“Caolan Robertson is from Kilkenny. He has over 1.3 million subscribers across YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms, an Honorary Digital Ambassador award presented to him by Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska, a documentary on Apple TV, and an international arrest warrant issued against him by the Russian government. He got married in Kyiv last November – to a man, in a city under missile fire – and he has no plans to leave. You have probably not heard of him. Feels like almost nobody in Ireland has. That gap between what Robertson has done and how little it has been covered here is, in itself, a story worth telling. This piece is an attempt to tell it. Full interview with Caolan and Ukrainian journalist Marichka Padalko: “ Why this Irish Journalist Never Left Ukraine ” But the story begins earlier – at the Polish border in the first days of February 2022, where his editor at Byline TV had sent him when he was refused permission to enter Ukraine. Robertson stood and watched hundreds of thousands of women and children pouring across the border with their suitcases, from Mariupol, Kharkiv, Odesa – every city in Ukraine – with no idea what would come next. Robertson admits, without embarrassment, that he did not know where Ukraine was on a map well into his adult life. Growing up in Ireland, Ukraine was not part of the curriculum: history class meant Irish history, and the little that was taught about the Second World War meant Britain, France, and Germany. Ukraine did not appear. When the Russian aggression began in 2014, he heard about it, but through the fog of Russian propaganda, which framed it as a “family dispute between peoples”, who were “essentially the same”. He believed it because he had nothing to contradict it with. This is not a confession unique to him. It is, he suggests, a structural failure with consequences: a generation of people across Ireland witnessed in February 2022, with almost no context for what they were watching. The speed with which Russian narratives filled that vacuum was predictable: countries that do not teach their children the history of their neighbours leave them defenceless against those who will invent that history for them. Robertson grew up in rural Ireland, hearing his grandmother’s stories. She once showed him a photo of herself in her communion dress, standing on a Dublin street. Behind her, the buildings had been damaged by German bombs; the Luftwaffe had mistaken Dublin for Liverpool. Robertson grew up knowing that catastrophe is not always somewhere else, that Europe forgets this at its peril. North Strand on the morning after the German bombing of Dublin on the night of 31 May 1941. Photo from Independent Newspapers Ireland/NLI collection, via Pam Lecky. Standing at that border in 2022, he recognised what he was seeing. “I didn’t think it was possible for fascism to come back to this continent,” he said. “And instead of speaking German, it was speaking Russian”. He started interviewing refugees. While other journalists asked “What do you think of Putin?”, Robertson asked something different: “Describe your life a week ago”. One young woman said she had been living in Podil, a hipster part of Kyiv – she used to have wine on Friday nights, and worked in the media. “And now I don’t know who I am. I feel like a refugee.” The interview got millions of views. People across the world watched and thought, “That could be me.” The woman was later offered a job at Deutsche Welle. Robertson never made it back to his normal life in London. Ukrainian refugees, women and children, fleeing Ukraine in 2022. Photo by Aurel Obreja for AP Photo Eleven months later, he came to Kyiv for three days. He expected destruction and despair. Instead, he found women selling flowers in front of sandbags and people holding hands in the street. He asked them on camera why they were still celebrating love at a time like this. “Because love is victory,” they said. “This is our power. This is what we’re fighting for. We’re not just fighting for land – we’re fighting for our brothers and sisters, for the right to love, for the right to determine our own destiny.” He found a city that was, in some sense, a struggle for him to describe, more alive than anywhere he had lived before: the trains ran on time, the healthcare worked, and at five in the morning, the flower shops were open. He stayed. What followed is a remarkable body of work that has, largely without institutional support, shaped how hundreds of thousands of English-speaking people understand this war. He went to Kherson alone – no press jacket and no armour, with just five dollars for a bus ticket – after hearing that Russian forces had begun hunting civilians with drones and posting the videos online. In Kherson, a drone followed him down a street, and he ran into a café. When Robertson published the documentary – opening with the line “There is a city in Europe where civilians are being hit with drones intentionally, and the perpetrators are posting the videos” – it got two million views in a day. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC all dispatched teams to Kherson two weeks later to cover the same story. The documentary Hunted in Kherson, reported by Caolan Robertson for Journeyman Pictures: “ Russian drones have adopted a new terrifying strategy | Hunted In Kherson “ Then he headed east – to the outskirts of Bakhmut, to Chasiv Yar, to Kostiantynivka – to film what he had heard about: white phosphorus falling on civilian areas. Robertson and his team documented it every night, sending samples and cartridges back to London for analysis, to prove that what Russia was doing was not collateral damage. It was deliberate. He heard about the mines and booby traps left behind in Izyum and across the occupied territories, and volunteers were warned not to touch animals on the sides of roads, cats or dogs, because Russian forces had been sewing explosives inside them to kill rescue workers who simply wanted to save an animal. “This is a level of evil that is hard to comprehend,” Robertson said. “It is not a military strategy. It is not about land or even propaganda. It is something much darker – to destroy everything alive, to destroy freedom itself.” That realisation never left him. He went undercover into Sudzha in Kursk, during the Ukrainian incursion in 2024, in a van, when North Korean troops had just arrived to support the Russians. There he filmed children cycling in the streets and houses intact. When Russia later claimed Ukrainians had tortured civilians, Robertson’s footage was the direct counter-evidence. Russia placed him on a wanted list, so now he cannot enter approximately forty countries. Last year, Robertson sat down with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine. He texted a contact on a Sunday morning, got a reply within hours, and hired a cinematographer that afternoon. He edited the footage himself that night at his kitchen table and posted it without showing it to anyone in the President’s office first. “In the Trump White House,” he observed, “Reuters have been kicked out for