Six Things I Saw In Eastern Ukraine
Join NPR's London Correspondent Ari Shapiro Monday, April 21, at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, for a live Facebook chat about his reporting in Ukraine.
I arrived in Kiev a little more than two weeks ago, planning to report a series of features on the echoes of the winter's revolution — from the Maidan protests, to the change in government, to Russia's annexation of Crimea.
That's not how I ended up spending my time.
Demonstrators in the east took over government buildings in Donetsk, Kharkiv and Luhansk, demanding closer ties with Russia. A week later, the separatists expanded their footprint to nearly a dozen cities. Kiev accused Moscow of orchestrating the upheaval as a pretext to invade. The Ukrainian army mobilized an "anti-terror operation" to take back the occupied buildings. The country now seems to be on the brink of civil war.
I spent most of the last two weeks traveling around Eastern Ukraine, speaking with locals and militants across the region. Now that I'm back at my home base in London, here are six things I took away from the experience.