Shortly before Pelley and the 60 Minutes team arrived in Odessa for this week’s exhibition, Russian forces had destroyed a residential building in the city. The rocket attack, which killed eight people, including a three-month-old baby, took place the day before Orthodox Easter.
Pelley met with Odessa Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov, who told Pelley that because he was born in the Soviet Union, he was struggling to understand what Russia was doing now. “I could not have imagined that the Soviet people would do such a thing,” Mayor Trukhanov told Pelley. “But today I see what the Russian soldiers are doing. The Russian soldiers are raping our women today. The Russian soldiers are killing children. The Russian soldiers are killing defenseless civilians today. So we all understand today that we have no choice but to resist aggression and resist. we will drive them out of our land. ” Beyond the borders, many Russians seem incapable — or unwilling — of understanding what their troops are doing in Ukraine. At one of the World Food Program’s food distribution sites in Odessa, the 60-minute team met Hannah, a woman from Mariupol who told Pelley that her parents lived in Russia. When he calls them on the phone, he tries to explain to them what is happening in Ukraine. “When you tell them about the facts, about what happened, they just do not get this information or they do not want to hear the substance and understand that it is true,” Hannah explained. What her family refuses to hear is that Russia has besieged her home, bombing it until it was destroyed. The Associated Press reported that Ukrainian officials say more than 100,000 civilians are still trapped in Mariupol, with little food, water or heat. Although Odessa has not been hit so hard, Russia still has hit it hard. While Pelley and his team were on the ground, Russian missiles destroyed a bridge at the mouth of the Dniester. According to Reuters, the bridge connects mainland Ukraine with the Odessa region near the mouth of the Danube River and will give Ukraine a link to continue exporting goods if Russia blocks Black Sea ports. On Saturday, a new Russian rocket attack destroyed a runway at Odessa airport. In his nationwide report, Pelley said he has seen something he has not seen in all the years of conflict around the world: the massive destruction of neighborhoods. When interviewed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at his band in Kyiv in April, Pelley visited Bucha, the site of a Russian massacre of civilians. There, behind the church of St. Andrew and the Pyervozvannoho All Saints, Pelley stood on the edge of a sand ditch, where he saw victims who had been hurriedly and duty-free buried before the retreat of Russia. “It’s the most shocking war scene I’ve ever seen in my entire career,” Pelley said. “It’s industrial madness.” The video above was created by Brit McCandless Farmer and Will Croxton. Edited by Will Croxton and Robert Zimet.