“War is always somewhere around”: a review of Jen Stout’s Night Train to Odesa

A train arriving at the Odesa train station in July 2020. Photo: Oleksiy Muzalyev / wikimedia.org

When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Jen Stout – a reporter from the Shetland Islands in Scotland – left Moscow and began her headlong journey into documenting the war in Ukraine. In Night Train to Odesa, Stout captures the human cost of war by focusing on the civilians, volunteers, soldiers and journalists with whom she found herself in night trains, military hospitals, crowded bunkers, and speeding vehicles bound for the front. With deep empathy and a photographer’s eyes, Jen Stout depicts the stories and experiences of real people and a nation grappling with their identity, history and hopes for a better future – and ultimately victory.
 

A freelance reporter fluent in Russian and knowledgeable about Ukraine, Jen Stout found herself at the Ukrainian border, facing the usual tumults of being a freelance journalist. She lacked cash and equipment, but through the generosity of Ukrainians, she quickly found herself ready to head to some of Ukraine’s most dangerous territories. Stout frequently discusses the difficulties of being a freelance journalist – and a female one at that – in an environment where some of her bosses thought she was too young to work as an experienced war correspondent. Thus, it is Stout’s tenacity and perseverance that truly glows in Night Train to Odesa’s initial pages.
 

Stout also manages to portray Ukraine in a manner in which most journalists have failed. Many writers and reporters sought the horror stories – and there were and are many – about mass graves at Bucha and Izyum, the murders and rapes of women of all ages, and the systematic destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage sites. Stout, however, focuses on the people involved in those events. In a rare act, Night Train to Odesa highlights the stories of writers like the poet and children’s author Volodymyr Vakulenko, who bravely buried copies of his books and his journal in a garden. She captures the grief his family experienced as they waxed and waned between hope and the reality of his death. Stout describes her brief and playful interactions with Victoria Amelina, the brilliant Ukrainian writer who succumbed to injuries sustained in a missile attack in Kramatorsk. For many, these people are merely names who appeared in a headline or an obituary, but for Stout they and their families have paid the ultimate price in Ukraine’s war for freedom and sovereignty.
 

Because of the people, their generosity, and the painful experiences binding them together, Stout finds herself deeply attached not only to those people with whom she develops trusting, working relationships. She also develops an attachment to Ukraine itself – so much so that even after she returns to the UK, she finds herself ready to return to Ukraine almost immediately. She finds herself at underground and bomb shelter concerts where Ukrainian rock stars like Serhiy Zhadan play to hundreds of people. She portrays a people and a nation who are battered, but not entirely broken, and who – despite their wounds and traumas – are determined to live each day, because living is what matters.
 

Nonetheless, Stout’s book also bears a warning for those who downplay the true price Ukraine has paid – and will continue to pay – in the war. Night Train to Odesa opens with a powerful scene in which Stout finds herself seated in a Moscow bar, watching as Russian media outlets perpetuate lies about “Ukrainian Nazis” that easily dupe their viewers. She examines the anti-war movement from the perspective of someone who once readily protested against US involvement in Iraq and who suddenly finds themselves in the midst of the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. Therefore, Stout’s book arrives at a pivotal point in American politics, in which Ukraine remains a contentious flashpoint in the country’s politics. The stories contained in the book have the potential to reopen public conversations about continuing US support for Ukraine.
 

Stout’s own bravery and selflessness are evident throughout the book. She shares detailed experiences of enduring nearby shelling; of living with the agonizing silences of friends and colleagues; and of entering dangerous zones where death lurks close by. Her empathy extends not only to the humans so devastatingly effected by the war’s ruthlessness, but also to the natural world. One of the book’s most heartbreaking scenes is one in which Stout watches a lonely dog before driving away and leaving it behind. In another chapter, Stout boards the wrong bus and inadvertently finds herself in a red-zone city from which she should not have been reporting. However, she decides to do so bravely, despite the potential professional consequences. In such reports, Stout establishes herself as a brave woman unafraid to “go against the grain” in order to offer the world the most authentic coverage of a war that has been swiftly fading from global headlines.
 

Night Train to Odesa is beautifully and lyrically written. It is, quite frankly, a book unlike any other during a time when books about the war in Ukraine written by non-Ukrainians are published at an increased rate. Consequently, Jen Stout joins the ranks of writers like John Sweeney and the recently deceased Daniel Knowles, whose bravery and devotion to Ukraine have taken them above and beyond the average journalist’s call to duty and comfort zones. Night Train to Odesa is visceral, intelligent, and establishes Jen Stout as a reporter whose future is imminently bright.

Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War by Jen Stout. Polygon 2024

Nicole Yurcaba is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. A poet and essayist, her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is Humanities faculty at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College in the United States. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.

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Book review, Odesa, resilience, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine, US-Ukraine relations