The Interview That Wasn’t: A Guinness in Kharkiv
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 4 October 2026
There is a particular occupational hazard associated with journalism in wartime Kharkiv: one begins to imagine that everybody one meets has a story to tell. This is partly because almost everybody does. Taxi drivers have driven through bombardments, pensioners have slept in metro stations, volunteers have crossed roads that sensible people would not approach and bartenders have continued polishing glasses while explosions rumble somewhere beyond the windows. After enough time in Kharkiv, the journalist develops the dangerous conviction that every stranger encountered in a bar is potentially an interview subject. Sometimes, however, a stranger in a bar is merely a stranger in a bar who would quite like a Guinness.
Thus began my encounter with Julia Golishevska, or at least the encounter that I briefly imagined might become an interview with Julia Golishevska. She appeared interesting, lively and sufficiently connected with the peculiar ecosystem of Kharkiv activism to provoke my journalistic instincts. Names such as “Drug”, “Kharkiv Activist” and “Kharkivist” floated around the conversation, offering the tantalising possibility of another portrait of the extraordinary informal civic networks that hold this battered city together. I began mentally constructing an article before the evening was over. This was my first mistake.
My second mistake was ordering the Guinness.
There is something wonderfully absurd about Guinness in wartime Kharkiv. The black Irish stout arrives looking as though it has travelled from Dublin through several geopolitical crises simply to reach your table. Outside there may be an air-raid warning, soldiers may be passing along the pavement and somebody somewhere is undoubtedly arguing on Telegram about whether another Russian missile is heading towards the city. Inside, meanwhile, a bartender is patiently allowing the famous white head to settle upon a pint of stout according to a ritual developed in an entirely different corner of Europe. Civilisation survives in peculiar forms.
My prospective interviewee appeared considerably more interested in this manifestation of civilisation than in becoming the subject of a newspaper interview. This was perfectly reasonable. Journalists have an unfortunate habit of assuming that other people share their enthusiasm for journalism. We produce notebooks, formulate earnest questions about civil society and ask strangers about their aspirations for the reconstruction of Ukraine. The stranger may meanwhile be thinking something substantially simpler: Is he going to buy another Guinness?
There followed one of those conversations in which two people may technically be speaking to one another while participating in entirely different events. In my version, I had encountered a potentially fascinating Kharkiv activist whose experiences might illuminate the strange resilience of Ukraine’s second city. In hers — or so it seemed to me — she had encountered an Englishman in a bar who was apparently willing to purchase Irish stout. Both interpretations had a certain internal logic. Only one of them required fifteen carefully researched interview questions.
Eventually Julia wandered away into the Kharkiv night, and with her disappeared my prospective interview. I was left with the peculiar sensation familiar to journalists everywhere: the suspicion that one has mistaken ordinary human chaos for the beginning of a story. Somewhere on my telephone remained the traces of an ambitious editorial project involving activism, humanitarian work, wartime resilience and the future of Kharkiv. Somewhere beyond the door was the person around whom this project had theoretically been constructed, heading elsewhere with priorities of her own.
The following day I did what journalists do when reality has failed to cooperate with their plans: I conducted research. This produced an impressive set of questions. What had drawn Julia towards activism? What did Kharkiv mean to her? What was the purpose of Drug? What exactly was Kharkivist? How had the full-scale invasion changed her life? What were the greatest problems facing ordinary civilians in Kharkiv? What had she learned about grassroots organisation during wartime? Where did she see herself in five or ten years?
They were excellent questions. There was only one difficulty: I had begun to suspect that the chances of receiving answers to them were approximately equivalent to the chances of Vladimir Putin appearing at the next Lviv Herald editorial meeting to explain that the whole invasion had been an unfortunate administrative misunderstanding.
This is not a criticism of Julia. Quite the contrary, it is a useful correction to the pomposity that inevitably infects journalism. People do not exist in order to become our interview subjects. They do not walk around Kharkiv waiting for foreign editors to appear with questions about civil society. Sometimes people go to bars because they want to go to bars. Sometimes conversations that seem pregnant with journalistic possibilities at eleven o’clock at night appear rather less pregnant with anything at all the following morning.
