‘People Are Used To Living With A Russian Threat’

Reporting from conflict zones around the world is nothing new for CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams, who’s made three trips to Ukraine this year alone as the country’s standoff with Russia started to grow increasingly tenuous and fragile.

In fact, even before the border crisis there threatened to metastasize into a full-blown military confrontation in recent days, Williams has been reporting on the situation in the country for months now. Her coverage has included everything from joining Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the frontlines last June for a CBS News interview (and spending time at home with Zelenskyy’s parents, having breakfast) to co-anchoring special CBS News streaming coverage more recently — and even sharing behind-the-scenes reporting dispatches on TikTok.

“People have been living with Russian aggression for years here,” she told me. “It’s already a reality. In a way, people are used to living with a Russian threat.”

Whether such a threat turns into sustained, open conflict — and with Russia having amassed tens of thousands of troops on the Ukraine border, that’s looking more likely by the day — is another matter entirely. Indeed, either a limited military action or a more full-blown mass-casualty event, as Puck News writer Julia Ioffe explains, looks dangerously close to breaking out any day now. With both of those outcomes representing “different flavors of horrible.”

For journalists like Williams, meanwhile, this has all been a strange and “surreal” crisis to cover in the country, where she’s joined by a CBS News reporting team that also includes senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata and reporter Haley Ott.

To understand why, it helps to look at some of the other global hotspots that Williams has been on the frontlines for. She has, for example, filed reports amid gunfire while embedded with Kurdish troops, for example, and she was one of the first TV correspondents to report from the rubble of Raqqa after its liberation in 2017. Williams also provided some of the first reporting from Iraq about the emergence of ISIS there, in the summer of 2014, and her continued reporting on ISIS has included coverage of the battle for Tikrit, the advance of militants in Libya, and the discovery of mass graves in western Iraq.

Beyond Iraq, she’s reported on the civil war in Syria from inside the country and interviewed female Kurdish soldiers fighting on the frontlines.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is nowhere near as visceral a conflict to cover, not yet anyway. Right now, there’s basically a strange and combustible mix of normalcy among the citizens — but also a gathering storm on the fringes of the country, where two armies are getting into position to maybe face off or not, plus a United States that keeps insisting to the world that, just you wait, Russia is about to pull the trigger. And not only that, but that Russia will also fake an excuse to do so. “I can’t think of another situation I’ve been in exactly like this,” Williams told me, one day before she traveled with Ukraine’s military to the settlement of Stanytsia Luhanska.

There, Russian-backed separatists fired heavy artillery into the village on February 17, reportedly injuring three people and hitting a kindergarten.

Williams’ assessment about how unusual this all is, from a reporting standpoint, has to do with the juxtaposition of scenes like that shelling in the village, alongside the Ukranians far from the front who Williams says don’t seem to be worried so much about the whole thing. Indeed, she told me those Ukranians have been, up to this point, largely going about their lives — no mass exodus, no large-scale hunkering down and hiding.

“It’s an interesting question, why are Ukranians not panicking,” Williams said. “I think, first of all, people have different threat assessments. Not every Ukranian thinks it’s really likely that an invasion’s going to happen. Some of them think it’s more likely. Some of them think it’s less. Secondly, they’ve got a governmentt that has been urging them don’t panic, stay calm. And they’ve been really stressing the cost of panic to Ukraine, to Ukraine’s economy, and the fact that it would really be destabilizing.”

Making this all the more strange is what Williams described as the US’ extraordinary step of pre-narrating moves that officials here think Russian President Vladimir Putin is about to make.

Continued Williams to me: “I can’t think of a time the US has done something like this before, which is to get out ahead of Russia and say, well, we think you might be going to invade. We think it could be any day. And, actually, we think you might stage some kind of violent provocation as a pretext for moving in.”

For now, she says that journalists in Ukraine are relatively unconstrained in their reporting — separate from the rules and permission needed to visit certain points on the battlefield, which is to be expected. Also, ordinary Ukranians on the street are more than happy to talk to her and aren’t necessarily suspicious of Western media.

“One of the things that’s interesting to me, talking to young Ukranians especially in places like Kiev — despite the fact that they have this threat, this looming threat — people tend to be forward-looking and very optimistic about their country.” Williams told me. “Optimistic that they have this young democracy that’s taken root. Optimistic that they can deal with problems in this country.”

Problems that include one very clear and present one: President Biden, for example, on Friday, February 18, told reporters he’s convinced that Putin has already made the decision to invade Ukraine. As for Williams’ own network, CBS News on Sunday reported that the US even has intelligence that Russian commanders have been given their invasion orders — and that ground-level commanders are already making battlefield sector-specific plans.

If this, as some of the most ominous news coverage warns, turns into the biggest military conflict on European soil since 1945, the coverage from reporters like Williams will certainly be even more important to the world’s understanding of what’s going on than it is now.

“It’s so hard to know exactly what’s going on, because, of course, so much of what’s going on is what is Vladimir Putin really thinking?” Williams said. “What does he really care about? Why is he doing this? What is his bottom line?

“We all assume from what he says and from what Russia says that he doesn’t like the kind of post-Cold War status quo. He wants to change it. And there’s this whole question about what his bottom line is. Does he want to turn Ukraine into a puppet state, or does he just want to sort of turn it into a demarcation line in what looks like a new Cold War to a lot of people?”