MOLLY WEBSTER: Heads up. This episode does deal with some intense topics, including sexual violence and war. If that's not where your headspace is at right now, or you're listening with some younger listeners, you might decide to skip this one.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

MOLLY: Hey, this is Molly. This is Radiolab. Today on the show, a very super special awesome collaboration with the NPR podcast, Rough Translation. This show, Rough Translation, does international stories that hit close to home, and we got to team up with them on the story you're about to hear. It's about a covert smuggling operation to get abortion pills into Ukraine right after the full-scale invasion, and then the ways in which the need for that medicine went beyond abortion. So I'm gonna be joined here in studio with Rough Translation host Gregory Warner.

GREGORY WARNER: Hey, I'm Gregory Warner.

MOLLY: And reporter Katz Laszlo. Katz is going to start in Germany with a couple and a question.

GREGORY: Yeah.

MOLLY: And I should say, to protect people's identities, we're only using first names, and sometimes no names at all. Here's Katz.

KATZ LASZLO: Where does the story start for you?

VICKI: Well really, with the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine.

KATZ: This is Vicki.

ARI: I made quite a deliberate decision to tell you slowly.

KATZ: And this is her boyfriend, Ari.

ARI: Because I knew that your family was there.

KATZ: They live in Germany, but Vicki actually has roots all across the former Soviet Union, and she's still got family in Ukraine.

VICKI: Of course, then you think if some things would have shifted in my biography, it would be me or my mother there.

KATZ: This is the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe in 80 years.

VICKI: And the only way I managed to handle it was to get active.

KATZ: Vicki walks down the street, and there's this closed nightclub, which has become this place where people are just, like, scrambling to organize donations that are flooding in.

VICKI: And then I start sorting through boxes in the donation center. I ended up in the medication corner, and most people who were sorting through it had no idea what these medications actually are.

KATZ: Vicki's actually a doctor, so she knows what everything is.

VICKI: And after eight hours or something, somebody said, "Oh, we are actually—we heard that you're a doctor, and tomorrow we are going with a big convoy of cars to the Polish-Ukrainian border. We're gonna go, we don't know what's gonna happen." And then, "Oh, it would be good to have a doctor on board. But if not, we'll figure it out."

KATZ: So she calls a bunch of friends who actually work for international aid organizations, and she asks, "Should I go?"

VICKI: They said, "No, but we really strongly advise against this. And—and you're just messing up with the official structures if private people are blocking the roads, and this just creates more chaos."

KATZ: Hundreds of thousands of people are pouring over the Ukrainian border, which is only a nine-hour drive away. And Vicki really wants to help.

VICKI: I decided the next morning under the shower, "Okay, screw it. I'm gonna go." I had a bit of a stomach ache when we drove there, thinking, "God, like, I'm now driving there thinking I can do something here, and we are going to be traffic for the big guys now coming in."

KATZ: She's picturing the Polish-Ukrainian border, and food distribution tents, major NGO flags.

VICKI: Like, I don't know, UNICEF or UNHCR or just one of the big organizations or NGOs, and they were not there. There's no one. I spent a fair amount of hours at one border crossing into the night to really see some grandmother or mother, like, stirring a pot and packaging it into, like, warm soups, warm this. Like, these Polish women were standing there the whole night. And this was, like, all this warmth that the people fleeing received.

KATZ: All of these people, refugees, who are just outside. It's below freezing, and they're either stuck waiting for transport deeper into Europe, or for family that's still on the other side, and they can't see them, and they don't know where they are. And there's nobody official saying, you know, "You made it. This is your next step."

VICKI: This was around, like, eight or nine days after the war. So I mean, you could say this is understandable. All the organizations are doing assessments. We are assessing, assessing. This is what you would hear. But it also made me really angry because, you know, I mean, this is a no-brainer to know that if it gets to -10 degrees at night at the border, that you need something to keep the people warm. And I think this was really one of the moments where I thought, like, we are not traffic here. Private people are not traffic. They're the solution at the moment.

GREGORY: And so Vicki decides to step in—but all the way in. She kind of blows off her job. She throws herself completely into volunteering.

KATZ: After five or six weeks, she's completely wiped out.

VICKI: I was in bed with high fever, really shivers.

KATZ: She gets COVID.

VICKI: And I was lying in bed sort of scrolling through, I think, 20 Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook groups of volunteers. And this is also where all requests were sort of flying around. And then I read they're urgently looking for abortion pills for women who were raped by Russian soldiers. This was a week after all the news broke about Bucha.

KATZ: These requests are coming the week that all of those really grim photos from Bucha came out ...

MOLLY: Oof.

KATZ: ... of dead bodies being left in the middle of roads. Stories of Russian soldiers using sexual violence as a weapon. Just in that week, at least 25 people came forward and shared firsthand how they'd been raped while trapped in basements in Bucha. Rape as a weapon has been confirmed in every occupied territory since. And Bucha's liberation, it was the first time that people outside of these occupied territories really found out.

VICKI: I mean, this was a shock, really, for everyone, right? Like, reading the news. Like, we had, like, faces to that. We were every day in contact with Ukrainian women, these very proud and strong women, like, kind of, like, with their children, carrying them with, like, one little bag. And so just to imagine that this is something that they are not granted the access to the pills in a situation like that. Like, these women that I had faces to—I don't know.

KATZ: If she hadn't been at the border, she would have read this news and thought big organizations ...

VICKI: They will take care of these women. Why should it be me? But from the experiences that we've had before, that—actually that wasn't the case in a lot of places, that governments and organizations are taking care. So even though I was telling myself I think I need to pull myself a little bit out of things, this was sort of the one where I was like, okay, what can we do about this?

