Jen Stout tracks her journey to the Ukrainian frontlines ahead of Edinburgh International Book Festival


The way Jen Stout talks about Kharkiv, it’s no wonder she fell in love with the city. It was 2019, and the man who spent the whole day showing her around Ukraine’s second-largest city couldn’t have been more hospitable. He was an actor, and the way he talked about his home city made it seem like what Berlin used to be: a place of experimentation, poets, dreamers and radicalism. Five years before, activists like him had actually fought to prevent the enemy taking over the city.
Yet now, in 2022, here the Russians were again, their guns only a few miles from the city limits. And here was Stout, a Scottish freelance journalist at her first war, trying to get sleep on the cold concrete of a metro underground next to some elderly women. She asked how they were feeling, and they insisted they were fine. But how, they asked, was she? “One of them said, ‘My little sunshine - ‘Is your flak jacket heavy?’ Which, actually, it was because you always get ones which are made for men and it didn’t fit me. And another one said, ‘Isn’t your granny worried about you?’ I said she was, and they all nodded sagely.”
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Hide AdThat’s what one thing you don’t expect to find in war, says Stout: kindness. People concerned about you. Interested in you, in where you’re from, in the world you left behind to share a night underground alongside some Kharkiv grannies.
The realities of war and its impact on ordinary people are the subject of Stout’s debut book, Night Train to Odesa. And although it is written with empathy, clarity and insight, it’s almost even more impressive that it was written in the first place. Put bluntly: unless you’re rich or working for a well-resourced media organisation, you can almost forget about being a foreign correspondent these days.
Stout was neither. She’d spent her childhood on her family’s Fair Isle croft and teenage years on Shetland, where the one subject that had entranced her at school was Russian. She studied it at Edinburgh University, but couldn’t afford the £1500 for the year abroad so switched to sociology. That seemed to be the pattern for her twenties too: she’d win a bursary to study in Russia or apply for a job there only to find they really required independent means. In the meanwhile, she trained as a journalist, working at a local newspaper in Stranraer and then as a TV producer for BBC Scotland.
“All the time though, I just knew that I had to be in the thick of things, working in Russian,” Stout explains. “Every year not doing that was wasted. I wanted to do the deep stuff, to use my brain, to use all the history I’d learnt, to write deeply and explore and make connections. I was so impatient to be out there. So one way or another, no matter what had come before, I would have ended up reporting in Ukraine. I’d also always wanted to do conflict reporting”
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Hide AdSo when, in 2021, she finally won a fully-funded bursary to Moscow, there was no question that she’d take it. Or that, when Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, that she’d leave Moscow and make her own way there.
She didn’t have a fixer, a security team, or any kind of institutional back-up, but she knew what sort of writing she’d aim at. Anna Polikovskoya’s journalism had inspired her since she started learning Russian, and she’d also been impressed by the Second World War reportage of women like Martha Gellhorn and Claire Hollingworth. “They tended to be less self-aggrandising than the men. I have always gravitated towards the longer and deeper reporting, especially if it had a bit of the reporters themselves in it.”
Doesn’t the job ever feel voyeuristic? “I always try to guard against that, and it helps that I don’t have to put a TV camera in the face of traumatised people. I can sit down with them, cry with them, put my hand on theirs and listen to their story.” The aim, she says, is to stay clear of clichés and to reflect wartime lives as accurately as possible.
She is, she insists, scared of a lot of things, especially when alone. That first Easter of the war in Odesa, she covered a rocket strike for a front-page story in the Sunday Post. She was fine when her boyfriend was with her, but that night he had to return to the frontline, leaving her alone in her bedsit. “The sirens didn’t stop all night and the church bells were ringing too, which was beautiful but haunting, and I kept having these half-dreams about what would happen if there was a blast, what the glass would do to my body and so on.
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Hide Ad“If I’m with other people, though, there’s almost nothing that’s scary. I don’t have to meet any Russians, and although there is a threat from the sky, it’s almost impersonal. You just work it into your daily life.”
Of course, there are horrors, though she doesn’t want to talk about post-traumatic stress beyond saying that photographers have it far worse. Yet she is fully aware of what defeat would bring (“Mass graves, all my friends on a blacklist then tortured and executed. I know that, they know that. This is a completely existential war”).
But that is, she says, still not the only possible future. “In the meanwhile, I get to be in Ukraine and watch its nation-building. And these debates between cultural figures. This could be at a time of bombardment, you know, when there’s no power and everything is covered in glass.
“Yet you’d find hundreds of people in a basement in Kharkiv discussing the new Ukraine they’ve been building for the last 10-20 years. Now it’s more urgent, tied in with the war effort. But all these people are building something and uncovering really progressive values, especially in Kharkiv. And I’m there to see it. How lucky am I?”
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Hide AdJen Stout will be talking to Allan Little at Edinburgh International Book Festival on Tuesday 13 August. Her book Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War is published by Polygon, price £17.99.
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