Putting on my face mask during the Coronavirus pandemic, I often recall the only other occasion in my life when I had to have my face covered. I visited the site of the Chernobyl tragedy several years after the disaster with a Channel 4 UK TV crew while making a documentary about Ukraine. The fact that my father, a nuclear physicist, died premature...

In 1994, when I was living in London, a Channel 4 documentary gave me the opportunity to briefly return to Ukraine, my newly-independent, long-suffering motherland that I had originally left in 1978. That was my very first glimpse of it as a separate country, no longer a province of the Soviet Empire where one could go to prison just for uttering t...