The director was having trouble making his documentary about Vitali Klitschko and his brother Wladimir emotional and dramatic. But when the mayor was blamed for two bomb shelter deaths, everything changed
I’m not a war correspondent. But it’s 3am and, like every night this week, I’ve been woken by the sound of sirens outside, alarms on my phone and a calm voice-broadcast in the corridor of my hotel telling me to go to the basement. I scramble into some clothes and fumble my way down to the hotel laundry/bomb shelter. The smell of detergent is overpowering but also somehow reassuring. I take in the sleep-deprived faces of my fellow basement dwellers: a group of Spanish nuns; a couple of mysterious American “technology workers” with their local girlfriends; and the real-deal journalists and war correspondents who remain entirely calm and tell us: “This is nothing. You should have been in Afghanistan last year.”
Why am I here?