Ukraine: The Handoff

Episode Summary

Title: Ukraine The Handoff - In April 2022, a Ukrainian woman named Evgenia smuggled thousands of abortion pills across the Polish border to address shortages in Ukraine after the Russian invasion. - The pills were distributed to doctors around Ukraine. Originally intended as abortion pills, they were also used to treat pregnancy complications and induce labor. - The war led to an increase in miscarriages and other pregnancy issues. Doctors used the pills to help complete miscarriages and stop bleeding. - The pills enabled women to have agency over their pregnancies during turbulent war times. However, a new hospital policy required women to disclose abortions as potentially related to national security. - By the end of the episode, Evgenia had received more pill shipments. The goal is to never again be in a shortage situation like in April.

Episode Show Notes

We continue the story of a covert smuggling operation to bring abortion pills into Ukraine, shortly after the Russian invasion. In this episode, reporters Katz Laszlo and Gregory Warner go to Ukraine, landing on a fall night during a citywide blackout, to pick up the trail of the pills and find out about the doctors and patients who needed them. But as they follow the pills around the country, what they learn changes their understanding of how we talk about these pills, and how we talk about choice, in a war. 

This episode is the second of two done in collaboration with NPR’s Rough Translation. You can find the first episode here (https://zpr.io/CnmNVFQ6X5gc).

Special thanks to the Rough Translation team for reporting help. Thanks also to Liana Simstrom, Irene Noguchi, and Eleana Tworek. Thanks to the ears of Valeria Fokina, Andrii Degeler, Noel King, Robert Krulwich and Sana Krasikov. And to our interpreters, Kira Leonova and Tetyana Yurinetz. Thanks to Drs Natalia, Irna & Diana. To Yulia Mytsko, Yulia Babych, Maria Hlazunova, Nika Bielska, Yvette Mrova, Lauren Ramires, Jane Newnham, Olena Shevchenko, Marta Chumako, Jamie Nadal, Jonathan Bearak, and the many others who we spoke with for this story. Thank you to NPR’s International Desk and the team at the Ukraine bureau. Translations from Eugene Alper and Dennis Tkachivsky. Voice over from Lizzie Marchenko and Yuliia Serbenenko. Archival from the Heal Foundation.

Legal guidance provided by Micah Ratner, Lauren Cooperman, and Dentons. 

Ethical guidance from Tony Cavin. 

EPISODE CREDITS:

Guest hosted by - Gregory Warner and Molly Webster

Reported by - Katz Laszlo, Gregory Warner 

Produced by - Tessa Paoli, Daniel Girma, Adelina Lancianese

w/ production help from - Nic M. Neves

Mixer - James Willetts and Robert Rodriguez

w/ mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom

Fact-checking by - Marisa Robertson-Textor

and Edited by - Brenna Farrell

Music:

John Ellis composed the Rough Translation theme music. 

Original music from Dylan Keefe. 

Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions and FirstCom Music.  

 

CITATIONSPhotos - 

Podcasts -

Articles - 

Further reading: a study on medical abortion (https://zpr.io/f8h5WNfKaMtk) by Galina Maistruck, one of the main sources in our piece

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Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

 

Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_19: Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash-back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at 4.15 annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Remember FDIC terms apply. SPEAKER_01: Listener supported WNYC studios. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, the novelist Jennifer Egan on how we could end the enormous problem of homelessness if we had the will to do it. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_12: Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. SPEAKER_13: Okay. All right. SPEAKER_14: You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. SPEAKER_10: From WNYC. This is Radiolab. SPEAKER_03: I'm Molly Webster. I am back in the host chair for one more week to bring you the second episode of our two-part story on Ukraine. It's a series we've been doing in collaboration with NPR's Rough Translation and their host Gregory Warner. So here's the final act. I hope you like it. You're listening to Rough Translation from NPR. I'm Gregory Warner. SPEAKER_12: And I'm Molly Webster. From Radiolab. From Radiolab. And we are back with our Rough Translation Radiolab collaboration. Yes. The last time we were together, we told you the story of an amateur smuggling operation bringing abortion pills into Ukraine right after the invasion. SPEAKER_03: That story was called Ukraine Under the Counter. It's in both of our feeds. Go listen. SPEAKER_12: And if you don't, spoiler alert. SPEAKER_03: When we ended that story. SPEAKER_20: So it was night. It was like 11, 11 and something. SPEAKER_03: A Ukrainian woman named Evgenia and her friends have crossed over the border with three moving boxes of pills. So it was like, I'm not leaving this, these pills in my car. SPEAKER_03: They carry the boxes up to her apartment. SPEAKER_20: So I was sleeping in my apartment in Lviv with 10,000 abortions. It was strange. SPEAKER_03: Really it was something like 15,000 abortion kits? Regardless she wakes up the next day and she had so many questions. SPEAKER_20: Doctors didn't know that we had brought this product. SPEAKER_03: You'll remember they were trying to get these pills to doctors throughout Ukraine after hearing stories of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers. And so Evgenia wondered, you know, would she be able to get these pills into the hands of doctors in time? And would women who needed them actually get them? And so we went to Ukraine to follow these pills. SPEAKER_12: All right. So we're in a blackout and it totally reminds me of the New York blackout. In October reporter Katz Laszlo and I landed in the Ukrainian city of Lviv. They're like impromptu parties where people clean out their refrigerators and make music. That morning, Russian missiles had knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people. And that night people were kissing, singing, picnicking, but also crying and shouting. We come here because of a donation of pills fueled by one story of war. Pills meant to offer some relief and maybe restore some choice. But in Ukraine, we'd hear so many different stories about the ways that people were interacting with these pills in a war. It made us rethink our understanding of how we talk about these pills and the way we talk about choice. SPEAKER_03: After Evgenia got the pills, she started calling doctors. SPEAKER_12: And six months later, when Katz and I arrived in Ukraine, we went to see one of the first doctors that she spoke with. SPEAKER_17: Galina Maestruk, who is also one of the people that everybody told us to talk to when we SPEAKER_12: got to Ukraine. SPEAKER_02: I know you sent me so many messages just like lovers in previous times. SPEAKER_06: We met Galina at her office in Kiev and her organization is the Ukrainian partner for International Planned Parenthood. SPEAKER_02: Galina's been practicing medicine for about four decades and abortion has been legal for SPEAKER_06: her entire career. And 10 years ago, abortion pills came on the market. But when Russia invaded in February 2022, first of all, supply chains to the country were cut off. SPEAKER_02: We have no air connection, we have no ship connection. So pills weren't being restocked. All the pharmacies were in collapse. SPEAKER_12: So by mid-April, the very moment that Evgenia was driving those abortion pills over the border. No, no, no pills at all at this time. SPEAKER_06: And because of this, doctors were worried. SPEAKER_18: From the beginning of war, we started to have these doubts if we're going to have enough SPEAKER_17: pills because the request we... SPEAKER_06: One doctor in Kiev told us in April, three