The daily quality of the NOS’s war reporting is so self-evident that you would almost forget to express your appreciation for its independent journalism. Well (for what it’s worth), here’s the reporters from the NOS News and news hour are doing great work, for weeks now, reporting the atrocities in Ukraine, the fear and courage of the population, the despair of the refugees and the warmth they encounter in Poland and Germany. Sober, nowhere larmoyant, the reporters do their work under harsh conditions, thus carving the scratches of war into our souls too.
Saturday gave both the NOS News if news hour plenty of room for a report by reporter Robin Ramaekers of the commercial Flemish channel VTM. That too is a quality: giving the best story of the day priority over the ‘own’ reports. Ramaekers was the only reporter at the military base in the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, where Russian missiles had hit and killed, according to Ramaekers, ‘a hundred, one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred’ young soldiers. “They were asleep, they didn’t stand a chance.”
It was mainly the combination of the smoking rubble that has become abstraction and Ramaekers’ testimony that could keep us awake. The survivors who ‘dig in the rubble with their bare hands for their comrades and find mostly loose body parts’. The ‘bodies dangling’ between the remains of the first and second floors of the ruin. The new phase in which the war is entering, now that the Russian army, with the prey Odessa in mind, is able to fight the Ukrainian military resistance more effectively.
Anyone expecting relief from the western side of their minds came home to the NOS from a cold fair. Germany correspondent Wouter Zwart reported on a protest action at the Polish-Belarusian border against the constant flow of trucks eastwards, which is roaring evidence of the failing trade boycott with Russia and its vassal Belarus: after a day of blocking, a traffic jam of 25 heap of crumbling miles. Ukrainian President Zelensky remotely addressed a demonstration in Bern, Switzerland. He denounced the multinational that is not stopping trade with Russia: Nestlé, which touts itself as ‘the world’s number one in infant and baby food’. It will not miss the customers in that maternity hospital in Mariupol.
Wry trade, after which Joris van Poppel reported on Holland at its narrowest. In Belgium he recorded how long lines of Dutch motorists formed in front of Flemish filling stations. Petrol and diesel are sixty euro cents cheaper than in the Netherlands. A satisfied SUV owner calculated that he saved 42 or 43 euros – a nice bonus in expensive times. The police had to intervene to manage the fuel-hungry traffic jam. No disturbances have been reported: all is quiet on the southern front.