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Stephen Fry into Ukraine

Duration: 1 x 52'

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Stephen Fry travels to Kyiv to meet up with fellow comic, President Zelensky and First Lady Olena Zelensky, and discovers for himself the mental and physical state of the people struggling to cope with the war.

He meets the recently widowed, whose anger at the Russians is ferocious. He meets the brother who lost his older brother and blames himself for his death, and whose wife cannot contemplate what to do next with her life having lost her soulmate, yet keeps smiling. He talks to survivors of the Azov Brigade who were captured and endured torture at a Russian POW camp before being exchanged. 

He watches an operation with an orthopaedic surgeon and talks to two of her patients who have new prosthetics, and who can’t stop laughing because, well, they are from Odessa!

With neurosurgeon Dr Andrii Myzak he discusses the challenges of mental health treatment when psychiatry during the Soviet Union period was associated with political oppression. At the Babyn Yar memorial to the 33000 Jews murdered over one weekend in 1941 he reflects on the bloody and turbulent history of Ukraine’s last hundred years. 

Interspersed with all this is the conference where US Secretary of State Blinken, Bernard Henri Levy and a host of other First Ladies and Gentlemen have gathered in the elegant surrounds of St Sofia.

And while trying to sleep he has to rapidly get to a bomb shelter as the Russian missiles try to intimidate guests and citizens alike. 

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