to five times more women were showing up in our office and asking for abortion pills. We realized that women would come and come and come and there are going to be more and SPEAKER_17: more of them. But the pills, there's not going to be more of them. And we didn't know if there's going to be any. SPEAKER_12: And at the same time, surgical abortion was actually harder to find. Hospitals were being bombed, surgeons were overwhelmed. A doctor in the eastern city of Dnipro told us... SPEAKER_20: After the beginning of the full scale invasion, refugees with no job and no money started turning to us. SPEAKER_06: And then on top of that, there's also just a baseline of people who are getting pregnant and who need abortions, war or no war. But Galina says during that time there was... SPEAKER_02: Absolutely silence at this period from international organizations, from big fishes in this, they have no such big speed to react to everything. You know, they need to make procurement, they need to get money for this. But then Galina gets a call. SPEAKER_20: Hello? SPEAKER_02: Connection with Evgenia was like magic situation. SPEAKER_06: Evgenia sends her 1600 abortion kids. Oh my god, it's these... wow. SPEAKER_12: We actually got to see some of these pills when we get to Ukraine. SPEAKER_06: I know the person who made these. These are the coffee packages, no? Coffee packages? Yeah, the story goes that when Evgenia was packing up the pills to ship them to the doctors, she didn't have any access to pharmaceutical boxes, so she grabbed these coffee bags. SPEAKER_12: Lviv incidentally is known in Ukraine as the city of chocolate and coffee. SPEAKER_03: What do the coffee packages look like? Is it like a... It's like a matte white bag and then you can see like the aromatic filter on it. SPEAKER_03: Oh, where the good smells come out. Okay. SPEAKER_02: It's a small box with small packages, but you know, it's a big difference when you give somebody food when it's no food. And so? SPEAKER_06: Once she learns about this shipment of abortion pills, Galina calls all the doctors she can think of across the country. SPEAKER_02: I call to Vinitsa, to Poltava, Dvrokhnya, Dnipro, and Todessa. SPEAKER_12: The coffee bags go to Buche and they go all around Ukraine. SPEAKER_20: We started to contact doctors and they started to tell about us to other doctors. From Kirsten, from Nikolai. We started to receive the mails and telephones like, can you bring it to us? SPEAKER_02: You know, you build the building from small stones and this was one of the small stones which was in the basement, you know, and it was extremely important. SPEAKER_06: The first second that I heard about this story, I was immediately like, what was this like for the women who needed the pills? Were people willing to go on the record? No one that actually had an abortion wanted to talk to us, but we did talk to the people that they talked to. We talked to their friends and their doctors. SPEAKER_12: Just a heads up, almost all of those doctors asked us not to use their last names to protect their privacy at work. SPEAKER_18: So this is Dr. Olga, she's based in Kiev and has patients in Buche and did during the SPEAKER_12: occupation. SPEAKER_17: I didn't have any case when a woman told me that she experienced that sexual violence or raping or so, and we didn't ask them on purpose, like we didn't ask them this question. Me as a woman, I couldn't let myself do that just to make her feel this pain again. And also I know that if this woman had a feeling that she wants to share with it, she would do that. SPEAKER_06: She said that the patients who did come to her for an abortion, they all came with a SPEAKER_17: really strict decision, strong decision for abortion, because despite the war they had other plans. SPEAKER_17: They maybe have children in here or a husband in territorial defense or in the army, and it's harder for them to leave the country. And I started to see patients who lost their houses, their relatives, and they came to us. SPEAKER_06: Another doctor we met, Valentina, told us about this woman who came to her from the east, from the city of Sloviansk. She told me I had in Sloviansk everything. SPEAKER_08: I had two flats, I had house near seaside, I have two restaurants. Now I am bombs. I'm homeless. SPEAKER_12: Another translation is, now I'm a bomb. SPEAKER_08: Now I am bombs. I don't know what I should do with my child. SPEAKER_06: She said, I already have a child to take care of, and I just lost my house, I lost my money. I should be healthy, strong, and to have time and energy for my one child. SPEAKER_03: We heard stories of patients where war came into their