“I had not been planning to go ... at all,” Hall, 82, said in a new interview. “When members of Congress asked me to go represent them, I thought, ‘Well, OK, I’ll do it.’”
The immediate reason for the invitation: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had called for a national prayer breakfast in his nation. Nobody from the U.S. Congress could attend at that time. Hall said he and former Kansas congressman Jim Slattery were asked to go and speak. (Both Hall and Slattery served as Democrats.)
“The hardest part of the trip was getting there and coming back,” said Hall, who today lives in Naples Fla. “It’s very difficult to get into Ukraine. You can’t take an airplane into Ukraine anymore. You either have to take a train in or drive in.”
Hall was not surprised to see Ukraine look like what it very much is — a nation at war. Russia invaded the country’s northeast in February 2022, and Ukraine stunned the world by initially halting the invasion and holding off the Russian army against growing odds.
The conflict has left hundreds of thousands of military casualties and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties in its wake.
Today, Russian troops hold about 20% of Ukrainian territory, even as Ukraine turned global heads again with its own recent invasion of Russia near Kursk, positioning the country for recent exchanges of military prisoners and, perhaps, military negotiations at some point.
Ukraine continues to hold off Russia’s glacial advances, thanks in part to massive aid packages from the United States and the European Union, aid that Hall said he supports.
Hall recalled the sights and sounds of bombed-out buildings, military road blocks and near-constant air-raid sirens.
“There was a school, a school bombed by Russia, and there was a hospital for children that they had actually targeted, and tore the whole place up, killed 22 children,” Hall said. “That was in Kyiv.”
“It’s a country at war, no question about it,” he added.
Parts of the Ukrainian capital still appear to be a cosmopolitan European city, he said, protected as it is by artillery and sophisticated air defense systems, including jets and drones.
Said Hall, “There are some beautiful building, absolutely outstanding churches, just gorgeous. I stayed in a nice hotel, and at the same time, there were bombed-out places.”
“You talk about a brave and courageous people,” Hall said. “They’re amazing.”
A portion of the country looked not too unlike the Buckeye State — torn by war, he marveled.
“It did,” Hall said. “The countryside, it had rolling hills and amazing farms. They have a tremendous amount of agriculture. Russia and Ukraine, they supply a good portion of the grain for the world. Their agriculture is incredible.”
Except for some instances of distinctive Eastern European and Byzantine architure, “You would think you were in Ohio,” the former congressman said.
Hall at one point was physically next to Zelensky and preparing to be introduced. But an air raid siren rang out, and the president’s security team shifted him to a new location. Instead, Hall met with Zelensky’s chief staff and a couple of his generals and advisors.
Hall represented Dayton in the Ohio Statehouse for 10 years, then in the U.S. House of Representatives for nearly a quarter-century, from 1979 through 2002, before serving at the United Nations as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.’s Agencies for Food and Agriculture.
A Kettering native, Hall is the son of Dave Hall, former mayor of Dayton.
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