Every journalist loves to tell war stories. On February 26, 2022, for instance, I woke up on the lobby floor of the Kharkiv Palace hotel in Eastern Ukraine to a security guard nudging the pile of couch cushions I was sleeping on, insisting that I go down to the car park before the next wave of Russian missiles hit. The hotel had rented me a room on the seventh floor, but the bombing was so incessant that I figured it was safer to pull up the cushions from a few of the lobby couches and make a