Some stories don’t just stay with you — they change you.
This conversation is one of them.
Katya grew up in Mariupol, a city now synonymous with destruction and unimaginable loss.
Before the war, she had already built an extraordinary producing career across CEE, the Nordics, the UK and beyond — a life that changed completely from one day to the next in February 2022.
And two days before the full-scale invasion, she made a decision that still moves me deeply:
She flew back home. Not because it was safe — but because that’s where her family and friends were.
She had a sense of what might be coming, and she chose to be with them.
That kind of clarity… that kind of heart… it stayed with me.
In our conversation, she speaks with a raw honesty that humbled me: about waking up to war, the urgent effort to get her mother out of Mariupol, and the moment she realised her childhood home — and every physical memory of her life there — had been erased.
And in the middle of that devastation, she created Those Who Stayed — a wartime anthology held together by heartbreak, humour and humanity.
A project that exists because the Nordic public broadcasters acted fast, with a very special shoutout to YLE, national broadcaster in Finland, who picked up the phone, rallied their peers and said: “We have to do this.”
And because my former colleagues at Red Arrow (now Seven.One Studios International) believed in the project early and helped make the financing possible.
We talk about producing as an act of resistance. About burnout. About rebuilding her life in Brighton — behind a bar, in a yoga studio, reconnecting with life in its simplest, truest form.
And we talk about co-productions — not as budget puzzles, but as