A vital chronicling of the war in Ukraine, one brutal day at a time

“What we saw was a mother who was holding her son in her hands and she was trying to cover all the holes in his body with her hands,” says Olga Sekliy, a paramedic in Kharkiv who was packing to flee the city before deciding instead to stay behind and brave shelled buildings in an attempt to rescue the wounded.

“I left everything, my friends, my family, it’s a hard choice. You need to decide what to lose – your homeland or your freedom,” says Alexander, a 25-year-old social science tutor from St Petersburg who fled to Georgia, walking for kilometres in the rain, in order to escape the Russian draft.

“There is no food here in any of the supermarkets, hundreds of people will stand in a queue and most of them will not get anything,”says Hussein from Kherson in the hours after Russia took control of the city.

These are the voices of the BBC’s Ukrainecast, a vital chronicling of the war in Ukraine, one brutal day at a time. Now more than 130 episodes in, the podcast began on the first day of the Russian invasion. Witnessing a faraway war via news headlines and energy prices can make the human cost feel distant: it’s all military strategy and arrows on a map in a territorial back and forth. But Ukrainecast does what the best journalism should: it makes it real – the heartbreaking, terrifying truth of civilians living through war.

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Ukrainecast brings them into our own lives, mustering a powerful network of BBC journalists and international services to bring insightful reports from those directly affected. It also adds incisive commentary from experts in their field that bring a careful and conscious balance between a broader context and individual suffering.

The BBC’s reach and reputation allow for expansive and intelligent storytelling, and it makes for sombre listening

We hear journalist and author Misha Glenny claim that it is the thirst for high-value rare earth minerals, as much as ideology, that is driving Putin’s push into southern Ukraine. YouTube’s Neal Mohan talks disinformation and censorship as the chief product officer of one of the rare social media outlets not banned in Russia. UK military commanders, international analysts and historians all find airtime, joined by the BBC’s own reporters and correspondents, who contextualise the battery of headlines we consume daily from the war torn region.

The BBC’s reach and reputation allow for expansive and intelligent storytelling, and it makes for sombre listening. Here is a parent wondering if his choice to stay in Ukraine will permanently rob his three-year-old daughter of her childhood. Here is a daughter sleeping with her parents in a car as they flee the only home she’s ever known, perhaps forever. Here is a father reliving the moment a shell blew open his kitchen and broke his son’s spine.

Here is the war in Ukraine in an audio document of historical and current import, brought to listeners across the globe, and it is urgent and deeply discomfiting. But that’s the point, right? If the best journalism “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable”, then we in the latter category owe Ukrainecast for bearing witness.