 So I'm Andrew Weiss, I'm Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment. Thank you all for being here this evening. It's a great privilege to welcome Simon Ostrowski from Weiss News. We've just watched a compilation of episodes from the very pioneering work, Russian Roulette, that Simon and his team have done in Ukraine dating back to the takeover of Crimea in late February. Simon's background is well known to most people. He's a former documentary filmmaker, a former journalist. And I'd like to sort of, when we get this conversation going on, sort of curious, how did you come up with the format that you are using in Ukraine? Was this something that developed spontaneously? Did the people with Shane Smith and Weiss News deliberately think that you were going to break the format and the stranglehold of what television is and how news is conveyed? I think it sort of happened organically. We didn't plan it, we didn't plan for Crimea. We had no idea Crimea was going to happen. We just went out there and we decided that this was going to be very different for Weiss because we're going to be reporting on a breaking event, which is something that Weiss has never really done before. So we took an editor with us into the field, which was a change, and we had a cameraman and myself. And we realized that we can't compete with CNN or any other networks for speed. So I think what happened was we found this sort of golden middle in terms of the length of the report and the speed with which it comes out. So it's not like a documentary, which comes out a couple of months after when everybody's already forgotten about the event and you get a really personal look into all of the characters. But it's also not like the news where you see it the day that something happened. Our stuff came out two, three days later. But it was long enough, I think, to give people some depth so that they could understand the story a little better. And people didn't mind that it didn't come out all day. A lot of people don't really care about breaking news. They want to just see something interesting. And I think we just stumbled upon a new format. So you've worked in print. You've now really, I think, broken through as a person creating a totally different genre of news. Originally, you were born in Moscow. You moved to the West at a relatively tender age. Why did you feel like this was the story you wanted to cover? Because you've covered, at least you've covered, North Korea. Did you think this would be something where you had an edge and that was what it was? Or was it just this was spontaneous and sort of in the ethos of Vice News this was just happening and you had to do it? When the problems in Ukraine started, I was in Sochi covering the Olympics. And I was watching all of the events on Maidan over the television screen but watching them through the Russian lens on like Russia 24. And just seeing that was really shocking for me. Just the language that the Russian media were using about what was happening just scared me to death because I'd never seen anything like that before. It was so intense that fascists have come to power and there's a junta and a coup. And then you saw the fighting in the streets as well and people were suddenly dying in Kiev because for the preceding couple of months I just tuned the protests in Ukraine out because I'd been to the Orange Revolution of 2005. I'd had enough of sort of Ukraine protests and then all of that developing into something that eventually failed. So I didn't really want to pay attention to it. I felt like I've been there, done that. And anyways, we had another reporter in Kiev covering the story. So it wasn't really up to me. Then Crimea started a couple of weeks after things ended in Kiev. Maybe even less. But I just told my editor something's happening in Crimea and we should go down there because it's really weird. There was just a few pictures of soldiers around the Crimean parliament clashes between the local Tatars and the local Russian population and it just seemed too interesting to pass up. So you're based in New York and of course I can attest that every dinner table conversation in New York probably doesn't revolve around the situation in Ukraine. But in Washington you'd be surprised. I've been in any number of events where you have senior reformary officials or people who still work for the government and inevitably everyone brings up by snooze at some point in the conversation and there's someone at the table who's never seen it and then three or four of us will tackle the person and say you absolutely have to pay attention to this. And I remember in early March 2014 thinking that there's a dividing line between watching these episodes and having a preconceived view of the conflict shattered. And I'm just curious when you were on the ground in Eastern Ukraine as things really started to spin out of control did you feel that you were in the midst of something that was going to just peter out? Because I think now looking back there was a real sense that this didn't necessarily... Russians were just kind of the forces raid at Moscow's behest didn't really know what they were doing and they were trying stuff. Did you feel like you were watching a bunch of experiments unfold and like some days things weren't that scary and then the next day things suddenly were really extreme? Well I don't make predictions anymore because I'm constantly being surprised by this thing in Ukraine and I never expected Russia to annex Crimea. The entire time I thought this is Putin flexing muscles showing the world what he can do and sort of posturing but I felt that at the last moment he was going to back down and people were going to come to some kind of an arrangement and I was as surprised as anybody when Crimea got annexed and now I just... I don't know what to expect anymore. So one of the things that you've done which I don't... I assume this is not that different from what a war correspondent does is you're really in the middle of dangerous situations and in the videos there's this constant back and forth