Good morning. The Globe’s senior foreign correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, recently travelled to Pavlohrad, a Ukrainian city on the verge of becoming the next front line as Russian troops edge closer. More on that below, along with tariff talk and a playoff picture. But first:
Today’s headlines
- Two of the synagogue attack victims may have been accidentally shot by British police
- Defence procurement to go through new agency as part of Ottawa’s plan to reform industry
- Thunder Bay police begin their first-ever landfill search for the remains of a First Nations woman
Tetyana Kotenko, 29, seen in September in Pavlohrad, is expecting a baby boy.Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
The Globe in Ukraine
A city on the brink
Pavlohrad is not yet on the front line, or in headlines. But it will likely be in Vladimir Putin’s crosshairs in the months ahead. Mark has been covering Russia and Ukraine for The Globe since 2002. He answered some questions about the trip he took to Pavlohrad with Ukrainian photographer Olga Ivashchenko to learn more about the city and how the war is changing it.
Why did you want to travel to this region?
The concept was that cities like Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and now Pokrovsk, tend to be written about for weeks or months on end while they’re on the front line, and then they disappear, and readers never really know what that city was or what it was like. It seems that Pavlohrad is on the trajectory where the front line is getting closer, where it’s increasingly getting targeted by Russian air strikes, and we’ve seen this pattern before. What Olga and I decided to do was spend some time getting to know the place and try and tell readers about what this city is like before it jumps into the headlines. Before it becomes too dangerous to get to.
What are some of the biggest differences that you noticed on the ground between a city closer to the front line like Pavlohrad compared to Kyiv?
It’s always been a tale of two worlds in Ukraine. Even with the increasing number of air strikes and the increasing hits that the capital has taken, life in Kyiv can feel really normal sometimes. I spent part of last weekend just sitting outside on a patio listening to somebody play violin, having a coffee and enjoying brunch at a French restaurant. That’s not imaginable in a place like Pavlohrad. When a siren goes off, it often means that something is going to hit the city imminently rather than in Kyiv where it can mean the start of an hours-long wait for an attack that may or may not happen. Also, in Pavlohrad, the fact that the war is getting closer is apparent as internally displaced people from the front arrive in minibuses several times a day.
Schoolchildren, seen in Pavlohrad on Sept. 17, are forced to study in a bomb shelter because of the possibility of Russian shelling.Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
U.S. President Donald Trump has been back and forth on his stance for the war. What are the views on compromise among Ukrainians who want the war to end?
One of the most interesting things about a place like Pavlohrad is everybody’s paying attention to what Donald Trump says about the war, but I don’t think anybody expects that it’s going to end in a compromise. Ukrainians got their hopes up when he was first elected that maybe this would mean an end to the war, but now it’s very clear that Putin’s not terribly interested in peace – and so the war’s likely to continue. With a place like Pavlohrad, the closer you get to the front line, the more people have suffered personally, the more they’ve lost their homes or a family member, or have family now living on the other side of the front line in occupied territory. And so while broadly across Ukraine there’s a growing consensus that they’re willing to make compromises in exchange for an end to the war, that feeling is very strong in a place like Pavlohrad, where the city’s population is now 50 per cent bigger than it was before the war owing to people fleeing there from the front line. Many of those people want to go back home and don’t really care about the politics of who controls their hometown.
What sense of hope or perseverance did you find?
I intentionally began and ended the story in a maternity ward of the local hospital, and spent time with kids going to school, went to the local bakery, and met with coal miners, because one of the things that struck me since the very start of the war is how much life goes on as usual in Ukraine. A war is not the perfect circumstances in which to be sending your kids to school, or going to work. But you have to, because you don’t get to choose. If you ask Ukrainians, ‘Why don’t you go somewhere safer?’ the answer in many cases is that they don’t want to go outside of Ukraine. And they point out that Russian missiles can hit anywhere in the country these days. Yes, it’s more dangerous to be in Pavlohrad than a place like Lviv, in the far west of the country, but they feel more at home in Pavlohrad. They’ve decided to just do their best they can in the face of all of this.
Anatoliy Tokarev, 68, a war veteran who has been fighting since 2014, created a museum dedicated to the Ukrainian-Russian war. He stands in front of a half-empty wall with the names of fallen soldiers.Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
Is there a picture that Olga took that you’d like to talk about more?
I think if there’s one photograph that will stick with me from this trip, it’s from when we went to the war museum run by the guy known locally as “Grandpa.” He had this black wall of names and faces of local people who have been killed fighting in the front line – not just since Russia started the invasion in 2022, but since the start of the proxy war in the Donbas region in 2014. I was struck by the amount of blank space he had left on the wall for more faces and names to come. And while we were looking at this wall, I recognized one of the faces, a guy named Denys Sosnenko. It was somebody who I had met the day before he died. He worked trying to recover bodies from the front line, an incredibly difficult job, and he and his team - a group called the Black Tulips - took me along on one of their missions back in Jan., 2023. The next day, his vehicle hit an anti-tank mine.
Just seeing Denys’s face on that wall - someone I’ve met before - reminded me how long this war has gone on and made me think of what the future might hold for some other people we were meeting on this reporting trip.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Shot
‘Anything can happen in baseball.’
Illustration by Michael ByersIllustration by Michael Byers
As the Toronto Blue Jays head to the playoffs, the first-place underdogs are keeping the baseball drama going in the park and in our homes.
The question now is, can this scrappy crew hold on to their magic? The team’s year started out rocky. Now it’s monumental. Marty Klinkenberg explains what has changed.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: A premature baby who contracted measles in utero has died in Alberta, the first death associated with the provincial outbreak that has grown to nearly 2,000 cases.
Abroad: Israeli naval forces boarded most of the vessels in a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza and detained some 450 international activists. Here is the latest.
Partners: Canada’s minister for trade with the U.S. wants to make progress on tariffs on some resource sectors before the USMCA trade pact review begins.
Colleagues: What “meeting hygiene” means, and why it’s time to rethink time management in the workplace.
Family: What’s the non-traditional Thanksgiving dish you make every year? Share your story with us.