Reflections from Kyiv: An Evening with Maksimas Milta

We were pleased to welcome NYLP Club members and friends to a special evening in the NYLP Club Speakers Series, presented in collaboration with the Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in New York.

Our sincere thanks go to Consul General Dovydas Špokauskas and to the entire Consulate team for being so supportive and open to collaboration with our Club. We are grateful for their hospitality and continued partnership. For this conversation, we could not have imagined a more appropriate room.

Thank you as well to everyone who joined us. Our Club exists through the engagement of its members, and gatherings like this are meaningful because of your presence and participation.

It was a pleasure to welcome back to New York Ambassador Julius Pranevičius, who has returned as Permanent Representative of Lithuania to the United Nations.

We are especially grateful to Maksimas Milta for joining us and sharing firsthand reflections from Kyiv. Drawing on both his personal experience and his work as Ukraine Country Director of The Reckoning Project, he spoke about documenting war crimes and human rights violations, as well as the realities of daily life under full-scale war.

Maksimas also offered a counterintuitive but important observation: even under wartime conditions, life continues, and people adapt to a new sense of normalcy. He spoke about living with constant vulnerability — from elderly people on small pensions facing power cuts, no heating, and elevators not operating, to the daily routine of air-raid alerts, power banks, and reliance on Ukraine’s defense systems. At the same time, the city continues to function, with a growing population, schools adapting their programs and inviting foreign lecturers, cafés remaining open, and new entrepreneurial opportunities emerging.

We briefly referred to Marička Paplauskaitė’s book Traukinys atvyksta laiku (The Train Arrives on Time), published by Lapas, whose founder, Ula Ambrasaitė, was also with us last evening. The book captures this reality well: war is not accepted as an excuse for trains to run late. On the contrary, enormous effort goes into ensuring that the railway system continues to function at the highest standard, with punctuality that can surpass even some of Europe’s best-known rail services.

We also extend our thanks to our moderator, Lukas Degutis, who recently relocated from London to New York to join The Spectator US as Editorial Manager. We were especially glad that this was his first engagement with our Club.

We look forward to continuing the NYLP Club Speakers Series with more conversations that bring together informed voices and international perspectives for New York’s Lithuanian professional community.