between you narrating and action and there's a scene in one of the episodes in the Orlovka police station where you're actually standing next to the chief of police who's carrying a machine gun wearing a full battle kit and the camera sort of pans to you and you're within two feet of him as he's trying to negotiate his exit. Was that the worst it got until the point when you were abducted where you felt that you were getting too close to dangerous situations and did you at times feel that this was not sustainable and you had to pull back? Well up until that point I think that was maybe the second most dangerous situation that we've been in because we'd also actually been sort of detained for a little while by pro-Russia forces in Crimea. We were released pretty quickly. But at that time we were specifically targeted and detained so that could have gone south. The situation in Orlovka could have gone south too but their anger was focused on the police and the interesting thing about a riot situation like that is that when the crowd has a target for its anger the journalists are pretty safe as soon as things calm down and people start thinking about what to do with their excess energy and adrenaline and anger they start looking for local enemies and you're the guy with the camera who doesn't look like he's from around there you're wearing this stupid helmet and this big press thing and they come up to you and it's all your fault and that's actually exactly what happened after Orlovka why we didn't stay for that scene where the lieutenant colonel introduces himself to the police and it was because Freddie, our cameraman, got attacked by the crowd and his camera was broken and so we had to get out of there really quickly that's obviously not on camera because the camera got broken but that was pretty intense but the war really escalated after that and a shell coming crashing down through a wall is a lot more dangerous can be a lot more dangerous than a crowd of angry people because a piece of shrapnel can just slice your head off so before we get to the escalation period one of the things that I think people have been slowly appreciating in the West is the role that facilitators played in creating the environment we have today and if you watch the episodes, particularly the one in Orlovka but then there's another one which we've seen where Ukrainian forces are being disarmed there's a level of professionalism that certain people in the crowd demonstrate and storm the police station and you can see, we were talking about this during the screening you can see this former GRU colonel, Desler who becomes a very notorious figure during this phase you can see him walking into the building and you can see people facilitating the removal of the beaten police chief who are kind of trying to tell the crowd back off he's done what you asked him to do was that clear to you at various points in this period that there were these unusually talented people who were helping speed events and guide crowds and kind of stage manage what looked like CASP but was more at someone's behest Agents, provocateurs sort of Or as we now know, Russian special forces are an intelligence person I think we understood that even in Crimea even before it started in Eastern Ukraine because it started out in Eastern Ukraine under the same template as was used in Crimea where Eastern Ukraine actually were sending the crowds of people against police stations in Crimea they were sending them primarily against military bases but the format was identical people from pro-Russia activist groups that existed in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea predated the conflict were sort of mobilized by these leaders just like you said and there were some people in the crowds that were more agitated than others and they needed to be tampered down a little bit because there was I guess a PR aspect of the whole thing to manage I think Crimea was so successful for Russia because there were so few casualties and I think initially that's what they wanted to see happen in Eastern Ukraine but then I think the plan got out of hand when the Ukrainians decided to fight back as a country So you spent some time in the early phase of the conflict seeing these kind of ragtag, oddball people who were elevated suddenly to being the mayor of Slavyansk who's this kind of guy in a hoodie and he's got a black hat on and he looks like a drug addict he just doesn't look like the... he's not Mike Bloomberg and I'm just curious later on I've seen one of the most recent batch of interviews you're with Saharchenko one of the leaders of the DNR, the Donetsk People's Republic have you seen the leadership change or is it just that these guys can be sort of cycled in to fill an established role? It's changed so many times actually I mean you've got, I don't know maybe the third or fourth incarnation of the leadership in Eastern Ukraine by now and I think people get removed and then are banned from coming back to Eastern Ukraine as it seems to me as it fits whatever Russia's policy is at the time and a lot of the leadership of the separatists are actually more radical than the Russian leadership in Russia and so I think when they see that people are getting either too popular or out of control and they try to sideline them put new people forward and we've seen that happen with when the mayor who was responsible for my captivity he was then replaced by Strelkov Strelkov had arrested him Strelkov Gierkin and then Gierkin himself after he left to Donetsk was then sideline too and he had to go back to Russia and both of those figures live in Russia now in sort of exile from the conflict and aren't even allowed to appear on Russian TV anymore and they've actually been trying to get in touch with various foreign media so that they could get their position across their radical position in terms of you know comparison to the Russian position because they want to continue the fight and they want to expand the territory and I don't think that that's what Russia's interest is at the moment I don't think that