Lucas Tomlinson, On Covering Ukraine For Fox

Olga Shevchenko, a coffee shop owner in Kharkiv, was sipping an oatmilk latte and trying to relax for a few moments when it happened. She’d opened Central Coffee here six years ago, on the bottom floor of an apartment building near Freedom Square in Ukraine’s second-largest city. That’s where the 31-year-old shop owner was finishing her drink, on the sixth day of the Russian invasion of the country, when a missile slammed into a government building nearby. The resulting blast wave tore through her business, and as the Russians stepped up their shelling of this city of 1.4 million people — killing civilians in several of the strikes — Shevchenko realized she would have to flee. Leaving behind not only her home, but the business she built with the sign over the front awning that promised “coffee & brunch.”

After interviewing her a few days ago, Fox News correspondent Lucas Tomlinson told me he thinks this is the kind of thing that will stay with him long after he’s wrapped up his reporting stint in the country. To cover the events in Ukraine is to be reminded of the tenuous barrier that separates normality and chaos in people’s lives. The before and after that comes into such stark relief, thanks to an externality like war.

“Seeing the carefree nature so many had before the invasion, contrasted with the sadness and stress so many families feel now — lives that have been torn apart — that’s what will stay with me forever,” Tomlinson told me.

The last time he spoke with Shevchenko, she’d driven basically across the country. Dropped everything and fled, all the way to Lviv, where he’s done his reporting from for the last several weeks. “It says a lot,” he told me, “that Kharkiv is so close to the Russian border, but everyone would rather drive across a country the size of Texas to feel safe.”

Tomlinson has been part of a Fox News reporting team inside Ukraine that includes Trey Yingst, Benjamin Hall, Mike Tobin, Jonathan Hunt, and Greg Palkot. Before I caught up with him, as he was preparing to end more than a month’s worth of reporting in the country, his broadcast day would get going at 1 am local time, so that he could contribute to “Special Report with Bret Baier” stateside. The end of his broadcasts to Fox News audiences back home wouldn’t come until after sunrise.

Sunrise, then breakfast, then a few hours’ sleep. Then hitting the streets in the afternoon to talk to residents — getting a sense of their mood, their lives, their routines and stories. “Out here in Western Ukraine, tens of thousands of refugees have arrived almost overnight since the war started,” he told me. “Most continue on to Poland. Visiting the train station, the central transit hub in Lviv, you see the impact of the war on people’s faces. The vast majority of refugees coming here are women and children since the men have to stay and fight, part of President Zelensky’s decree.

“While I try to get as many interviews as possible on camera — sometimes it’s the impromptu interview on the street that helps my reporting the most. Many times, I refer to these chance interactions in my appearances on the network. It has been part of collecting the whole picture. I try to speak to young and old. People from all walks of life out here.”

There’s so much that’s extraordinary about this conflict, from the scale of fighting not seen on European soil since WWII to the degree to which this is playing out online. Separate from social media, that last part is thanks to the work of reporters like Tomlinson, who grapple with how to help people perceive the totality of the geopolitical forces at work — and the chaos and death on the ground. From the missile strikes that have razed buildings in Kharkiv, to the plight of Ukranians huddled in subway tunnels. The displacement of millions of people, and the catastrophic economic devastation. And the Ukranian cities that, like Volnovakha, the Russians have simply blasted out of existence.

Increasingly, journalists themselves are coming under fire in Ukraine. According to one press account, a Russian special commando unit fired on Swiss photojournalist Guillaume Briquet just a few days ago, while he’d been driving towards the city of Mykolaiv. The Committee to Project Journalists, meanwhile, also reports that Russians have detained dozens of journalists in Ukraine. On Sunday, March 13, American filmmaker and journalist Brent Renaud was killed while reporting in a suburb of Kyiv.

The ones who remain continue bearing witness. Like Tomlinson’s Fox News colleague Trey Yingst, who on Friday pointed his phone’s camera at the dark sky in Kyiv. Wordlessly, he captured the cacophony of pealing church bells and sirens blaring together.

“Yesterday, I saw a mother and her daughter crying their guts out after getting off the train in Lviv,” Tomlinson told me. “They looked lost. Their lives will never be the same. Vladimir Putin has changed the lives of millions here overnight.”

One of the things that’s been unusual for the correspondents covering these events is that, at least in Tomlinson’s assessment to me, it feels like the first large-scale war to play out to such a large degree online. For weeks before the invasion on Feb. 24, for example, the world seemed to be watching an endless collection of Twitter and TikTok videos showing the Russian buildup on Ukraine’s border.

“While this information can be helpful,” Tomlinson said, “it also means there are times (reporters) are seeing what everyone else is seeing back home, too. That means, in broadcasts, I have tried to highlight the significance of what we are all watching — things others have missed.”

He told me about one particular chance encounter he had with a man who was leaving a nice restaurant in town, a beautiful woman next to him. Tomlinson asked the man if he was afraid of the Russians launching a massive attack. He smiled, lit a cigarette, and had a devil-may-care answer at the ready: “I have guns in my safe.” Illustrative, perhaps, of the defiance that’s led the country to hold out this long.

Even some retired general officers Tomlinson spoke with didn’t think Putin would go through with this. At least, not at first. “I have since followed up with some locals to ask, ‘How did you miss the signals?’ While the answers vary, one common refrain is: ‘He builds up his forces on our border every spring.’ Others thought Putin would choke off Ukraine from the world and kill the economy the way a snake squeezes its prey. Another reminder how hard it is to predict the future.”