There is also a darker dimension to this comedy. Kharkiv is a city in which alcohol, exhaustion, loneliness and war coexist rather too comfortably. People live beneath an almost continuous background pressure that visitors can easily underestimate. Sirens interrupt sleep. Explosions become conversational punctuation. Friends and relatives are scattered across Europe or serving in the Armed Forces. Jobs disappear, relationships fracture and plans extending more than a few weeks into the future acquire an element of fantasy. Under such circumstances, a bar is not merely a place for recreation. It can become a small illuminated refuge from a reality that is intolerable if contemplated continuously
.
This is one reason why the nightlife of wartime Ukrainian cities can appear so bewildering to outsiders. How can people drink while missiles are falling? How can music play after somebody has been killed across town? How can young women put on dresses, young men order rounds of drinks and everybody behave for several hours as though Europe’s largest war since 1945 were not occurring around them? The answer is that human beings cannot remain permanently terrified. Eventually terror itself becomes boring. The nervous system demands holidays from history.
Kharkiv specialises in these holidays. The city can move with astonishing speed between tragedy and farce. An air-raid siren sounds and nobody leaves the bar. Somebody checks a missile-monitoring channel, announces that the threat appears to be heading somewhere else and conversation resumes. A distant explosion shakes the windows and somebody orders another drink. Foreign visitors may find this behaviour reckless, but after years of war the residents of Kharkiv have accumulated a grim expertise in calibrating danger. They have also acquired an understandable reluctance to surrender every remaining pleasure to Moscow.
Against this background, the vanished interviewee becomes almost symbolic. Journalism wants coherence. War produces fragments. The journalist wants the activist’s biography, the organisation’s mission statement, the five-year plan and an uplifting quotation about rebuilding Ukraine. Kharkiv supplies a woman in a bar, a pint of Guinness, half a conversation and then an empty chair. The discrepancy between those two things may tell us more about the city than the polished interview ever would.
There is a temptation in writing about Ukraine to turn everyone into a hero, victim, activist or representative of some larger historical force. Ukrainians are asked endlessly what the war means, what Europe should understand, what victory would look like and what sort of country they hope to build afterwards. These are legitimate questions, but sometimes the people being asked them would prefer not to carry the symbolic weight of an entire nation. Sometimes they would prefer a drink.
Perhaps Julia remembers our conversation perfectly. Perhaps she remembers fragments of it. Perhaps she remembers the Guinness more vividly than the journalist who bought it. Perhaps, by the time these words are written, the whole episode has dissolved into that enormous archive of forgettable encounters from which city life is constructed. I cannot know, and that uncertainty is part of the story.
The fifteen interview questions will therefore remain unanswered, at least for now. They sit in their immaculate sequence like diplomatic notes addressed to a government that has ceased to exist. Somewhere among them is a question about aspirations for the next five or ten years, which in Kharkiv may be the most extravagantly optimistic question of all. In a city accustomed to measuring life between air-raid alerts, tomorrow morning can occasionally seem ambitious enough.
Yet there is something oddly reassuring about the whole episode. War has not abolished triviality. Not every encounter carries profound meaning. Not every Ukrainian encountered in a Kharkiv bar needs to deliver an eloquent dissertation on national resilience. People can still be chaotic, unreliable, amusing, thirsty, distracted and magnificently uninterested in the editorial requirements of the Lviv Herald. That, too, is a form of normality worth defending.
And so my great investigation into Kharkiv activism ended before it began. No revelations were obtained, no organisational philosophy was uncovered and no stirring quotation about Ukraine’s European future was recorded. Instead there was a bar, a conversation, a Guinness and a disappearing prospective interviewee. In wartime Kharkiv, this probably counts as a relatively successful evening.
The journalist, meanwhile, learned an important professional lesson. When somebody you have just met in a Kharkiv bar agrees vaguely to an interview while you are buying the drinks, do not immediately commission fifteen questions about their aspirations for the reconstruction of Ukraine.
Buy the Guinness. Enjoy the conversation. And wait until morning before calling it journalism.
