Lviv- I’ve just restarted my crossing borders series on my Fabled City channel as part of documenting my time here in Ukraine. We all see plenty of news reports from here of course, but how to non-local journalists actually get here? You see a Kevlar-clad journo reporting from a hot zone but devoid of context as to how they pulled this feat off. In as straightforward manner as possible, I want to demonstrate some of just what to travel to here (and later out of here) entails.
I chose Berlin as my jumping off point in part because it’s not only the gateway to eastern Europe but also because it was the cheapest one-way flight from New York City that put me the furthest east within the West.
Typically, at least in my experience, these kinds of journeys must be made incrementally quite simply because airports in war torn states are either completely offline or one cannot fly directly to their capitals from Western air hubs. So this trip began in earnest upon touching down at Berlin’s Brandenburg airport and posting up in the city’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood for a few days. I wanted to get somewhat acclimated while researching just how to move east. I initially debated between Warsaw and Krakow as far as getting closer to the Ukrainian frontier and eventually settled on Krakow as making way more sense in terms of logistics.
As an intra-Schengen zone crossing, this episode is fairly benign but to me that’s what makes it of interest. Poland, once the titular state of the dreaded Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, is today a Slavic society firmly footed in the West as a constituent state of both the EU (as of 2004) and NATO (as of 1999). It is also a key geographic conduit for non-EU, airport-less Ukrainians going to and fro to central Europe via train and bus.
More to come here and on my corresponding Youtube channel. Stay tuned!