Luke Mogelson '05: Inside Ukraine’s “Dead Cities”
For The New Yorker, Luke Mogelson '05 covers the tragic stories of ordinary people caught in the front lines of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In the in-depth piece, "The Desperate Lives Inside Ukraine’s “Dead Cities," Mogelson puts himself in the frontlines to talk to the citizens in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, where Russia has concentrated its forces and its firepower since April, after abandoning its disastrous bid to capture Kyiv.
From The New Yorker: "People in Ukraine sometimes describe the intensity of shelling in simple auditory terms. A place can be “quiet” or “loud.” As the volume increases, so do the chaos, misery, death, and fear. You cannot experience such fatal noise without instinctively grasping its purpose, which is to brutalize psychically as much as physically—to demoralize and stupefy."
Mogelson has been a contributing writer for The New Yorker since 2013, covering the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. His new book, The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible (Penguin Random House), will be released in September.