The Truth About the War in Ukraine

In September 2014, I watched a tank battle from a hilltop in Mariupol, Ukraine.

I toured that battlefield, the day the first cease-fire was signed, on Sept. 5, 2014. I witnessed a wasteland of charred, destroyed tanks, and armored personnel carriers. And scores of dead soldiers who reminded me of the plaster molds of the dead in Pompeii, the way they seemed to be frozen in the moment and the motion of their deaths.

The conflict was then, and it remains today, a real war.