MOLLY: The idea even that someone from one country can get an abortion to someone in another country all came about because of the creation of something called the abortion pill or abortion pills, which are really two types of medication: mifepristone and misoprostol, called mife and miso. Taken together at any point in the first trimester of pregnancy, they can induce an abortion. The trick with them is that they are one of the most controlled medicines that we have, especially moving country to country or crossing borders. And so the notion on a practical level, on a legal level, of donating abortion pills, it's a pretty complicated one.

VICKI: I knew that through some contacts of my partner's family, there was a woman rights activist. So I thought maybe this is somebody we could ask.

ARI: I immediately called her, asked if she knew some people. Is there a way? How do people usually do this? So she then gave us the number of a supplier she had worked with, so we reached out to him.

SUPPLIER: Yes, hello? Can you hear me well?

GREGORY: This supplier, we are not using his name because he is talking about stuff that he could be arrested for.

KATZ: Are you comfortable with us calling you "Supplier?"

SUPPLIER: Yeah, why not?

MOLLY: Even his mom doesn't quite know what he does.

SUPPLIER: For her, you know, I'm a missionary in Africa.

MOLLY: The supplier is based in an African country. He is of European descent, and he has made a name for himself as being one of the main abortion pill suppliers to Europe, and honestly throughout the world.

SUPPLIER: I had some passion for all these women who die unnecessarily from abortion. So what we try to do is to reduce unsafe abortions.

MOLLY: So the supplier offers to donate 10,000 abortion kits.

VICKI: He just said, "I have somebody in Prague for 500 kits. One euro per kit."

ARI: Which is very cheap.

KATZ: And a kit in this case is five pills. It's one mife and four miso.

SUPPLIER: This is a big chance we have, getting women access to these lifesaving medicines.

VICKI: I mean, of course, it's women being raped in need of their medication. But in the time of a war breaking out in your country, I can imagine myself and other women that are maybe just pregnant from even just their partner deciding that this is not a good moment to bring a child into this world.

GREGORY: The supplier tells them he's got an idea for how this can work, but they have to act quickly. He happens to be putting together this huge medical donation for Ukraine, with lots of different stuff like painkillers and antibiotics and COVID medication—all kinds of pills, actually. And he doesn't actually have time himself to get all of this stuff to Ukraine. But if Vicki and Ari can meet him at the airport and organize the transport over the border, then he can add abortion pills pretty much for free.

VICKI: We were so in this. Like, okay, let's get it done.

GREGORY: But, he says, here's the thing: the airport that the supplier is gonna fly into, it happens to be an airport in Poland. And in Poland, it's illegal to give anyone an abortion pill.

KATZ: At the moment, there's a serious court case going on. This abortion activist, she gave one set of pills to someone, and she's potentially gonna go to jail for three years. I mean, it—the court case hasn't finished. But that woman never even took the pills. And that's one set of pills.

MOLLY: But then I guess I think, okay, wait, they're just bringing them through Poland. They're not stopping in Poland. So, like, that, I guess, they could probably do?

KATZ: Well, the problem is they can't prove that they're not gonna hand them out in Poland, right? Like, if you just get intercepted by customs or police, you can't very convincingly say, "Oh, no, no, no. We're just driving on."

MOLLY: Yeah, that—hmm. So then how would you actually ship it through Poland?

KATZ: They realize they need all kinds of things that they don't have, like a truck that can be officially sealed by border guards, a registered Polish logistics company that can attest for the shipment.

VICKI: We were trying to explain that his plan is not gonna work. But he was just in a madness of packing and repacking.

KATZ: Meanwhile, the supplier keeps calling them back.

ARI: Every time we spoke to him, which was really every few hours, he would be talking about a larger quantity, 15,000 medical abortions, and on top of that, 15,000 emergency contraceptives—morning-after pills.

GREGORY: And on these video calls with the supplier is when the couple realized something new about the supplier's method to get these pills into Poland.

SUPPLIER: I didn't want the Polish customs to find any mifepristone.

KATZ: He's, like, taking them out of the boxes, and he's putting them in other containers.

SUPPLIER: If these pills are labeled "Misoprostol" and "Mifepristone," it's a big problem.

KATZ: He's putting them in these, like, big tubs of sport nutrition protein powder.

VICKI: Put these in these plastic bags.

KATZ: And there's also, like, pills in little sandwich bags.

VICKI: What is he packaging there? How much is it? The numbers kept changing, the names, the packaging, and you couldn't really follow him anymore.

GREGORY: And was this the first moment where you were actually conscious of, like, bending rules? Like, this was not gonna be legitimate, actually?

VICKI: Yes. That was the first time.

KATZ: They could all go to jail. Like, you can't just walk around with thousands of unlabeled pills, especially if you're a doctor. Vicki could lose her medical license.

VICKI: Of course, there was a part that thought, "Can we not take an official route, because abortions are not forbidden in Ukraine?" But at the same time, like with everything in these first weeks, there was no time to take all these official routes.

MOLLY: And part of the rush is that they're racing against two different clocks: one of those clocks is biological, which is that in Ukraine, you only have nine weeks to take this medication. But the way the weeks are counted is not from when you get pregnant but from the date of your last period. So imagine you get pregnant at the beginning of the war, by the time Ari and Vicki are trying to get these pills to you, you're technically, like, eight or eight-and-a-half weeks along, and you really only have, like, three days left to get this medicine to get a medical abortion.

GREGORY: And the other clock that the couple is racing against is the supplier's plane. He's already booked his flight.

VICKI: The first time we got in touch with him was a Thursday, and his plane was landing on a Monday.