Russia wants to join Eastern Ukraine to the country in the same way that it did Crimea I think for them right now at least and you know this paradigm could shift at any moment but right now the conflict in Eastern Ukraine for Russia is a tool for pressuring the Ukrainian central authorities and by extension the West and all they have to do is turn up the heat you know on the conflict get the people who they support to start fighting make it look like Ukraine is about to collapse and then they can get the Ukrainian authorities to agree to anything and again by extension the Western authorities to agree to something So I'm going to ask you two more questions then hopefully we'll open things up and have folks participate in the conversation if you go back to Eastern Ukraine as I assume you will and you find yourself now in the presence of either separatist leaders or people who are kind of organizing things as opposed to the trooper on the ground how would you describe what's different now is this still a ragtag bunch is there a level of professionalism that surprises you like how would you characterize the separatists that you're seeing on the ground right now and the mid-level leadership that you're encountering when you're doing your work It's definitely more organized than it was at the very beginning but I still probably wouldn't call it like a totally professional operation and there's a lot of difference between the situation in Lugansk it's harder to operate in Lugansk areas especially the areas controlled by Cossacks who refuse to even coordinate their activities often with the authorities of the Lugansk People's Republic and then in Donetsk it's a much sharper operation where they organize press meets and they've got a list of schedules of meetings and they've got all of the symbols and flags and the whole city has been transformed I think they've had some consultation from Moscow on that So the other half of this conflict is the Ukrainian force which is also a bit of a grab bag of professional, military and volunteer units I'm just sort of curious how you would describe today I don't know when the last time you were around the Ukrainian units but I'm just curious how you would describe the conditions there the quality of the equipment, the level of morale in the sense that, you know, is it a more capable force or is it a force that's really also not quite professionalized and ready? Yeah, there's a difference between what the Ukrainian army was a year ago and what it is now but there's not a massive difference between what the Ukrainian army was in February when they lost Debaltseva and what they are now and I think that's the key thing to remember is that even if they're, you know, better than they used to be they're still not good enough to hold something when there's a concerted effort to take it from them and especially when you have, you know, evidence of Russian troops being involved in that fight the Ukrainians just can't stand up and not only can't they stand up but they can't even withdraw in an organized manner or know when to cut their losses I almost feel like the military leadership and, you know, the leadership of the military in Ukraine have like a sort of Stalinist view of how war should be waged which is that you should never retreat and so then they leave it up to the panicking soldiers to retreat leaving all of their equipment behind instead of having, you know, saved that equipment and retreated at an earlier point and I don't know why that is maybe it's just bad organization maybe it's because nobody wants to be the guy who ordered the retreat to be then called a traitor afterwards for having done it but, you know, there's something missing there Well, look, let's open things up now A couple of basic ground rules if you would ask a question as opposed to extending a long comment so that plenty of people here in the room who have great expertise in background on these issues get a chance to have a question to Simon and then also identify yourself before speaking so please over here Simon, there's also a microphone if you would just wait for the microphone First of all, Simon, thank you for joining us here My name is Ruben Gazerian I'm an Eastern European analyst in Washington, D.C. You kind of alluded to this in this previous question How would you or why would you describe that there's a difference in how developed the DNR is to the LNR? Is there something in the leadership? Is it Russia's support? Or basically how would you describe that difference? Thank you You know what, to be honest I really don't know the answer maybe it has something to do with the fact that the LNR is closer to the Russian border and so maybe the political leadership there is more dependent and weaker and then you know the DNR leadership have to be more independent somehow and look after things and also they're the face of the two separatist republics because they're closer to the Ukrainian front line and all of the journalists come through there but you know that's just guesses to be honest I don't really know Can you talk about the Cossacks in Luhansk and sort of what your experience has been around them Do they basically seem to be a force unto themselves? Are they accountable to someone? They seem like a force unto themselves they do because when you're driving through their areas we were actually on our way to meet another one of the local rebel leaders when we were pulled over by some Cossacks at a checkpoint who said you have to come meet our leader because he's much better than the guy you want to see he's a much stronger fighter and so he sort of derailed us for about two hours and sat us down and gave us tea and told us how great he was and then sent us on our way so in that sense they kind of do what they please And is this the one that had all the sort of bizarre rules about single women shouldn't be allowed out at night or my misremembering Cossack leader I think you interviewed who really made his mark by being sort of almost like 19th century 17th century kind of social norms that he was trying to impose on the