THE WEEKLY REVEAL

Hello! In this issue:

• Secretly intercepted phone calls from Russian soldiers in Ukraine reveal how fear and propaganda fueled Russia’s violence against its neighbor.
• Decades before COVID-19, AIDS tore through the U.S. There was little acknowledgement that it was affecting women.

THIS WEEK’S PODCAST

Listening in on the War in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. That day, as Russia unleashed a brutal assault on the strategic port city of Mariupol, a team of Associated Press reporters arrived in the city.

Vasilisa Stepanenko, Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov kept their cameras and tape recorders rolling throughout the onslaught. Together, they captured some of the defining images of the war in Ukraine.

This week on Reveal, guest host Michael Montgomery talks with the journalists who risked their lives to document blasted buildings, enormous bomb craters and the daily life of traumatized civilians. We also listen to phone calls Russian soldiers made during the first weeks of the invasion, secretly recorded by the Ukrainian government and obtained by AP reporter Erika Kinetz. The intercepted calls reveal the fear-mongering and patriotism that led some of the men to go from living regular lives as husbands, sons and fathers to talking about killing civilians.

In this update of an episode that originally aired a year ago, we also talk with Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights lawyer who received a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, about human rights abuses and war crimes in Ukraine since Russia’s first invasion in 2014.

A Quote to Remember

“We literally had to convince the federal government that there were women getting HIV.”

Maxine Wolfe was an activist in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. While the world treated it as a gay men’s disease, women were being infected too. Because of this misinformation, women struggled to access testing and their symptoms weren’t incorporated into the disease’s definition. That left some women without access to proper care – and some even died without ever being diagnosed with AIDS.

In Case You Missed It