MOLLY: On top of that, they're already getting additional requests for abortion pills from Ukraine.

ARI: We would—started getting messages from people saying, "Hey, we heard you guys are transporting something. Could you get it to us?"

VICKI: I've never felt more sure that this is the right thing to do somehow.

ARI: It was very clear that if we were not going to do this, then this shipment wouldn't go. If we pull out, then we're basically canceling this for everybody.

VICKI: The things were packed, the flight was booked, and this was our best chance.

GREGORY: Okay, so they're gonna do this thing. What is actually the plan?

MOLLY: Okay, buckle up. Because by Sunday night, they have set up a relay race, which is: the supplier has gotten the pills from India where they're manufactured. He's taking them from his home base in Africa—which we can't name—up to a Polish airport. At the Polish airport, he will hand the pills to the couple who are on the customs forms as, like, the receivers. They're supposed to spend as little time with the pills as possible.

VICKI: Because—what's the word that Ari always—like, this plausible deniability. Like, you lose that in the moment that you have that in your hand, right?

MOLLY: They will then immediately give the pills over to a Polish logistics guy. He will then hand the pills to a driver who is taking the pills along with the entire medical shipment over the border to a hospital in Ukraine. A Ukrainian contact named Yevgenia will go to the hospital, she will extract the pills and start distributing them to doctors and gynecologists who will then get them to patients. And the thing to remember is in this whole chain of humans, the only person who is being told that these are abortion pills is Yevgenia. And that’s basically only because she runs an NGO that moves medical supplies around Ukraine.

VICKI: We've never met these people before, so we didn't know if we could trust them.

GREGORY: So what is everybody else on the chain being told the pills are?

KATZ: The supplier's system to keep these pills safe—mostly from the border guards in Poland—was to relabel them as vitamin C.

VICKI: Vitamin C plus was mife, and vitamin C without the plus was miso.

MOLLY: Can you, like, paint the airport scene?

VICKI: We didn't know if the situation is going to require that we would have to have some kind of discussion with the customs people. So we thought, how shall we dress? Like, let's dress like the most reliable, boring, proper people.

ARI: I was wearing a beige sweater, and underneath a button-up shirt with the collar sticking out of the sweater and wearing my glasses.

GREGORY: Right, because nobody's ever broken the law in a beige cardigan.

KATZ: Exactly.

GREGORY: It just doesn't happen.

KATZ: So they arrive early. They're in their boring outfits. They choose a boring bench.

ARI: There's no better scenario than just sitting it out now.

KATZ: And so they wait. They scroll through their phones. They glance at the customs door, glance at the police.

VICKI: I'm feeling super calm, but I just have to go to the toilet every 10 minutes. [laughs] Like, nothing strange about that.

ARI: I feel my lungs, weirdly, my heart. I can just—I felt, like, my heartbeat for, like, two-and-a-half hours.

MOLLY: The logistics guy they hired shows up, and the three of them wait some more.

ARI: And then suddenly my phone rang, and it's our supplier. "I landed. I'm here with customs. Can you put your logistics partner on the line?"

GREGORY: And the logistics partner gets on the phone. He speaks in Polish, nods, laughs a little, says "Okay."

ARI: Hangs up, looks at both of us and says, "It's through."

VICKI: Oh, my God!

KATZ: Suddenly, the supplier walks through the door.

VICKI: Yeah, I see—I see a man in a suit.

KATZ: He's, like, a guy in his 50s, quite tanned. And he's wearing, like, a blue stripe-y shirt.

VICKI: Like somebody who would have this, like, little, like, briefcase, like, with wheels, where he just puts in his important documents for the meeting that he's flying into.

KATZ: But instead of this little, slick briefcase, he's got one of those airport trolleys stacked to the top with these bags. Just a huge amount of these, like, plastic, colorful bags that you zip up that are super handy. And you grab them in a panic because they're really light. And you stuff all your clothes in them.

VICKI: Yeah, really. Yeah. Bizarrely wrapped in plastic.

KATZ: And he's just, like, slowly pushing it in front of him, trying not to drop it. These bags are, like, jam-packed with antibiotics, with COVID medication, with anti-inflammatory medication. And then hidden between all of those pills are the abortion pills. Vicki is thinking, "Oh, my God!"

VICKI: Okay, if this now goes in one big package into Ukraine, is this really gonna work out? We thought, what if something goes wrong, and then these land in some hospital in Lviv and are used maybe falsely?

VICKI: I did imagine some kind of doctor on the other side, or a paramedic or somebody opening it and nobody knowing, oh, that there's—what are these pills, suddenly, these loose pills in bulk in a plastic bag?

KATZ: And you really don't want to be taking mife or miso not knowing what it is.

GREGORY: And even though she knows she's supposed to just hand the pills over to the next person on the chain, their role is done ...

VICKI: We sort of diverged from our plan. Would you say that?

ARI: Yeah, true.

GREGORY: They decide they're gonna go with the logistics guy to his warehouse in Poland, and then repack the pills before he gives them to the driver.

VICKI: Let's go through it together to make sure that—yeah, that everything's separated properly.

MOLLY: Everybody? Even the supplier?

KATZ: Yeah, the supplier is the only one who knows how all this stuff has been packed. But he's got a connection flight in one-and-a-half hours. So they're just like, "Okay, we're gonna do this as fast as possible."

ARI: We arrived there. And then we thought okay, let's sort of quietly start doing this. The two of us started doing this on the floor in the warehouse: opening the bag, getting it out. That's when we figured out the markings he had put on the boxes was done with a whiteboard marker. So all of the markings had disappeared. Every now and then, you would see a smudge.

VICKI: You had to really dig deep into—like, take out half of the bag until you find the first box or bulk packaging with miso.