region Well, we were on our way to see a guy called Musgavoy who had had a people's court set up where they tried some looters and alleged rapists you know by a show of hands and that caused quite a scandal You know that's the story that we were derailed from covering by Kaisitsyn who's a Cossack from Russia who I think maybe was doing the stuff that you were talking about Peter Ridaway, if you just wait for the mic Peter Ridaway from George Washington University Do you see any process at the grassroots in Danieca, Lugansk whereby people are becoming more impatient with the poor administration and the lack of a good choice of food and interrupted education that sort of thing to the point where the local leaders are in danger of losing a lot of popular support I think people who feel that way generally leave the area unless you know they have absolutely no other options but I don't think that there's a kind of potential for the population rising up and destabilizing the leadership because of its unpopularity if it exists It's hard to say because people in that area don't want to talk about how they really feel because that's a dangerous thing to do and that's the reason that that wouldn't work because we look at things from the perspective of how mechanisms work in a democracy but over there if you went out onto the central square and started protesting against the authorities then that's a very quick path to the basement for you or worse and so I think you have to look at it from the point of view of this is a war there's no sort of democratic process and it doesn't really matter what the people think at the end of the day because they're not the ones with the guns Hi, Jeff Trimble from US International Broadcasting First it's great thank you for using the Svoboda material in your reporting please use more because they're doing a great job thanks a lot My question is about feedback to your content while your narrative is in English there's a lot of Russian in it and of course a lot of people in Ukraine and in Russia speak enough English that they could consume your content and react to it what kind of reactions do you get to your materials from people in Ukraine and even more important from my perspective from people in Russia and what underlies that is how in the world can we start to change the narrative and start to get Russians thinking differently about what's actually happening in that part of the world as opposed to what they're getting from their own media and I know it's a big discussion and we can talk more during the reception thanks Yeah, to be honest I don't think there's really any way to change public opinion in Russia because most of the population gets their news from Russian television and it's a very small proportion of people who would watch stories like mine and this is something we were talking about earlier but it's relentless to the Russian television news and people worry about the United States' perception in Russia and not making the wrong move and not wanting to turn ordinary Russian people against the United States but I don't think that's a... I think we've passed that point Russian's perception of the United States and the outside world at large doesn't depend on what the United States does it depends on how... when making policy decisions regarding Russia Are you hearing from people in Ukraine and Russia about your... Yeah, I mean, you know, there's the comments under YouTube videos but... I'd rather not voice them here and the occasional charming email Bryce Jordan from Georgetown University Thank you again I'm just thinking specifically about your recent interview with Zakharchenko and kind of how dismissive and really rude he was to you and I was thinking when I was seeing that you know, does a certain reputation precede you now especially in the wake of the detention and how has your reputation changed with the separatist leadership? I think some people know me out there I think some people don't know me maybe they've heard of me but they don't know exactly who I am I don't think I'm as famous as I think I am and I think that you know, for the separatist leadership there is an interest in continuing to allow the foreign media to report even if they don't like their reporting a lot of the time why because the Kremlin doesn't control what we say and they don't always see eye to eye with the Kremlin the Kremlin controls the Russian journalists who are in Eastern Ukraine so even if they give an interview as they regularly do to a Russian channel they know that what's actually published is going to be managed and so if they're making radical statements about wanting to take over a Mariupol that might not get reported in the Russian press but if a Western journalist takes that interview he'll publish those words and that's what they want to see happen Could you talk a little bit about how the Western press presence in Eastern Ukraine has changed do you want to deal with this anymore and it's no longer interesting? Well it's like with any story when there's a lot of bang bang and then when there isn't people leave and go and do other things I think that's quite natural to be expected and I don't know if there's really anything that can be done with that but we're trying to stick with the story as much as possible obviously not there right now there's always stories to be doing there I think even when there's not a lot of explosions and so forth there's always some interesting investigations that you could do and we're lucky to have with the Russian Roulette series quite a sizable following so anything we put on that playlist people get a notification about it and they'll watch it that's really good for us and that encourages I think my editors to continue it because we've got a different model than CNN does because of the way YouTube works simple as that if you subscribe to something and there's a lot of subscribers to your material then you can get an audience for it even if it's not on the global headlines at this very instant and who's the bulk of the audience right now? like who do you think