started talking about life before the city was annexed by Russia. He said it was more or less the same as now. That even back then, they had shelling and had to hide in basements. And things still weren’t any better now. He didn’t criticize Putin directly, but he was critical of the city’s living conditions.
‘I need the diploma’
When I got back home, I spent a lot of time thinking. At the beginning of the war, I had rose-colored glasses on. They were giving us one picture of the situation, but in Donbas, I saw something completely different. My view of the special military operation has changed — I don’t think it’s necessary anymore. But I’m still in school, and I don’t want to get expelled and lose my diploma.
Sure, there are a lot of things I don’t like about the university and the country, but I’ve learned to live with it. It’s better to stay quiet until I graduate.
Russian propaganda in Mariupol
I try not to get into political conversations with people I don’t fully trust. I only share my thoughts with a close circle. I’m not ready to openly criticize anything — especially not around people who could affect my academic record. At university, they tell us the operation is necessary, that it’s about defending our country’s interests. We often gather humanitarian aid, weave camouflage nets. So yeah, you can’t exactly tell the dean or your professor what’s really on your mind. They’ll call you in and start digging through your social media. If I got expelled, that would be a disaster. I want to get my degree.
I’m staying in university because I need the diploma, the knowledge, and the connections. Yes, our dean is basically a propagandist. That’s his job, and he’s very vocal about his beliefs. For me, it’s neither good nor bad. I’m fine keeping a professional “teacher-student” relationship with him. It’s useful. He has a lot of contacts who could help me get a job — if I end up staying in Russia.
But I don’t want to be involved in any propaganda projects myself. Right now, I’m okay with working as a regular editor, writing news that doesn’t require personal opinion. Staying behind the scenes. Quietly, smoothly, moving forward without drawing attention to myself.
After graduation, I might leave Russia. I’d like to keep working in journalism, but I haven’t figured out yet how or where to get a job abroad. I imagine it’s not easy.
Why Russians enlist
‘His hair has gone completely gray’
Before I started university, I wasn’t that close with my stepdad. I just knew that my mom really trusted him and that they were happy together. But after I moved away, something fatherly seemed to wake up in him — he started messaging me all the time. Now we talk a lot. He’s still at the front.
I never bring up the war. Usually he’s the first to write, starting with, “Hi, sweetheart,” and then the conversation flows from there. You can’t really leave his message unanswered for a day; you never know if he’ll even be online tomorrow. We talk about my studies, and he always asks if I have enough money. It’s really important to him that I’m okay.
He works as a sapper. He hasn’t been injured. He comes home on leave every six months for about two or three weeks. I always make time to see him when he’s back. He’s changed a lot. He used to be cheerful and full of energy. Now he’s quiet, withdrawn. He says he’s just really tired of it all — he wants to come home. In the past two years, his hair has gone completely gray.
I don’t want to be a war correspondent anymore.
Story by Karina Pronina for People of Baikal
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