ARI: We were really knee-deep in these pills.

VICKI: Yeah.

ARI: We tried to be very organized. And then, as we noticed, there was not that much time left.

VICKI: I remember I was getting really stressed, but ...

KATZ: Two other people who were working at the warehouse start helping, too.

ARI: And by the end, there were, like, six people doing this.

MOLLY: This was a—I thought the operation was of the utmost secrecy, and now a lot more people know what's going on. It just—doesn't it make it more risky?

KATZ: Yeah. I think initially, they're worried about people knowing. And as they're repackaging the pills, they're worried more about, like, are we gonna find all of these pills in time to put them in the right place and ship them on to Ukraine?

GREGORY: And it's only when they've fished out all of the abortion pills and tossed them into ...

ARI: Three moving boxes.

GREGORY: ... three cardboard boxes, that they're finally ready to go home.

VICKI: It felt like our thing is over. We're driving towards home. I mean, it felt—a lot of tension fell off. And yeah, it was a really good feeling, even though I was super exhausted. We were super exhausted.

GREGORY: But a couple of days later ...

ARI: We got a message.

KATZ: Yevgenia's texting. All of the medication has arrived, and that the only thing that isn't there is the abortion pills.

ARI: While we are speaking to her about how confused she is ...

VICKI: We kept calling the logistics guy. Where are the—the boxes are not there? And he kept insisting ...

KATZ: No, no. They arrived. They arrived. And they're talking to Yevgenia. And Yevgenia is like, "They did not arrive."

ARI: So we are getting two conflicting messages about the same shipment from both sides of the border. At this point, I'm convinced we're getting screwed over.

KATZ: Then they start to think they've been tricked.

GREGORY: What do they imagine? What are they playing out might have happened?

ARI: That it's somehow, the driver cannot be trusted. And he is against abortion and is going to throw these into the river.

VICKI: It's all strangers. It's all strangers sort of joining forces. You never know if there's some hidden agenda on either of the sides.

GREGORY: And they know that if they'd stuck with the supplier's chaotic plan and left the pills hidden among the antibiotics and painkillers, those pills would still be with the rest of the medical shipment in Ukraine.

VICKI: I'm just feeling so naïve and—and defeated.

ARI: Yeah. It was not nerves anymore.

VICKI: Yeah.

ARI: It was really frustration.

VICKI: Frustration.

KATZ: Their whole plan is just crumbling. And they're like, "How are we ever gonna tell these people that this shipment that we've been telling them is gonna arrive in a few days with these essential abortion pills has been lost? How are we going to tell them?" And they're thinking, "How are we gonna tell the supplier who's donated a huge amount of money in terms of these pills that it just didn't work out? And also, why the hell did we take this risk to take all of these pills through Poland?

MOLLY: When we get back from break, a chance discovery sends the mission into a whole new direction. Stay tuned.

MOLLY: Hey, this is Molly Webster. We're back with Gregory Warner of Rough Translation and our reporter Katz Laszlo. And we're gonna pick right back up on story.

GREGORY: A few hours after the pills go missing ...

ARI: We heard from the logistics guy. Then we—he tells us, "We know where they are."

GREGORY: They found the pills in the driver's private car while the rest of the shipment is in his truck already in Ukraine. Honestly, to me, this part is super suspicious, but nobody really had time to investigate why, and it didn't really matter.

KATZ: They are just trying to finish this delivery. And so the second they find the pills, the logistics guy's like, "Okay, I've got a new driver who has time to drive the pills to the border, but he can't take them into Ukraine. So do you have someone on your end who can pick them up in Poland and get them to Lviv?"

VICKI: We weren't really sure who to trust.

MOLLY: In the end, they ask the one contact who knows that these are abortion pills and who's in Ukraine, and the person who has experience distributing medical supplies: Yevgenia.

YEVGENIA: The decision was, okay, me and two of my friend—girls, were just going by car, travel into Europe to pick it up.

KATZ: Yevgenia calls up her friend Maria.

MARIA: We're gonna take a ride to Poland to take couple boxes as a volunteer. I said, "Okay, that's fun."

MOLLY: Side note: before the war, in normal times, Maria was a fashion editor.

KATZ: She says, in this war ...

MARIA: You know, you're so stressed all the time. You're trying to eat, you're trying to sleep, you're reading news. So you're looking for something to do so you can be useful.

YEVGENIA: And we took some coffee. We smoke some cigarette. We just talk about whatever. Then we cross the border.

KATZ: They get to the meeting spot, which is ...

MARIA: It's abandoned gas station. Like in a movie, you know? With—when you're meeting some gangsters or something. It's raining. Like, suddenly you're in the middle of nowhere, taking something from car, from strangers, you know? And we didn't open the boxes, just put them in the car.

KATZ: They drive off back to the border. And as they get closer ...

MARIA: We grabbed some food. And I said, "Okay, maybe we'll check what is in that boxes. "She said, "Yeah, okay. Maybe we'll need to take a look."

KATZ: Wait, you're killing me. Like, do you know it's abortion pills at this point? Or did she not tell you?

MARIA: She told me, but I thought, "Okay, abortion pills. No problem." And we just open those boxes, and there's black garbage bags. Like, there's no packs or prescriptions. Nothing. They're just black garbage bags in a box. And you open it, and it's full of pills. And especially when you know how vitamin C looks like, you know exactly that it's not it. And I said, "Okay, we're gonna be arrested."

YEVGENIA: It looks like a drugs packing. I don't want to touch it.

MOLLY: Yevgania at this point is dedicated to helping the war effort and getting medical supplies to Ukrainian people. If she is arrested or in any way compromised because of this delivery, all that's gonna stop.

