KYIV, Ukraine—In Mariupol, a Ukrainian port city on the Sea of Azov only about 10 miles from the front lines, you can frequently hear artillery exploding from inside the city.
Sometimes it sounds like tree branches knocking in the wind. Sometimes it’s loud enough to rattle windows.
I was at dinner with a group of young people from the city. I had met some of them earlier in the day when I gave a talk about journalism to a university class, and they had invited me to hang out with their friends that night.
We had burgers and beer at a restaurant called Sito Piano, which was on the ground floor of Mariupol’s City Hall. The rest of the building was still a burnt-out carcass—torched when pro-Russian separatists briefly took over the city in April 2014 in the opening days of the war.
