From the reporter's notebook: A visit to a POW camp is the best cure for sympathy for Russian soldiers.
After our eyes adjusted to the aggressive glare of the white walls that had just been painted around the courtyard, we began to notice figures, dozens of them dressed in navy blue, clinging to the interior walls of this surreal space.
It was a hot June day in western Ukraine, and we had just been released, like children in a petting zoo, into a yard full of prisoners of war from the Russian army.
Standing in front of a person who in some ways is the living embodiment of all the suffering and death brought to your home and the people living in it, and trying to have a normal and civilized conversation is especially strange.
Photo: Francis Farrell / The Kyiv Independent.