YEVGENIA: I'm definitely not against abortion, but it was like, why we should bring it in this amount—it's a large amount—to Ukraine, into Ukraine, to take it. And the reason, the first reason, was rape cases. And here I became a bit sad. I mean, I need to do this.

MOLLY: Maria, seeing all these bags of loose pills, turns to Yevgenia and asks ...

MARIA: Do we have documents for that?

MOLLY: So Yevgenia calls Ari.

ARI: She wants to know what's up with these documents. Who are they from? What do I have to do with them? What can I say about them?

GREGORY: That paperwork, it doesn't make sense anymore, because the abortion pills have now been separated from the rest of the medical shipment.

ARI: So there's documents, but they no longer actually apply to any of this.

MARIA: We don't have documents that we are official volunteers. We don't have any prescriptions, and we have no proof what kind of pills that is. This is serious, guys.

VICKI: I remember me getting really nervous that maybe something would go wrong.

KATZ: You—did you feel responsible for her?

VICKI: Of course, yeah. For the pills and for everything, everybody involved. At that point, so many people have put some risk, let's not have something go wrong here.

MOLLY: So Yevgenia and Maria are finally at the border, and it's a day when it's going really, really slowly. They're actually stopping every car, searching the cars, taking out the packages. And they finally pull up to the border booth. They're the first car. The border guard comes out of her booth, and she says, "Get out of the car. Open up the trunk." And so they open up the trunk of the car. And there are the three moving boxes. The border guard is like, "Can you tell me what's up with your tail light?"

MARIA: And we were like, "What?"

MOLLY: And they look, and the tail light is broken. It's not working. And the border guard, she's asking all of these questions about the tail light.

MARIA: She said, "Oh, my God. You were driving like that through Poland? It's impossible. Who, like, allowed you to do that?"

MOLLY: Yevgenia and Maria are like, "Oh, my God. What? Aah!" And then the border guard sort of turns back to the boxes, says ...

MARIA: "What are you carrying?" And we said, "Pills." She said, "Do you have any documents for that?" "Yes, of course." She understood that okay, it's medicine.

MOLLY: And she just waves them through.

MARIA: And basically, that's it.

MOLLY: They pile back in the car and then just drive off.

VICKI: So at 7:50 pm, we got the message. "Friends, congratulations to all of us. We are in Ukraine now. Wow. We'll be in Lviv at night. Tomorrow we will start unpacking, and I'll call to understand where our vitamin C is and what to do with it." It was really like a firework explosion sort of feeling, like a—I think that was the best feeling I've ever had ever in this relationship. It was incredible.

ARI: And you want to share it with everybody.

VICKI: You kind of felt like jumping up and screaming. And, like, "Aah!" sort of. Like, oh, I want to scream it at the top of my lungs and tell everybody like, "Oh, we are getting married or we're having a baby." "Oh, we smuggled abortion pills. Now we're gonna go dance all night long."

KATZ: The next day, they get another text from Yevgenia.

VICKI: "It's a huge, huge, huge help, and we are so grateful for the help. You're really beautiful, but I feel like a criminal. After that, we won't work together anymore. I'm sorry."

MOLLY: And that was it. After this moment, this sort of community of strangers just dissolves with different feelings of shame and success, and a lot of questions because, like, what happened to these pills, and were they needed? And did pregnant women get them? Did doctors want them? So when we come back, we go on the ground to Ukraine to find out what happened next. That's coming up.

MOLLY: Hey, this is Molly. This is Radiolab. You're listening to our collaboration with NPR's Rough Translation. Today we're talking about smuggling abortion pills into Ukraine. When last we left, Yevgenia had just gotten the pills over the border, and when she does, she starts calling doctors.

GREGORY: And six months later, when Katz and I arrived in Ukraine, we went to see one of the first doctors that she spoke with.

WOMAN: Galina is ready.

GALINA MAISTRUK: Hello.

KATZ: Hello.

GALINA MAISTRUK: [speaking Ukrainian]

KATZ: I'm Katz.

GREG: Galina Maistruk, who is also one of the people that everybody told us to talk to when we got to Ukraine.

GALINA MAISTRUK: I know. You sent me so many messages, just like lovers in previous times. Yeah.

KATZ: Exactly. Well, I have to say I'm very enthusiastic.

KATZ: We met Galina at her office in Kyiv, and her organization is the Ukrainian partner for International Planned Parenthood.

GALINA MAISTRUK: I'm an OB-GYN, and also ...

KATZ: Galina has been practicing medicine for about four decades. And abortion's been legal for her entire career, and 10 years ago, abortion pills came on the market. But when Russia invaded in February, 2022, first of all, supply chains to the country were cut off.

GALINA MAISTRUK: We have no air connection. We have no ship connection. I mean ...

KATZ: So pills weren't being restocked.

GALINA MAISTRUK: All the pharmacies were in collapse.

GREG: So by mid-April, the very moment that Yevgenia was driving those abortion pills over the border ...

GALINA MAISTRUK: No. No. No pills at all at this time.

KATZ: And because of this, doctors were worried.

OLHA: (through interpreter) From the beginning of war, we started to have these doubts if we're going to have enough pills because the requests ...

KATZ: One doctor in Kyiv told us in April, three to five times more women were showing up in her office and asking for abortion pills.

OLHA: (through interpreter) We realized that women would come and come and come, and there are going to be more and more of them. But the pills, there's not going to be more of them. And we didn't know if there was going to be any.

GREG: And at the same time, surgical abortion was actually harder to find. Hospitals were being bombed. Surgeons were overwhelmed. A doctor in the eastern city of Dnipro told us ...

