will manage to hold on here. having covered the conflict in afghanistan and because of the taliban's regime in the 1990s, you expect a level of brutality in that conflict. but i think when i went to cover the war in ukraine, perhaps because it was in europe, it involved global powers, you know, it might have been naive of me, but i didn't expect to see the level of brutality that i saw on the ground there. the first time i went to cover the story, it was at a time when russian forces had just withdrawn from northern ukraine. and so areas around kyiv