James Verini
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
James Verini’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
via the Ukrainians who were not soldiers and not combatants, who were normal people caught in the middle of this.
And that turned out to be actually very fortunate in its way, because it had occurred to me before covering other wars, but I always managed to forget it, which is the fact that if you and I were caught in a war, well, at least me, if my country was invaded,
I probably wouldn't end up fighting.
I would probably end up like one of the people in the theater, just a regular civilian who's expelled from their home, expelled from their city and winds up in a refugee shelter.
We all of us like to think that we would be on the front lines.
Very few of us actually would be.
I probably wouldn't.
Yes, of course they knew.
Of course they knew.
You may remember that the whole world had seen those images of detti, children in Russian, written on not just one but two sides of the theater, in the parking area and in the front, 20-foot-high letters.
People tend to forget now because it's been so long, but...
The initial satellite images of the theater were sent out before the theater was destroyed.
And all of Ukraine and then all of the world a few days before the bombing was able to see this theater intact with these signs of children.
And there was even some footage that came out of the interior of the theater when the refugees were still in it, this handheld footage of these very crowded, dark hallways, but people looking okay.
If you were in Ukraine at the time, a lot of Ukrainians thought to themselves, uh-oh, because those signs aren't going to be a warning to a Russian pilot.
They're going to be an invitation to a Russian pilot.
Of course, the Russians knew.
They had seen children written in those letters on either side of the theater for days before the bombing.
They would have seen it in all of their surveillance.
They owned the skies at that time.
Showing 81–100 of 216 · page 5 of 11
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