NATALYA: (through interpreter) After the beginning of the full-scale invasion, refugees with no job and no money started turning to us.

KATZ: And then on top of that, there's also just a baseline of people who are getting pregnant and who need abortions, war or no war. But Galina says during that time, there was ...

GALINA MAISTRUK: Absolutely silence in this period from international organizations, from big fishes in this. They have no such big speed to react to everything, you know? They need to make procurement. They need to—to get money for this.

GREG: But then Galina gets a call.

YEVGENIA: Hello?

GALINA MAISTRUK: Connection with Yevgenia was like magic situation.

KATZ: Yevgenia sends her 1,600 abortion kits.

KATZ: Oh, my God, it's these—wow!

GREG: We actually got to see some of these pills when we got to Ukraine.

KATZ: I know the person who made these. These are the coffee packages, no?

MOLLY: Coffee packages?

KATZ: Yeah. The story goes that when Yevgenia was packing up the pills to ship them to the doctors, she didn't have any access to pharmaceutical boxes, so she grabbed these coffee bags.

GREG: Lviv, incidentally, is known in Ukraine as the city of chocolate and coffee.

MOLLY: What do the coffee packages look like? Is it like a ...

KATZ: It's like a matte white bag, and then you can see, like, the aromatic filter on it.

MOLLY: Oh, where the good smells come out. Okay.

GALINA MAISTRUK: It's just a small box with small packages. But, you know, it's a big difference when you give somebody food when it's no food.

GREG: And so ...

KATZ: Once she learns about this shipment of abortion pills, Galina calls all the doctors she can think of across the country.

GALINA MAISTRUK: I called to Vinnytsia ...

NATALYA: Hello.

GALINA MAISTRUK: ... to Poltava ...

OKSANA: [Speaking Ukrainian]

GALINA MAISTRUK: ... Dnipro and to Odesa.

GREG: The coffee bags go to Bucha, and they go all around Ukraine.

GALINA MAISTRUK: You know, you build a building from small stones. And this was one of the small stones, which was in the basement, you know? And it was extremely important.

KATZ: The first second that I heard about this story, I was immediately like, what was this like for the women who needed the pills?

MOLLY: Were people willing to go on the record?

KATZ: No one that actually had an abortion wanted to talk to us, but we did talk to the people that they talked to. We talked to their friends and their doctors.

GREG: Just a heads up, almost all of those doctors asked us not to use their last names to protect their privacy at work.

OLGA: [Speaking Ukrainian]

GREG: So this is Dr. Olga. She's based in Kyiv and has patients in Bucha, and did during the occupation.

OLGA: (through interpreter) I didn't have any case when woman told me that she experienced that sexual violence or raping, or so—and we didn't ask them on purpose. Like, we didn't ask them this question. Me as a woman, I couldn't let myself do that just to make her feel this pain again. And also, I know that if this woman had a feeling that she wants to share with it, she would do that.

KATZ: Another doctor we met, Valentyna, told us about this woman who came to her from the east, from the city of Slovyansk.

VALENTYNA: She told me I had in Slovyansk everything. I had two flats. I had house near seaside. I had two restaurants. Now I am bomsh.

KIRA: I'm homeless.

GREG: Another translation is, "Now I'm a bum."

VALENTYNA: Now I am bomsh. I don't know what I should do with my child.

KATZ: She said, "I already have a child to take care of, and I just lost my house. I lost my money."

VALENTYNA: "I should be healthy, strong and to have time and still powerful ...

KIRA: Energy.

VALENTYNA: ... energy for my one child."

MOLLY: We heard stories of patients where war came into their lives, changed their environment, their houses, their relationships, their income. And they knew that they needed these pills, but we also heard stories about these pills that went beyond abortion.

KATZ: And that revelation, it started with Dr. Oksana.

KATZ: Yes. We are good. Okay, can you introduce yourself?

OKSANA: [speaking Ukrainian]

KATZ: Her hospital is in Lviv, near the train station. And she sees local patients and also patients who fled fighting in the east.

OKSANA: (through interpreter) And these are a lot more complicated cases, more complications with pregnancies and more issues with pregnancy. Everyone is in a lot of stress.

KATZ: Do you mean that just because of the stress, like, there's more complications, like miscarriage and stuff like that?

OKSANA: (through interpreter) Yeah, that's right.

KATZ: Can you give me a sense of scale? Like, as in how much more percentage would you say was complicated?

OKSANA: (through interpreter) Well, it's difficult to estimate. But I think it's, like, one-third more than it was before.

MOLLY: It was up one-third. Wow!

KATZ: Yeah, it just seems like such a massive increase. We heard that from a lot of doctors.

DIANA: I think it's much difficult to be pregnant during the war than in normal life because you don't know what will be tomorrow.

KATZ: This is Diana. She's a gynecologist in Kharkiv, really close to the front lines.

DIANA: When the war start, we have a lot of complications of pregnancy.

KATZ: And she described having a day where ...

DIANA: All women get to our hospital by ambulance with bleeding.

KATZ: ... every single woman that came in was hemorrhaging.

MOLLY: Doctors, like, when they see complications like this happening, they reach for these pills, for mifepristone and misoprostol.

GREG: Wait, wait. They reach for these pills for complications?

MOLLY: Yeah. So it's actually really dangerous if a miscarriage doesn't complete. Like, if anything is left in the womb. And so in the case of miscarriage, you would use these pills essentially in the same way you would as an abortion, where you would take the pills, and then they would just make sure your uterus was completely cleared out. In the case of bleeding, you don't actually need both pills. Doctors would just go for misoprostol. So misoprostol is the pill that causes everything to contract. And that's just like a tightening of muscle. And so when you have that contraction, it clamps down on blood vessels, which essentially closes them off and so blood can't get out. And then you stop bleeding.

