Human stories from Ukraine: Inside The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak
As major outlets shutter foreign bureaus, one journalist builds a new model for international reporting.
When Tim Mak landed in Kyiv on Feb. 23, 2022, for what he thought would be routine coverage of a potential conflict, he couldn't have known that Russian tanks would roll across the border that very night. But those events launched the former NPR investigative correspondent and U.S. Army combat medic on an unexpected journey — one that would lead him to build what has become Substack’s largest international publication.
Started in spring 2023, The Counteroffensive and its sister publication, Counteroffensive Pro, have grown to over 100,000 subscribers by taking an unconventional approach to war coverage. Rather than focusing solely on military developments, Mak and his team of seven journalists in Kyiv tell deeply human stories about life during wartime.
In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Mak about building a new model for foreign correspondence, the challenges of balancing investigative work with daily coverage, and why personal stories matter more than ever in covering conflict. —Parker Molloy
How did you get your start in journalism?
I did not intend to be a journalist. I went to school at McGill in Montreal, and I studied Canadian politics and geography. I didn’t write for the student paper except for an opinion column in my last two years. What I really wanted to do was get into politics. Unfortunately, the first politician I worked for went down in a ridiculous scandal... the minister of foreign affairs of Canada left classified documents at his girlfriend’s home. I came to Washington, D.C., as kind of a political refugee, thinking, “Hey, I’m going to take an unpaid internship.” My internship happened to be with David Frum, who is now at The Atlantic. He happened to be starting a website covering politics in 2009, and he asked if I wanted to be a reporter. And I was like, “Okay.” And 15 years later, I am still doing it.
Over that time I worked for various places like Politico and The Daily Beast and NPR. And somewhere in there I joined the Army and became a medic. And I found myself in Kyiv unexpectedly, too. I was tapped to be part of the team that NPR sent to Ukraine in case a war might break out — in part because of my background as a soldier and my medical experience. And as it happened, I landed on the night the war broke out. And I’ve been running around here ever since.
How did The Counteroffensive come into being?
I wanted to come back to Ukraine. I didn’t think of it as my main project. I was thinking about coming back to Ukraine, doing freelancing. And what it turned out to be was that there was a real appetite for human interest reporting and narrative journalism in the foreign policy reporting space.
We very rarely just do “This is what happened.” We’ll do that when there's a huge breaking news story. But usually we really emphasize applying the techniques for fictional writing — characters and narrative and storytelling — and bringing that over to the nonfiction side to do journalism that’s human-centered. So instead of telling you what happened and where, we introduce you to a person who went through something related to the news. And by learning about that person, you learn the news.
Why focus on personal stories rather than traditional war correspondence?
I guess you could say it all started with a dog. On the first day of the full-scale invasion, as we were leaving Kyiv, I posted a photo of a dog. And I called it a “dog of war.” I like to think of myself as a decent journalist, but I think that a proportion of the people who read me read me because I post cute dog photos from Ukraine.
But what led from that: I understood that there was so much stuff in my reporter’s notebook that I wasn’t putting out in my mainstream straight news coverage. And people wanted — there was just a deep appetite for that. People wanted to know more than what they could see by watching the television. They wanted to understand the mood. They wanted to understand the characters. They wanted weird anecdotes.
Our motto is “Empathy and autocracy can’t coexist.” And what we mean by that is that when we tell these personal stories, when we explain the human consequences of dictatorship and autocracy, we think it compels action. It compels people to fight the so-called Ukraine fatigue and apathy that might otherwise come about.
The dogs (and cats) of war
After Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, a nationwide spirit of volunteerism emerged across Ukraine. This ethos evolved into a movement known loosely as the “volonteri,” an informal network of helpers that is a central force in Ukraine’s fight for freedom and identity.
Then came February 2022’s invasion of Ukraine. In Mykolaiv, a strategically important port city on the Black Sea, three-time powerlifting world champion Anna Kurkurina sprang to action, dedicating herself to rescuing, rehabilitating, and rehoming cats and dogs found roaming the region’s war-torn streets.
“People here, we cannot just sit and wait,” Kurkurina says. “We must make our own contribution to [the future of] our nation.”
For more on Kurkurina and her daily struggles and triumphs as she uplifts the most vulnerable inhabitants of her city, read this year’s Webby Award-winning photo feature “Lifting Ukraine,” published by Long Lead.
How do you balance long-term investigations with the need for regular coverage?
At The Counteroffensive, you can’t be full-time investigating. It’s just not sustainable professionally or financially. The thing is that huge organizations that have full-time investigative teams do that as a premium on all the other kind of daily news they do and the revenue that they take in from that. But if you were to do a standalone investigations team or an investigations publication, it would not be financially viable.
What's your view on the future of international reporting?
If I were a 22-year-old graduating college and I wanted to become a foreign correspondent, I would say you have to be not only a correspondent but you have to be a media entrepreneur of some kind. Gone are the days where you can do great journalism, be a super-talented journalist, and be recognized for that alone and get picked up and posted to a Washington Post foreign bureau or the New York Times.
Twenty, 25 years ago, even small regional papers, the Dallas Morning News, would have foreign bureaus. I doubt they do now, although I haven’t checked. And gone are the days where young journalists might be able to get an opportunity to go work at one of these foreign bureaus.
The window is rapidly closing on foreign correspondents, in general, for both the reason of limited media resources but also the decrease in mainstream publications’ appetite for taking risks. There’s liability when it comes to hiring freelancers, particularly in conflict zones. And increasingly, publications don’t want that liability.
Ultimately what we end up with is less coverage of the world, which is weird because we're more interconnected now than we were 25 years ago. But on-the-ground, independent, authoritative news gathering is harder and harder to find. And I think that's a really bad thing for all of us who care about everything from America’s role in the world to international institutions and the rules of war, the adoption and implementation of liberal democracies around the world. All those require a vibrant and independent press, and it requires some of our largest newspapers being there to watch and give an authoritative answer on what’s happening there. That’s what I worry about long term — not having that.
Further reading and listening from Tim Mak
“Ex-Wife: Donald Trump Made Me Feel ‘Violated’ During Sex” by Tim Mak and Brandy Zadrozny (The Daily Beast, July 27, 2015)
“A Ukrainian jazz club provides joy in Odesa despite the invasion” (NPR, April 23, 2022)
“NPR investigates Russia’s notorious 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade” (NPR, March 14, 2023)
“We will not yield.” (The Counteroffensive, Nov. 6, 2024)
“Bombed in Syria, then again in Ukraine” by Tim Mak and Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova (The Counteroffensive, Dec. 3, 2024)