is the most eye-hard? I think it's like 50% United States and then 50% the rest of the world and then the rest of the world divides into a quarter of it as Ukraine and Russia and then a quarter of it is just you know random people all over the place and is it, you know, Vice is calling Carter's bid it's heavily millennial is that true in this case or do you think the age skew is different? that part I don't know I haven't looked at those statistics but I know it skews like heavily towards males so I think maybe 70-80% of our viewership are males and do you think that drives what you know will do well and like are you measuring your performance on views and on audience sides? I mean I think we're trying to expand our appeal but the thing is we report a lot on conflict and I think, you know, young guys are more interested in conflict than young girls Jessica Matthews Jessica Matthews from Carnegie I'm interested in the Ukrainian army such as it was a year ago and what we saw there in instances where they were well equipped were they demoralized turned over by their leaders it seemed like there were some episodes there where they were not facing overwhelming force at all and they could have fought which is what armies are supposed to do this is an army that had existed in a country that was at peace for 23 years there were certain parts of the army that had participated in the American-led efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq but those were very small and limited units and the rest of the army at large were conscripts I don't think they ever expected to fight and I don't think they went into the army ever hoping to fight either and I don't know that people in the army really believed in the cause either the Ukrainian army over the last 23 years was essentially a vehicle for the generals to enrich themselves it wasn't there for providing any kind of defense because I think nobody in Ukraine ever imagined that Russia would attack their territory I think that was so far beyond anybody's perception that they never even made plans for fortifying their eastern frontier all of the exercises that they did had always happened on the western side so I just think that it took a while for people to catch up with the reality really and there's also a big difference between the volunteers and battalions by definition volunteers have better morale than conscripts who have just been called up by the draft office so the morale was good in the volunteer battalions it was over the top to be honest and there was no morale in the rest of the army people didn't want to be out east they wanted to be back home in Iraq in the fall of 03 visiting some of the coalition forces having an American general say to me that of all the useless members of the coalition the most useless was the Ukrainian delegation that's harsh can you talk a little bit about there's obviously a long standing debate in Washington about whether the US should get more directly involved and one of the ways people talk about that would be through some form of more direct military assistance to the Ukrainians do you think we're in a situation where that kind of assistance would be a big change on the ground or is there just a structural mismatch between what has been applied so far to pressure the Ukrainians versus the relatively limited capabilities the Ukrainians themselves well luckily I'm a reporter so I don't have to make that call I just kind of observe and criticize and never have to face any of the consequences myself well sometimes most of the time not I don't really know what the answer is there I personally wonder what the utility of giving weapons to a country that produces so many weapons is and if the Ukrainians don't want to unify as a nation properly for the war effort including getting their military industrial complex straight they're the ninth biggest weapons explorer in the world so they could maybe curtail some of those exports and send them to their army figure out some of their problems with corruption before they blame the rest of the world for abandoning them because the other side of that coin is that if you do give them weapons you don't know if they're going to make it to the right people or whether they're going to get left behind like they did in Debaltsevo because of those command problems that we were talking about before from Luhansk still on my line thank you for reporting on my hometown I'm Tanya, I write for Renate Echo at Global Voices and I'm from Luhansk so my question to you is how did you manage to sort of negotiate your double identity of being an American but also being kind of a Soviet child I'm also one did you figure out through time that there were moments and places where it was better to be the American guy because that's another hat you wear and then other places where it's like I speak your language and not just because you speak Russian they're the short the short hand when were those moments I mean I've always kind of been a foreigner wherever I went so here in the United States growing up I was from Russia and then when I moved back to Russia when I was 17 I was from America so I kind of got really used to that role I don't give it too much thought but I think it's great and I'm really thankful to my family for keeping up Russian while we were growing up here because without it I don't think I would have been able to start as a journalist in Russia I wouldn't have got my first job that got me started so it's not really something that I devote a terrible amount of thought to and do you feel that the people you're interacting with throughout the conflict have pegged you as a foreigner do they look at you and it's obvious people insist on calling me Simon even though my name in Russian is Simon and even if I tell you three or four times my name is Simon they'll still insist on calling me Simon because they just want me or consider me to be a foreigner my name is Simon if we're speaking Russian you can call me Simon in English Alexander Blysenko General Eurasianist and close observer of Russia and Central Asia but also