GREG: Wow!

MOLLY: Yeah. You can actually grab these pills—well, misoprostol for just normal labor where there's no complications, but to help induce contractions and give birth.

KATZ: And so when I thought about that April shipment of pills, it took me a while to, like, really let that sink in. But every gynecologist was like, "Oh, yeah, we really used it for, like, the complications and the miscarriages and the mobile pregnancies and in labor." And I'm like, "But what about the abortions?" And they're like, "Yes, yes. For miscarriages." And I'm like, "What about the abortions?" And they're like, "Yes, yes. For miscarriages." And I'm like, "Wait. Hang on a minute. Like, why do they keep bringing up these miscarriages all the time?" It just hit me in the stomach of, like, whoa, these pills are for every possible moment of pregnancy.

MOLLY: Hello? Hello?

VLADA: Hello.

ANASTASIA: Hello?

MOLLY: We have a baby, folks. I just—we have a baby on screen. Here, wait. I'll put on my video. But we also ...

MOLLY: I ended up on a Zoom call with four Ukrainian women who were all based in Kiev, three of whom have been pregnant during the war.

YEVGENIA: I found out about the pregnancy in July. And ...

MOLLY: None of these women have used these pills, but I just wanted to hear about the experiences of being pregnant and giving birth in Ukraine right now.

VLADA: Now I have a little daughter. Her name is Valeria.

MOLLY: There was Genya, Nadya and Vlada, and then their translator, Anastasia.

VLADA: Yeah, it's my first baby.

MOLLY: Wow.

VLADA: And I am 29 years old. And I never told stories about my pregnant.

MOLLY: It actually was the first time all of them were telling their stories, and they had so many overlaps and shared moments. There was this just shared sense of uncertainty.

ANASTASIA: It's okay in Kyiv not to have any electricity for eight hours.

YEVGENIA: It's blackout or life without water.

MOLLY: And then obviously stress ...

VLADA: The hospital was hit by rocket.

MOLLY: ... and fear.

YEVGENIA: Sometimes, I hear explosions.

VLADA: When I give birth to Valeria, we have air alert. And it was very scary.

MOLLY: Just a loneliness and isolation. In Nadya's case, she was two weeks before her due date.

NADYA: [speaking Ukrainian]

MOLLY: And then the invasion happened on February 24, and she found herself in occupied territory.

NADYA: [speaking Ukrainian]

ANASTASIA: They heard different sounds, like shooting and rockets and so on.

NADYA: [speaking Ukrainian]

MOLLY: So she couldn't get to the nearby hospital. The road was hit by a missile. And then just because of how dangerous the streets were and the fighting, no doctor or midwife could get to her. And while she's trying to figure all this out, she's leaking amniotic fluid. Like, she's already leaking water.

NADYA: [speaking Ukrainian]

MOLLY: But she still decides to join a group of people who are going to try to drive out of the area.

NADYA: [speaking Ukrainian]

ANASTASIA: She didn't understand her emotions in that time, yes? She had only an aim to reach the destination where there was help.

MOLLY: After eight hours of what was supposed to be a 45-minute trip, Nadya does make it to a hospital and she has a healthy baby. And eventually, Vlada did too.

VLADA: Valeria is five months old.

MOLLY: And she and Valeria are very happy. Genya is about to have her baby. But these women, you know, there were moments where their lives were in danger, or their pregnancies were, or there was just simply so much uncertainty around them that it did bring up moments of doubt.

VLADA: We planned two years for my pregnancy. And (speaking Ukrainian).

ANASTASIA: Mm-hmm. If she knew, yes, that it would be the war, maybe Vlada wouldn't decide to do it.

MOLLY: One of the Ukrainian doctors we met, Valentyna, spoke about how abortion and war can be complicated. Katz first saw Valentyna in a video on Instagram.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Valentyna: [speaking Ukrainian]]

KATZ: She starts by saying the topic of our conversation is abortion in wartime.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Valentyna: [speaking Ukrainian]]

KATZ: She says, "This is a very difficult, ambiguous situation from each side. But a woman has the right to decide for herself, not to wait for society's opinion or church or what they think of her."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Valentyna: [speaking Ukrainian]]

KATZ: She says, "We believe in the victory of Ukraine, but we should think about how to help the children we have now."

MOLLY: And the whole time she's talking, she has the actual coffee bags of pills from this April shipment next to her. And it kind of feels like she's defending these pills and the use of them against someone you can't see. And you just have all these questions like, why does she feel the need to make this argument? Or who or what is she arguing against? And what does abortion have to do with victory in the war?

KATZ: It's so nice to meet you in real life.

VALENTYNA: Thank you.

GREG: So Katz and I and our interpreter Kira came to Valentyna's office in Lviv. Religion, it plays a large role in Lviv. And the city is a center for the Greek Catholic Church.

VALENTYNA: Not a lot of doctors, gynecologists, like to do abortion at all.

GREG: But Valentyna told us about a question that she now has to ask all of her patients who request an abortion. And this is a part of her practice that changed about a week or so after the Russian invasion, when her hospital director handed her what appeared to be a hastily written new form for patients to sign. And this form specifically was for patients requesting an abortion.

VALENTYNA: I can't give you this form.

GREG: No, of course not.

VALENTYNA: But I can show you.

GREG: And I—maybe we can take a picture just so we have ...

KATZ: Can we take a picture?

VALENTYNA: No.

KATZ: Okay.

GREG: Okay.

KATZ: Can you just tell me what it says?