lives, changed their environment, their houses, their relationships, their income, and they knew that they needed these pills. But we also heard stories about these pills that went beyond abortion. SPEAKER_06: And that revelation, it started with Dr. Oksana. Yes, we are good. Okay, can you introduce yourself? Her hospital is in Lviv, near the train station, and she sees local patients and also patients who fled fighting in the east. SPEAKER_18: SPEAKER_09: And these are a lot more complicated cases, more complications with pregnancies and more issues with pregnancy. Everyone is in a lot of stress. SPEAKER_06: Do you mean that just because of the stress, there's more complications like miscarriage and stuff like that? Yeah, that's right. Can you give me a sense of scale, like as in how much more percentage would you say was complicated? Well, it's difficult to estimate. SPEAKER_18: But I think it's like one third more than it was before. SPEAKER_09: It was up one third. Wow. SPEAKER_03: It just seems like such a massive increase. SPEAKER_06: And we heard that from a lot of doctors. I think it's much difficult to be pregnant during the war than in normal life because SPEAKER_04: you don't know what will be tomorrow. This is Diana. She's a gynecologist in Kharkiv, really close to the front lines. SPEAKER_06: When the war started, we have a lot of complications of pregnancy. SPEAKER_04: And she described having a day where all women get to a hospital by ambulance with bleeding. Every single woman that came in was hemorrhaging. SPEAKER_06: Doctors, like when they see complications like this happening, they reach for these SPEAKER_03: pills for Mifopristone and Misoprostol. Wait, they reach for these pills for complications? Yeah. SPEAKER_12: So it's actually really dangerous if a miscarriage doesn't come in. SPEAKER_03: It's dangerous if a miscarriage doesn't complete, like if anything is left in the womb. And so in the case of miscarriage, you would use these pills essentially in the same way you would as an abortion, where you take the pills and then they would just make sure your uterus was completely cleared out. In the case of bleeding, you don't actually need both pills. Doctors would just go for Misoprostol. So Misoprostol is the pill that causes everything to contract. And that's just like a tightening of muscle. And so when you have that contraction, it clamps down on blood vessels, which essentially closes them off. And so blood can't get out and then you stop bleeding. Yeah, you can actually grab these pills, well Misoprostol for just normal labor where there's no complications, but to help induce contractions and give birth. And so when I thought about that April shipment of pills, it took me a while to like, really SPEAKER_06: let that sink in. But every gynecologist was like, oh yeah, we've really used it for like the complications and the miscarriages and the unlivable pregnancies and in labor. And I'm like, but what about the abortions? And they're like, yes, yes, for miscarriages. And I'm like, what about the abortions? And they're like, yes, yes, for miscarriages. And I'm like, wait, hang on a minute. Like, why do they keep bringing up these miscarriages all the time? It just hit me in the stomach of like, whoa, these pills are for every possible moment of pregnancy. Yeah, because I felt like we'd come to Ukraine to do this story, right, about abortion pills SPEAKER_12: and war. But then actually being in a country that was running out of these pills because of a war, it felt like this story was so much bigger than what we thought. SPEAKER_09: Hello hello. Hello. SPEAKER_03: Hello. We have a baby, folks. I just, we have a baby on screen. Here, wait, I'll put on my video. I ended up on a Zoom call with four Ukrainian women who are all based in Kiev, three of whom have been pregnant during the war. SPEAKER_09: I found out about the pregnancy in July. And none of these women have used these pills. SPEAKER_03: But I just wanted to hear about the experience of being pregnant and giving birth in Ukraine right now. Now I have a little daughter. Name is Valeria. There was Zhenya, Nadia and Vlada. And then their translator, Anastasia. Yeah, it's my first baby. SPEAKER_10: And I am 29 years old and I never tell story about my pregnant. SPEAKER_03: It actually was the first time all of them were telling their stories and they had so many overlaps and shared moments. There was this just shared sense of uncertainty. SPEAKER_07: It's OK in Kiev not to have any electricity for eight hours. It's blackouts, life without water. SPEAKER_03: And then obviously stress. SPEAKER_10: The hospital was hit by a rocket. SPEAKER_03: And