Lucas Tomlinson, Fox News correspondent, shared his experience reporting from Ukraine. Tomlinson has been in the country for a month, with a couple weeks in Kyiv, before he shifted to Lviv, in the western part of the country.
Lviv is normally a bustling university town and cultural center. “A week ago, they were students in class,” Tomlinson told B+C late on March 2. “Now they’re making Molotov cocktails and roadside bombs.”
The airstrikes are miles from Lviv, but the city is a nexus for refugees, which have surpassed one million since the war began last week. Lviv is around 40 miles from Poland. “It’s the real center of this refugee crisis,” said Tomlinson, who added that the traffic en route to the border is dreadful, and trains are packed.
“It’s very hard to get out of the country right now,” he added.
Alcohol sales are banned in the city. A local brewery known as Pravda is making Molotov cocktails instead of beer. Residents are following the latest on their phones, Tomlinson said, and checking in with family members in other parts of the country.
“People are nervous, people are scared,” he said. “Everybody here has friends and family across the country.”
Yet many remain hopeful, he added.
“Ukrainians are fierce, very fierce,” said Tomlinson. “Even if the Russians manage to topple the capital, it will be a long, bloody war. This war is going to go on for years.”
Tomlinson graduated from the US Naval Academy in 2001. Before joining Fox News in 2014, he served on a human terrain team with the US Army’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team in Afghanistan. He was a Pentagon-based producer at Fox before becoming correspondent in January.
It is Tomlinson’s first time covering a war as a journalist. “It’s a great honor to be here,” he said. “I like giving a voice to the Ukrainian people, even if it’s just a small conversation with a young man or young woman on the street, just to pass along that voice and tell his or her story.”
He mentioned chatting with a barista in Kyiv, who expressed concern about Russian soldiers, but stressed that, at the moment, she had a job to do.
Tomlinson said he is pleased to “give a voice to someone who doesn’t have one.” ■