more recently Ukraine of course and a general fan of your selfless and raw reporting so thank you we've heard from the perception from Russia's perception of what's going on and the lack of understanding there but what would you rate the understanding here in the West and where it can be helped where it's gone wrong and how it's changed throughout your reporting and coverage of there that's a good question it's a tough question to answer I think that people's perceptions here are closer to reality than people's perceptions are in the United States in Russia simply because there's not a controlled narrative and there are just so many different medias that you can choose from to get your news from and so people just get a more balanced opinion if they're interested and the other problem is that not everybody's interested that just means that a lot of people aren't following yes please Alexander Melikishulia thank you Simone for your comments which I find very informative thank you for calling me Simone and I'm really glad to see you safe and sound first of all thanks my question has to do with your experience chronologically speaking you were there at the early stages of the conflict but based on your experiences you know you witnessed the motley crew of marginal elements from Russia coalescing there what's your sense of the control you mentioned control from Moscow but how tangible is that control in other words do you see as this situation developing further a possibility for folks just going on their own completely thank you very much I think it would be hard for them to go alone completely if we're talking about the separatists taking things into their own hands and completely rebelling against whatever the Russian government position is because they depend on them for arms and they depend on them for money and a lot of the people fighting over there are fighting not for the idea of a greater Russia or whatever you want to call it but basically they're either for adventure or for cash sort of lots of marginal groups that are ideological either far left or far right or weird religious aspirations and then of course there's the group of soldiers who are just simply Russian soldiers following orders and I think the battles of Ilovaisk over the summer which was a real turning point in the war that was when the Ukrainian forces were progressing very strongly against the pro-Russia separatists and they seemed on the point of basically dividing Donetsk from the city of Lugansk by cleaving this area in between them when for the first time Russia moved regular troops in to support the separatists and essentially won the battle for them and turned the whole war around so I think what that shows is that the separatists and the Ukrainians are pretty evenly matched but the Ukrainians have superiority and can win when it's just against the separatists so the separatists need Russia because without Russia I think it would have all been over a long time ago my question is what's your sense of the current armaments capacity production capacity for the rebel region the separatist regions and their current arsenal what do you estimate and how do you think that matches up with public U.S. estimates I don't know I don't think they produce weapons in eastern Ukraine what to the one factory though where they were sort of re-webbering tanks yeah I went to a factory it was like a repair facility but they weren't actually making tanks from scratch there's a pretty well-known facility in Donetsk where they like to take the journalists to show them all of the equipment that they've taken from the Ukrainians and repainted or fixed up or cannibalized for spare parts because the official position of the separatist authorities is that all of their equipment was captured from the Ukrainians and that they didn't get anything from Russia but that's not true but that's the reason you get so many reports out of that particular facility no idea I mean it's just too big for me to understand as one person thank you I think that next time you are in Donetsk you have to call your Semen that's better that's a Russian name because Semen is not Russian you see this is what I was telling you that's why you are foreign I get this all the time you mentioned that people who are in these regions who support Ukraine but is it fair to say that if referendum on the future of Donetsk and Luhansk is today the majority will vote against any strong ties with Ukraine and will vote for federalization or separatization I don't know confederation you know I think a referendum in the conditions of war is really pointless I mean it's not let's imagine no war today and only those who live they won't well they would probably vote for separation or joining Russia I think because I think in that part of the world people have a very keen sense of what the you know the political which way the political wind is blowing at the time and it's almost a matter of survival to internalize the correct political position and any referendum organized under the supervision of the separatist authorities would essentially mean that people have to vote for whatever the official position is of the separatist authorities and we saw that during the last referendum that they held that they tied voting to getting social benefits so you weren't able to in some towns get your card unless you went and participated in the referendum that's maybe two more questions we got three thank you my name is Daniel Hines from Eurasia Foundation I have a question about what the kind of casual atmosphere was like working among other journalists was it kind of a collaborative effort where if something big happened you would all call each other up and alert them to it are we mostly working independently and also what was it like working alongside the pro Kremlin state-run media was there a kind of animosity between the western journalists and the Kremlin journalists it was really great working with all the other reporters and all of my colleagues were also doing really amazing work going to all of the crazy places and seeing all