fear. SPEAKER_09: Sometimes I heard a explosion. SPEAKER_10: When I give birth later, we have an alert and it was very scary. SPEAKER_03: Just a loneliness and isolation. In Nadia's case, she was two weeks before her due date. SPEAKER_03: And then the invasion happened on February 24th and she found herself in occupied territory. SPEAKER_09: They heard different sounds like shooting rockets and so on. SPEAKER_03: So she couldn't get to the nearby hospital, the road was hit by a missile. And then just because of how dangerous the streets were and the fighting, no doctor or midwife could get to her. Her grandfather goes to the Ukrainian army and they said if she goes into labor, let us know. We can go to her and maybe we can help her. SPEAKER_07: She didn't want to maybe interrupt the soldiers who were there. SPEAKER_03: But she didn't want to pull the soldiers away from fighting. And while she's trying to figure all this out, she's leaking amniotic fluid, like she's already leaking water. SPEAKER_20: But she still decides to join a group of people who are going to try to drive out of the area. SPEAKER_07: She didn't understand her emotions in that time. Yes, she had only an aim to reach from the destination where there was help. SPEAKER_03: After eight hours of what was supposed to be a 45-minute trip, Nadia does make it to a hospital and she has a healthy baby. And eventually Vlada did too. Valeria is five months old. And she and Valeria are very happy. Zhenia is about to have her baby. But these women, you know, there were moments where their lives were in danger or their pregnancies were, or there was just simply so much uncertainty around them that it did bring up moments of doubt. We planned two years for my pregnancy and I knew that it would be the worst. SPEAKER_07: If she knew, yes, that it would be the worst, maybe Vlada wouldn't decide to do it. SPEAKER_03: Coming up after the break, these pills take us into a complicated conversation around having a baby or not in a wartime. SPEAKER_12: Self-translation will be back in a moment. SPEAKER_19: Lulu here. If you ever heard the classic Radiolab episode, Sometimes Behave So Strangely, you know that speech can suddenly leap into music and really how strange and magic sound itself can be. We at Radiolab take sound seriously and use it to make our journalism as impactful as it can be. And we need your help to keep doing it. The best way to support us is to join our membership program, The Lab. This month, all new members will get a T-shirt that says Sometimes Behave So Strangely. To check out the T-shirt and support the show, go to radiolab.org slash join. Radiolab is supported by Capital One with no fees or minimums. Banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Visit capitalone.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC. Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily and can grow it at 4.15 annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA member FDIC terms apply. SPEAKER_16: After but her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues, is history repeating itself? SPEAKER_00: You can almost see an equation again, I would say, led by the Times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments. SPEAKER_16: Listen to On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_03: We're back with Radiolab. I'm Molly Webster. This is our collaboration with Rough Translation. And here's Gregory Warner. SPEAKER_12: In the first part of this episode, we followed the shipment of abortion pills to Ukraine. And we learned that they were needed and they were used. In fact, the stress of war on pregnancy meant they were used a lot more widely than we thought. SPEAKER_03: One of the Ukrainian doctors that we met while we were following these pills ended up making us think about the complexities of getting an abortion in a time of war. And so this doctor, her name is Valentina. She asked that we not use her last name to protect her privacy at work. But Katz had come across a video interview with Valentina on Instagram. SPEAKER_08: She starts by saying, the topic of our conversation is abortion in wartime. SPEAKER_06: She says, this is a very difficult, ambiguous situation from each side. But a woman has the right to decide for herself, not to wait for society's opinion or church or what they think of her. This is her decision and no matter what decision she makes, it will be the right one. SPEAKER_06: She says, we believe in the victory of Ukraine, but we should think about how to help the children we have now. SPEAKER_03: And the whole time she's talking, she has the actual coffee bags of pills from this April shipment next to