‘You Want to Be Prepared for the Worst’: CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Anchoring Live From Kyiv With Russia and Ukraine on the Brink
Jim Sciutto arrived in Ukraine last weekend as Russia amassed 100,000 troops on its border, and the United States warned that an invasion could come within days.
The CNN anchor and chief national security correspondent has since hosted the morning edition of CNN Newsroom from Kyiv. Sciutto has delivered live reporting from the nation’s capital amid a continued buildup of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, an information war over what’s really happening on the ground, and frantic efforts from the U.S. and NATO allies to reach a diplomatic resolution that avoids an invasion.
It has been a confusing week for people trying to keep track of the conflict. The U.S. and Russia have each offered conflicting accounts of whether Russia is pulling back troops from Ukraine’s border. Russia has called claims it is planning an attack “baseless allegations.” President Joe Biden warned Thursday he expects Russia to invade “within the next several days.”
I called up Sciutto for this week’s episode of The Interview podcast to try and understand what is really going on.
Sciutto said the mixed messaging coming from Russia — claiming a drawdown of troops as the evidence on the ground shows the opposite — is deliberate. He noted the country has a “long history” of “basically lying about what its military is up to.”
“It’s not accidental,” he said. “That kind of misdirection is part of the plan.”
Sciutto has decades of experience covering conflict overseas. He has served as a foreign correspondent covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Before joining CNN in 2013, he had a stint in government as chief of staff and senior advisor to Gary Locke, the U.S. Ambassador to China. Sciutto has written two books, The Shadow War, on how Russia and China seek to covertly undermine the U.S., and The Madman Theory, which examined Donald Trump’s chaotic approach to the world stage.
I asked Sciutto about anchoring from a capital city on the brink of potential war, what life is like for the people of Kyiv right now, and what he thinks of those who claim the media is rooting for conflict.
See highlights from our interview below.
On getting into Ukraine:
The concern when I arrived a few days ago was that the airport would close. KLM, for instance, over the weekend stopped flying into Kyiv. I believe another airline as well. Now the question was do other international airlines cancel because of concern that a war was about to begin and that there might be threats if not to the the airport itself, to the airspace? Because remember, MH17. You had a commercial airliner flying over Ukraine in the midst not of a hot war, but something of a kind of slow burn war, that this has been. Russian missiles shot the thing down, killed nearly 300 people, thinking that it was a military aircraft. So understandable nervousness about what all these guns and missiles and bombs and soldiers mean for safety. So one of the concerns was, okay, are the airports going to stay open? They did it as it happened and the flights still went in. But we were looking for backup routes in, we were looking at driving in from Warsaw, for instance.
Now, it may turn out that there is no invasion or there’s a smaller invasion, say to the east, of a smaller part of the country. But in each scenario, you want to be prepared for the worst. I’ve spent a lot of time going to war zones for years, as have a lot of my colleagues. So we know that the situation on the ground could change very quickly. And when it does, the risks are not theoretical. They’re real. And you have to be prepared for them.
On what life is like in Kyiv right now:
It’s such a disconnect from what you hear from U.S. and NATO officials. And, by the way, Ukrainian officials as well, because while they may not be as forward leaning as their U.S. counterparts, they do talk about a genuine threat from the Russian military. But I’ve been walking around Kyiv as much as I can. Restaurants are open. Streets are busy. Stores are busy. I went out Sunday night. It was a beautiful Sunday, late winter evening. People were out strolling with their families. No palpable nervousness. And when you ask Ukrainians, which I have, and I said, ‘Hey, you know what’s going on at the border? Does that not make you nervous?’ Partly, it’s a little sense of resignation because they’ve been living through a war for eight years. Partly, it’s just a little natural skepticism too, to say, ‘Listen man, Putin is always messing with us’. We’ve got to get on with our lives. It reminds me, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Middle East, it reminds me of a place like Beirut, for instance. Beirut is a place that has been through wars and other kinds of attacks for many years. Even in the midst of some of those really dicey periods, you could go out and have a lovely dinner, surrounded by people, and the beaches are crowded and so on. Some of that is just a kind of natural toughness and built-on experience. Frankly, too much experience of war in recent years.
On how to report on foreign conflict when statements from official sources can’t be trusted:
With any reporting, of course, you have to enter as a skeptic. Know your source, have confidence or not have confidence in your source, oftentimes based on relationships and whether they’ve given you reliable information in the past. But you always enter with a little bit of skepticism and awareness of what ax or axes they have to grind. You know, what’s their track record? And that applies both to Russia in this case and to the U.S. Then in the midst of that, you know based on experience that there are certain things Russia will do or try to do that the U.S. would not. I mean, to straight up, for instance, lie about its forces being on the ground in Crimea. Russia does things to a degree that even with its checkered history, U.S. military and intelligence agencies, they do not do. You apply different filters to each source to some degree while maintaining a general and healthy level of skepticism. And then doing your best to match up what you hear from even, say, U.S. officials against what you see on the ground and what you know about their history and their broader intentions. Because this is an information warfare space, you have to be conscious that that everybody’s taking part in that to some degree with varying degrees of accuracy and credibility. You just have to be smart. And take your time and look at the big picture.
On Edward Snowden’s tweet accusing media of pushing for war:
It is, like many tweets, not based on fact. His assumption is because folks in the media are covering it — as you say, a massive Russian military buildup around borders with tremendous and deadly capabilities — because we’re covering that, we are somehow rooting for it to be used. I know for a fact I’m not. And the people I’m working with don’t. Because I’ve seen wars in person. And it’s bloody and deadly. I have no desire to see that happen. But it appears to be a major threat and requires coverage. I also think, like many tweets, I don’t believe Edward Snowden’s watching my show. Because I ask questions of U.S. officials and NATO officials and Russian officials, by the way, when given the opportunity, to press them on why we should believe X or Y. We raise and discuss both what we hear, what we see on the ground ourselves and what genuine and reasonable questions we have about those things. I just don’t think he’s watching our shows. As always, you’re doing your best, but we definitely ask hard questions of folks when we’re told things like this. No, not rooting for war. Because I and my colleagues have seen it and it’s not fun or enjoyable. It’s real and it’s bloody and it’s deadly.
And by the way, Edward Snowden is in Russia. Given protection by Russia. A country that has a long track record of starting wars, invading countries. And by the way, journalists have a tendency to fall off balconies in Russia. Opposition leaders and dissidents get poisoned both in Russia and outside its borders. In that particular case it’s a remarkable perch to be in as you throw that criticism, or his perception of how media is covering this particular buildup.
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