Podcast: “Why aren't they there? It's their turn!”
Tom Mutch on Ukraine's "iron generation" and a looming postwar reckoning
Tom Mutch in Bucha, April 2022
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In February 2022, as Russian troops prepared for invasion 100 kilometres east, Tom Mutch, a Kyiv-based reporter, arrived in Mariupol to take the temperature of this (then) culturally vibrant port on the western shore of the Sea of Azov. Days of vox pops concluded that the city’s strays sensed something its civilians couldn’t.
“People were like: ‘oh, it's all just politicians, blah, blah, blah. There's already a war going on here and no one cares’ ... None of them believed there was going to be a war,” he told me in a New Books Network interview. “However, one thing I noticed is that there were dogs ... just non-stop barking … rhythmic barking, like all in sync. Do they know something we don't? And there's obviously also the sort of old wives tale that dogs bark when death is coming to a person or a place. I remember being very spooked out by that at the time”.
Within days, Mariupol was under bombardment and beginning a three-month siege that ended in capture, annexation, and Russification. Yet, to the surprise of many including Western military intelligence, not just Kyiv but the notionally more vulnerable Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Odesa all held. In the months that followed, Ukrainian resistance turned into partial reconquest but then got bogged down into a grim remake of the 1914-18 western front.
In The Dogs of Mariupol: Russia’s Invasion and the Forging of Ukraine’s Iron Generation published today by Biteback, Tom Mutch recounts Ukraine’s story since 24 February 2022 through the voices of a generation transformed by war. “One of the things that happened – and this is one of the great tragedies of the war – is that, at the very start, so many of the people who signed up for the army were the most passionate, talented, intelligent, well-educated, patriotic young people. And, over the course of this very long-running, grinding war of attrition, many of those people ended up dead, grievously injured, burnt out, traumatised”.
This is storing up significant societal problems for postwar Ukraine. “Soldiers I've spoken to who have been demobilised, who've been injured, who've come back, and … [seen] young guys in bars chatting up girls or working on their laptops and in coffee shops, they ask: ‘Why aren't they there? It's their turn. We've done this for two years. What's going on here?’ … After the war, I think there's going to be this really, really big tension in society between the people who gave their lives or their family members gave their lives and the people who sort of stayed behind the front line".
Raised in Christchurch, New Zealand, Tom Mutch (@Tomthescribe on X) graduated from Oxford then worked as a researcher/writer for Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott before transforming into a freelance photojournalist “focusing on humanitarian issues” with bylines in The Times, Newlines, Der Spiegel, The Telegraph, and the New Zealand Herald. Outside Ukraine, he has reported from Afghanistan, Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Lebanon, and Israel.
For my Writers’ Writers list, he chose Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine by Eugene Finkel (Basic Books, 2024) and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador, 2021).