her. And it kind of feels like she's defending these pills and the use of them against someone you can't see. And you just have all these questions like, why does she feel the need to make this argument? Or who or what is she arguing against? And thinking about the subject line of her video, what does abortion have to do with victory in the war? SPEAKER_12: So Katz and I and our interpreter Kira came to Valentina's office in Lviv. Religion, it plays a large role in Lviv. And the city is a center for the Greek Catholic Church. SPEAKER_08: Not a lot of doctors, gynecologists like to do abortion at all. In our hospital only maximum five or six persons who do abortion. SPEAKER_06: Valentina gets a lot of questions from her patients about how their abortion will go. SPEAKER_08: What I should do if I will have hemorrhage? SPEAKER_06: Will these abortion pills work? Will it hurt? Will I have children in future? SPEAKER_08: Do I need a follow up? SPEAKER_06: When I can go to fitness? When is it safe to have sex? Have normal, have normal life. SPEAKER_12: Those are some of the questions that the patients ask her. But Valentina told us about a question that she now has to ask all of her patients who request an abortion. And this is a part of her practice that changed about a week or so after the Russian invasion. When her hospital director handed her what appeared to be a hastily written new form for patients to sign. And this form specifically was for patients requesting an abortion. I can't give you this form. No. But I can show you. Maybe we can take a picture just of you have. Can we take a picture? SPEAKER_05: No. Okay. Can you just tell me what it says? Explain to me. Because obviously I don't understand. SPEAKER_09: It's addressed. Like the head of the hospital. That was our names. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Give my agreement for... For disclosing my personal data for the fact that I asked for the medical help in here. SPEAKER_09: To hospital. SPEAKER_08: To the hospital. SPEAKER_09: It says you're disclosing your name and information to third parties. SPEAKER_09: Related with the interests of the national security, economical prosperity, and human rights. And this agreement is active as long as martial law in here. So this is something that says specifically during the martial law period, you are allowed SPEAKER_06: access to my abortion files. Wow. And they have to sign this. They can't say no. I have to say that I'm a bit shocked. I would be very upset if I had to sign that form. SPEAKER_03: The form is for all abortions or it's in the case of rape? It's for all abortions. SPEAKER_06: Okay. Every single abortion. Everyone that requests one. SPEAKER_12: And Valentina also specifically has to ask each patient, is your abortion for war-related reasons? And if they say yes, and she says most do. SPEAKER_08: They should write that they do abortion caused by war. SPEAKER_06: And honestly, I was like, wait, hang on. What does your decision to have an abortion have to do with national security, with economic prosperity? Because in this war, we should kill our children, future children, because parents don't know SPEAKER_08: what to do with all of this. You understand me? SPEAKER_03: Like if there had been no invasion or no war, that couple, that pregnant person might have made the decision to keep that baby. And so in deciding to not keep that baby because it's wartime, it's almost like another murder on the battlefield. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. That is what she's talking about. Whether or not patients feel this way, we can't say. This was just one form in this one hospital. And we don't know where it came from. Like the hospital wouldn't tell us more. But it was clear that Valentina wanted us to see this form and really think about what it meant. SPEAKER_15: I never forget when I saw the first time, Musgrave in Maribul. And you feel like your society is not just people around you, that it's like you really one body. SPEAKER_06: Many Ukrainians told us about a certain kind of conversation they'd been a part of or at least overheard. We feel this genocidal war is killing us. SPEAKER_15: And I think when somebody wants to have children, have more Ukrainians, it's just about future, about living and about purpose. It's like regeneration. A lot of people who are around her told me, oh, you are so great. SPEAKER_07: You gave a birth during the war. But she didn't have any other opportunity because she was already pregnant. Her clients, they were planning to have a child before the war. But when the war started, she and her husband decided not to do it. And she even said the phrase that