VALENTYNA: Explain?

KATZ: Because obviously I don't understand.

KIRA: It's addressed, like the head of the hospital.

VALENTYNA: That without names. Yeah. Give my agreement for ...

KIRA: For disclosing my personal data for the fact that I asked for the medical help in here...

VALENTYNA: To hospital.

KIRA: ... to the hospital.

VALENTYNA: My diagnose...

GREG: It says you're disclosing your name and information to third parties.

KIRA: Related with the interests of the national security, economical prosperity and human rights. And this agreement is active for as long as martial law is here.

KATZ: So this is something that says specifically during the martial law period, you're allowed access to my abortion files. Wow! And they have to sign this. They can't say no. I have to say that I'm a bit shocked. I would be very upset if I had to sign that form.

MOLLY: The form is for all abortions, or it's in the case of rape?

KATZ: It's for all abortions.

MOLLY: Okay.

KATZ: Every single abortion. Everyone that requests one.

GREG: And Valentyna also specifically has to ask each patient: is your abortion for war-related reasons? And if they say yes—and she says most do ...

VALENTYNA: They should write that they do abortion caused by war.

KATZ: And honestly, I was like, wait. Hang on. What does your decision to have an abortion have to do with national security, with economic prosperity?

VALENTYNA: Because in this war, we should kill our children, future children, because parents don't know what to do with all of this. You understand me?

MOLLY: Like, if there had been no invasion or no war, that couple, that pregnant person might have made the decision to keep that baby. And so in deciding to not keep that baby because it's wartime, it's almost like another murder on the battlefield.

KATZ: Yeah, that is what she's talking about. Whether or not patients feel this way, we can't say. This was just one form in this one hospital, and we don't know where it came from. Like, the hospital wouldn't tell us more. But it was clear that Valentyna wanted us to see this form and really think about what it meant.

MARIA: I'll never forget when I saw first—the first time mass grave in Mariupol. And you feel like your—your society is not just people around you, that it's like you're really one body.

KATZ: Many Ukrainians told us about a certain kind of conversation they'd been a part of or at least overheard.

MARIA: We feel this genocidal war is killing us. And I think when somebody wants to have children, have more Ukrainians, it's just about future, about living and about, you know, purpose. It's like regeneration.

NADYA: [speaking Ukrainian]

ANASTASIA: A lot of people who are around told me,"Ooh, you are so great. You gave birth during the war." But she didn't have any other opportunity because she was already pregnant.

NADYA: [speaking Ukrainian]

JULIA: (through interpreter) It seems to me that every woman in Ukraine has her own story. And even if at first glance it has nothing to do with either war or pregnancy, you can still trace the points that lead to this.

GREG: On our last day in Ukraine, we go to the address of a warehouse where Yevgenia tells us there's a few coffee bags still left.

KATZ: Hi, Vanya.

VANYA: Hi.

GREG: This guy answers.

VANYA: It's eight.

GREG: It's very clear that this is not a warehouse in the way in which, like, I've been picturing it. It's just an apartment.

KATZ: Hi. Are you Vanya?

GREG: Gregory.

VANYA: Yes.

KATZ: I'm Katz.

VANYA: Okay.

KATZ: Nice to meet you.

GREG: He's got a roommate who's frying an egg. They have a dog.

KATZ: And then we come in, and the dog is, like, very enthusiastic.

GREG: Since that April shipment that we've been following, Yevgenia received two more shipments of abortion pills. These were not smuggled though, through Poland, like the last batch. They were legally mailed from India.

KATZ: And yeah, she told us that they were here, so we thought we would come and visit them.

VANYA: Yeah. They—it's just a room full of boxes. [laughs]

KATZ: You can just see in the corner of your eye, in each bedroom there's, like, a huge stash of boxes. Like, massive amounts of boxes.

KATZ: Like, the stack is taller than us.

GREG: I would say it's eight-foot high, for sure. That's amazing.

KATZ: So they're, like, a hundred white boxes. And on it, it says "Top kit. Combi kit. One plus four."

GREG: Every few days, someone comes here, grabs a packet of pills and mails it off to another doctor. They've even smuggled some into occupied territories.

KATZ: Here they all are.

KATZ: It was so dramatically casual. We're just standing in this guy's apartment, and each of these pills is—is a story. It's someone's story, a moment in their life. Whether that's pregnancy or a complication or a family decision or pressure, a traumatic event or just something they'll forget.

VANYA: Have a nice day.

GREG: Thank you.

KATZ LASZLO: Thank you.

GREG: Thank you so much.

MOLLY: Yevgenia, who brought the boxes over the border originally, says that they have more than enough pills. Some of them may even expire.

KATZ: But the hope is that they'll never have to go back to a situation like in April, that they'll never run out.

KATZ: All right. And then we step back into a beautiful day. You would never guess.

GREG: Reporter Katz Laszlo. This episode was produced by Tessa Paoli, Daniel Girma and our senior producer Adelina Lancianese, with help from Nic M. Neves. Our editor was Brenna Farrell. Thanks to doctors Natalia, Irna and Diana, Yulia Mytsko, Yulia Babych, Maria Hlazunova, Nika Bielska, Yvette Mrova. And to our interpreters, Kira Leonova and Tetyana Yurinetz. 

MOLLY: And translation came from Eugene Alper and Dennis Tkachivsky. Voiceover came from Lizzy Marchenko and Yulia Serbenenko.

GREG: Fact-checking by Marissa Robertson-Textor.

MOLLY: For more reporting on Ukraine, you should totally go check out the Rough Translation podcast over at NPR. For now, I'm Molly Webster. This is Radiolab. Thank you for listening.

 

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