The Operator

The journalist Sergii Leshchenko has a knack for inserting himself into the pivotal moments of Ukraine's history. I wanted to see the war through his eyes.

- By Franklin Foer

In February, when the bombs began falling on Kyiv, I immediately thought of Sergii Leshchenko. He isn't a friend or colleague exactly, but I feel indebted to him. Over the years, at a series of Kyiv cafés, he has patiently explained the dark corners of Ukrainian politics to me, sharing insights gleaned from his long career as an investigative reporter. In those earliest hours of the war, as I watched CNN correspondents crouching in the parking garages of their hotels, I worried about what might befall him. I sent him a text extending my "solidarity and prayers," a gesture that, even as I made it, felt inadequate to the moment.

I had first met Leshchenko in May 2014, in the back room of a sleek Kyiv restaurant serving food from the republic of Georgia. A group of journalists, both local and foreign, had assembled, and the mood was ebullient. Three months earlier, a revolution had chased President Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian-backed kleptocrat, from power.

Leshchenko seemed young then: wiry, bespectacled, clad in a button-down shirt, a quiet presence. He had been something of a prodigy; the son of engineers, he had obtained his first press pass when he was 17. In the early years of independence from the Soviet Union, he roamed the corridors of Parliament, gawking at the new titans of the nation's politics.

He didn't set out to be an investigative journalist. The vocation was thrust upon him. In 2000, two weeks after he began working for a newspaper, his editor went missing. Two months later, the editor's corpse was discovered in the forest, decapitated, drenched with chemicals, and charred. Investigating the murder, which was never officially solved but strongly implicated a former president, provided Leshchenko with an advanced education in the hideous tactics of the powerful.