I'm not sure if I want to give a life in such a world. SPEAKER_14: It seems to me that every woman in Ukraine has her own story. And even if at first glance it has nothing to do with either war or pregnancy, you can still trace the points that lead to this. SPEAKER_12: On our last day in Ukraine, we go to the address of a warehouse where Evgenia tells us there's a few coffee bags still left. SPEAKER_06: Hi, Evgenia. Hi. SPEAKER_12: This guy answers. It's very clear that this is not a warehouse in the way in which, like, I've been picturing it. It's just an apartment. Hi, are you Vladimir? Yes. SPEAKER_05: I'm Kes. Nice to meet you. He's got a roommate who's frying an egg. SPEAKER_12: They have a dog. SPEAKER_06: And then we come in and the dog is like very enthusiastic. SPEAKER_12: Since that April shipment that we've been following, Evgenia received two more shipments of abortion pills. These were not smuggled though through Poland, like the last batch. They were legally mailed from India. SPEAKER_06: And yeah, she told us that they were here. So we thought we would come and visit them. It's just a room full of boxes. SPEAKER_06: You can just see in the corner of your eye, in each bedroom, there's like a huge stash of boxes. Like massive amounts of boxes. Like the stack is taller than us. I would say it's eight foot high for sure. SPEAKER_12: So they're like a bunch of white boxes and on it, it says top kit, combi kit one plus SPEAKER_06: four. SPEAKER_12: So 24. There's so many boxes of abortion pills here. SPEAKER_12: Then also the living room. There are more boxes of pills. And under Vanya's sock drawer. SPEAKER_04: It's like a piston. Yeah, it's abortion pills. SPEAKER_07: But they're put all together in the kit. SPEAKER_12: Every few days, someone comes here, grabs a packet of pills and mails it off to another doctor. They've even smuggled some into occupied territories. SPEAKER_06: Here they all are. It was so dramatically casual. We're just standing in this guy's apartment. And each of these pills is a story. It's someone's story. A moment in their life. Whether that's pregnancy or a complication or a family decision or pressure. A traumatic event or just something they'll forget. Have a nice day. Thank you. SPEAKER_13: Thank you so much. SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much. If Ghenia, who brought the boxes over the border originally, says that they have more than enough pills. Some of them may even expire. But the hope is that they'll never have to go back to a situation like in April. SPEAKER_06: That they'll never run out. All right. And then we stuck it back into a beautiful day you would never guess. SPEAKER_12: Reporter Kat Slaslow. This episode was produced by Tessa Paoli, Daniel Germa and our senior producer Adelina Lancini's with help from Nick M. Nevis. Our editor was Brenna Farrell reporting help from the Rough Translation team. SPEAKER_03: Huge thanks to the ears of Valeria Fokina, Andrei Daegelek, Noel King, Robert Krolwich and Sana Krasikov, plus Soren Wheeler and all our friends at Radiolab. Thank you to NPR's International Desk and the team at the Ukraine Bureau. SPEAKER_12: And to our interpreters, Kira Leonova and Tatiana Uranetz. Thanks to Drs. Natalia, Irna and Diana, Yulia Mitsko, Yulia Babich, Maria Glazunova, Niko Bilska, Yvette Mrova. SPEAKER_03: Thanks also to Lauren Ramirez, Jane Neuhem, Olena Shevchenko, Marta Chumako, Jamie Nadal, Jonathan Bierich, and the many, many others we spoke to for the story. SPEAKER_12: The Rough Translation team includes Luis Treyas and Justine Yan. Our intern is Elena Torek. Our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of the Enterprise Storytelling Unit, which is our home at NPR. Our visuals editing came from Katie Dull and Peter DiCampo. Illustrations by Oksana Trzachkowska. SPEAKER_03: Translation came from Eugene Alper and Denis Kaczywski. Voiceover came from Lizzie Marchenko and Yulia Srebrenenko. Archival from the HEAL Foundation. SPEAKER_12: John Ellis composed our theme music, original music from Dylan Keefe, additional music from Blue Dot Sessions and FirstCom Music. Mastering by James Willets and Robert Rodriguez, fact checking by Marisa Robertson-Texter. SPEAKER_03: Legal guidance from Micah Ratner, Lauren Cooperman, and Denton's. Ethical guidance from Tony Kavan. NPR's senior vice president for programming is Anya Grundman. SPEAKER_12: I'm Gregory Warner. Rough Translation is taking a little break, but when we get back, we have some more stories from Ukraine and a trip to India. See you soon. SPEAKER_03: I'm Molly Webster. Thanks for listening. Lulu and Letif are back next week. SPEAKER_11: SPEAKER_19: Thank you.