asking the wrong questions. Here, I asked anything I wanted and walked out with the footage”. Caolan Robertson’s interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, published on his YouTube channel in March 2026: “ My interview with the President of Ukraine “ Robertson’s argument about why the world should pay attention to Ukraine is not primarily about geopolitics, but about what the war reveals. Ukraine, he says, loves freedom even more than Ireland does. And countries that have been safe for a long time forget what freedom costs, what it means to hold onto your identity when someone is systematically trying to erase it. Ukrainians haven’t forgotten. People in liberated Kherson described to him their experience of running through their front doors for the first time after the Russians fled – breathing their own air, flying their own flags – and he found it more affecting than almost anything he had witnessed. This is also why his colonial argument matters, and why it lands differently with Irish audiences than with anyone else. The most persistent piece of Russian propaganda is simple: some Ukrainians speak Russian, therefore they are Russian, therefore this war is a “family dispute”. Robertson dismantles it the way only an Irish person can. If you went to any town in Ireland, he says, and asked whether people wanted Britain to take the country back, you’d be chased out – and they speak English. That’s what colonialism does: it imposes a language, but it does not impose a desire. He notes, without particular anger, that a portion of Irish public opinion remains susceptible to this argument – that a strand of the Irish far-right and far-left, shaped by anti-defence sentiment and a reflexive suspicion of Western foreign policy, has found itself, uncomfortably, proximate to pro-Russian positions. Robertson’s journalism is partly addressed to that audience, not as a lecture, but as a mirror. There is another explanation for why Robertson felt something when he crossed into Ukraine, the one he only understood later. Both of his parents were adopted, an unusual thing, and rarer still, they found each other. Psychologists, he says, have written about this: adopted people sometimes carry a particular kind of wound, a sense of abandonment, and they tend to find one another across the world. He did not think much about origins until he came to Ukraine. Then he started researching. He discovered that his great-grandparents are buried north of Odesa. They were part of the Black Sea Germans, a community that had settled in Ukraine centuries ago, expelled by the Soviets in one of the waves of forced displacement that the twentieth century scattered across the continent. He found a letter, written by his great-great-grandmother to a daughter who had gone missing in the turbulence of those years. The way she wrote about the place was, he said, exactly how he felt. “Maybe that’s why I never felt like I missed home,” he said. “Because it was always here”. Robertson is also frank about the stereotypes he arrived with. He assumed Ukraine would be grey, closed, homophobic, perhaps racist – the Eastern Europe of Western imagination. “It turned out to be the complete opposite,” he says. Whether it was soldiers on the front line, working-class people, or the middle class, Ukrainians judge you by who you are – your sense of humour, whether you’re a good person. “It’s not about race, not about gender. Ukrainians form an opinion based on what they see. And that is genuinely refreshing.” The small-mindedness he feared, he says, exists – but it is a Russian and Belarusian way of thinking, not a Ukrainian one. He points to Odesa as the city that surprised him most: a Jewish community, Crimean Tatars, Muslim traditions, multiple languages and cuisines, a diverse and vivid place, the opposite of everything he had imagined. Robertson funds all of this through Patreon. Around 700 supporters, roughly seven thousand euros a month, and every receipt is published. He was offered jobs by nearly every major English-language broadcaster after the Kherson documentary and turned them all down. He was offered investment, sponsorship deals, and a salary. Yes, he said “no” each time. This is worth thinking about, particularly if you are a student studying journalism, media, communications, or simply thinking about what kind of world you are inheriting. Robertson’s model is precarious, exposed, sometimes frightening and not romantic at all. It is also free in a way that almost no institutional journalism is completely free. He does not wonder what his sponsor thinks, because he has no sponsor. When he sits opposite the President of Ukraine and asks about Orbán, no one in the room can stop him. The question his career poses – and it is a question for your generation more than anyone else’s – is not whether independent journalism can survive. It is whether you are willing to pay for it. There is one more thing Robertson talks about openly, and it is this: he does not drink anymore. War correspondence has a culture. In the bars of Beirut and Kyiv, in the embassies and the press pools, journalists have long used alcohol to decompress, like after a missile strike, after a day at the front, after someone they knew did not make it back. Robertson is frank that he was part of that culture. After particularly hard trips, like the ones to Chasiv Yar, to Sudzha, to nights in Kherson under bombardment, he would come back to Kyiv and drink heavily. It is, Robertson says, what he saw around him, and for a while it felt like the only way to cope. But after Christmas 2024, Robertson completely stopped. His reasons are several. He wants to be ready, in case a missile strike happens at 3 am, you cannot afford to be somewhere in a haze. Robertson is handling, as he puts it, “one of the most serious stories in the world,” and he wants to be fully present for it. He has also watched colleagues – journalists, volunteers – quietly unravel over time: PTSD arriving slowly, masked for years behind the glass. Robertson talks about it because he knows young journalists are watching. “Do it sober,” he wants to say from some stage someday. “Do it the best you can, because you’re handling something that’s someone else’s life”. Robertson has a dream he talks about. He met a man near Lviv, who ran a hot air balloon business – a bright orange balloon that used to drift over the Carpathians in peacetime. The man is now a soldier in the Military Forces of Ukraine. He told Robertson: when the war is over, the first thing I will do is go home, light the burner, and sail up into peaceful skies. Robertson wants to be there when that happens. He wants to film it – the balloon drifting in silence over a free country, and then the credits rolling, and then the screen going dark. That film does not exist. Yet. Caolan is staying until it does. Is cuimhin linn.
Original story
Continue reading at University Times Ireland
universitytimes.ie
Summary generated from the RSS feed of University Times Ireland. All article rights belong to the original publisher. Click through to read the full piece on universitytimes.ie.