of the crazy things that we were seeing and sending their reports to their outlets and often times we collaborate with one car together with independent Russian journalists like I mentioned in one of the videos that we had a journalist with a Russian passport who helped us get through pro Russia checkpoints and we extended the same favor to him when we were on the other side of the lines going through Ukrainian checkpoints I'd sit in the front seat with my American passport and wave it at the Ukrainians and we helped each other out in that way wasn't really a lot of hanging out with the Russian official media I think we all sort of understood what the situation was and sometimes you don't want to see what's going on in the kitchen because then you have to do something about it and just I think a lot of what they did they tried to do away from prying eyes anyways these days though if you were in Donatsk and the situation is more or less calm there's a lot of press junkets that the local authorities organize and inevitably you're going to be with a really big group of Russian journalists if you go along on one of those they look at you funny so right now there's a lot of focus I think in Washington about the prospect for escalation in a sense that more equipments flowed in there's advanced anti-aircraft capability there's greater command and control and consolidation do you have a plan for how to cover that in this sort of period of anticipation particularly in and around what's your next map your next step well yeah the plan is like buy an airplane ticket fly to Kyiv and get on a train and go there that's the whole plan so maybe two more questions Jackie LeBue also from your Asia Foundation so I was wondering which new sources would you recommend following for those of us following the conflict that are doing really innovative reporting other than vice oh well then I wouldn't recommend anything at all but I mean the New York Times has done really amazing reporting who else the BBC has been doing really good reporting all of the sort of major outlets that you're used to watching they do do good reporting I think the mainstream media gets a bad rap I don't know why no I'd say at least in this institution I think we recognize that it's actually really hard to understand what's going on and it's actually the western correspondents who are there who have really helped us understand a lot better the fabric of the societies that have been under all this pressure but also what the battlefield looks like I think it's you know there's this idea that you could understand anything without the work that people are doing for BuzzFeed the Wall Street Journal of New York Times the Guardian I mean nobody's like consistently brilliant and all of those outlets have produced some really amazing reports I especially like some of the ones New York Times does like a year after something's happened and they dissects you know events by interviewing just a whole whack load of people and giving you a perspective like the story they did about the hours before Yanukovych fled one more one more okay no two more two more that's fine Hello Peter Sadler from Atlanta Council thank you very much for taking the time to come out here I wanted to ask you a question about the internal governance of the DNR and the LNR we read a lot around here that pre-existing channels of corruption criminal organizations even the mafia every now and again wind up running the territories that they get occupied and kind of drafted into these separatist structures a lot of the clips that we just watched it seemed a lot like normal people were out there protesting or rallying or on the military to push for the separatist agenda so in your experience how would you characterize the relationship between the separatists organized crime networks already existing there and then these kind of mass administrations have popped up initially did they phase out over time did organized crime step in how is this unfolded thank you well initially I think they were trying to replicate what happened in Crimea and they didn't want to see any casualties they just wanted to see overwhelming popular support for Russia and for that to solve the problem for the Russians at least but that didn't happen and so those methods were quickly sidelined bringing out pro-Russia supporters and using just ordinary people and it became an armed conflict and it just became about who had the guns and what the conflict is about now it's not really nobody's asking the local population what they think on either side nobody really cares it's just who's got the bigger gun Spencer Trumblay I'm not with any organization just a cameraman Simon your work has you've even commented that this was broken the mold of international news reporting and it's shaken up the format have you noticed a difference in the way that other media agencies are reporting now now that you've kind of been heralded as a legitimizing voice for vice and then also changing the format what's your look I'm really glad you asked that question what's CNN doing now are they changing I don't watch CNN but the BBC they really have imitated our dispatch format my friend Natalia Antolava actually told me that her editors told her to do an Astrovsky so that's out there look it up Natalia Antolava some of her reporting in Ukraine has been great and she does a good impression of me we're incredibly grateful to you for being so generous with your time we are in your debt without your reporting I think people's understanding of what's going on in Ukraine would be far far diminished and we just wish you all the best and epically hope you'll stay safe because you're doing things that are quite quite challenging and where you'll be in our thoughts thank you for inviting me this is really one of the biggest crowds I've ever talked to it's much easier when you're just staring into the lens of a camera thank you so much I hope you guys will join us now we have beer wine and pireski on tap in the back please stick around and talk to Simon thank you Andrew appreciate it thank you