Ukraine, day by day

The Ukraine coverage was not told first in the studio: it was told in audio. Every day, from Quito and later from the Polish border and from Lviv, La Posta recorded an episode of A Correspondent's Diary, the podcast that carried its coverage of the invasion. According to the team itself, it became the most listened-to podcast in the country during those days; the episode about the trip spent a week as the third most played on Spotify in Ecuador. Boscán, Mónica Velásquez, José María Gil and Hernando Tapia traveled to Medyka and Lviv in the third week of the war, the only Ecuadorian journalists on Ukrainian soil; in Quito, Jefferson Sanguña co-hosted the shows. Nine installments, from day one to the six-month review.

Before dawn on February 24, 2022, Russia crossed the border. Vladimir Putin called it a special military operation, and 17 cities were attacked on the first night. Café la Posta went on air that same day with an Ecuadorian student in Zaporizhzhia and an analysis of what was beginning. The next day, day two, came another full edition. The Foreign Ministry's count of Ecuadorians located rose from 450 to 700 and then to 913. From then on, each installment of the diary put on record what was known that day. Below is the log, with the map La Moni prepared for each broadcast.

On March 3, day eight, Andersson Boscán mapped the territory in four and a half minutes: Kherson had fallen the night before, Mariupol had seen eight days of fighting, and the Russian objective was Odesa and access to the sea. On March 7 he published the full explainer, twelve minutes to understand where the war came from: the Donbas, with a Russian military presence since 2014; Crimea, annexed that same year; the corridor Putin sought between the two; and the horseshoe with which he meant to crush the resistance against the western borders. Thirteen days in, as Boscán reported, four of the five major cities were still holding out, thanks to poor Russian logistics and a Ukrainian morale the West had not seen coming.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Ministry was getting people out. The humanitarian flights left from Budapest and Poland in March: 246, 203 and 190 passengers according to Deputy Minister Vayas, plus 9 on a Mexican humanitarian flight and 82 on commercial flights coordinated by the government, for 730 people arriving in Ecuador; some 200 Ecuadorians chose to stay in Europe. On April 4, at day forty, U.S. Ambassador Michael Fitzpatrick came to Café la Posta: Putin has already failed, but he can win the battle. On April 18, Vayas explained on Veraz how the evacuation was organized.

At six months, on August 19, 2022, the coverage took stock with Ruslan Spirin, Ukraine's representative for Latin America, from Kyiv: 8.5 million people had left the country, 5.5 million had returned, and the Zaporizhzhia plant was still occupied. Boscán did not host that day: he was testifying before the National Assembly on the Danubio case. The students who returned on the humanitarian flights complained that the scholarships promised so they could continue their degrees never materialized; in April, Vayas had said that Senescyt and universities in Hungary and Poland would find them places. The war goes on. Kherson was liberated in November 2022; Mariupol remains occupied.

In June 2023, Boscán closed a show with a self-critique of the profession: journalists who take money to publish and to stay quiet, who ask favors of those in power, who treat the audience as idiots and never go out into the street. I am a journalist, so I owe you an apology, he said. The Ukraine coverage had been the opposite: going to the ground before offering an opinion.