NewsNation correspondent Robert Sherman, reporting from Ukraine.

NewsNation

NewsNation foreign correspondent Robert Sherman was three days into covering the Russian invasion in Ukraine when eight men in all black walked into a café in Ivano-Frankivsk and surrounded him.

He’d been trying to file a story, but the men ordered everyone to surrender their phones and laptops. Two of the men reached into their jackets and grabbed weapons. Sherman’s mind raced through possibilities; still in his 20s at that point, he knew in an instant he’d crossed a threshold.

“For a moment, I genuinely thought we were being robbed,” he told me.

The truth was actually scarier. It was obvious, once the men in black marched Sherman’s group out of the cafe, that members of the local population—understandably on edge, wary of potential saboteurs—had alerted the authorities to Sherman and his team, who were being investigated as suspected Russian spies.

A NewsNation correspondent’s baptism by fire

Sherman, whose new book Lessons from the Front comes out on Dec. 11, points to that episode in response to a question from me about defining moments that crystallized the risks of his job. “There’s no classroom or textbook that prepares you for that,” he said about that encounter in the cafe.

“It was the first time I realized how naive I’d been, and the first time I understood how fast war forces you to grow up.”

His new book follows how the former local politics reporter from Cleveland went from covering campaign trails to running toward explosions on battlefields in Ukraine and Israel. Sherman’s story also reveals something that can get lost in the geopolitical analysis about wars: The conflicts don’t just reshape nations; they also leave an indelible mark on the people who chronicle them.

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Ukrainian servicemen of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade take part in a military training at an undisclosed location in Kharkiv Region on May 14, 2025. (Photo by TETIANA DZHAFAROVA/AFP via Getty Images)

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What covering Ukraine taught Robert Sherman about the world

“When I first went to Ukraine at 25, I imagined the job of a war correspondent was defined by this fearless archetype,” says Sherman, who was recently promoted to international correspondent at NewsNation and will begin that role in 2026.

That naivete evaporated almost immediately.

Sherman says he watched thousands of Ukrainians abandon their cars and walk 30 miles through the snow to reach Poland. “I didn’t understand what, or why, this was happening. That’s the moment I realized I had a lot more to learn about the world.”

I asked what covering wars like the one in Ukraine had taught him about himself. For the NewsNation correspondent, at least, the job revealed that he isn’t necessarily fearless or heroic—rather, that he’s driven mostly by curiosity.

Moments of fear and clarity

Some memories, he suspects, will never leave him. Like the time when the Ukrainian city he was staying in came under attack. He joined a group that was rushed into an underground shelter, down a staircase into a dim concrete tunnel where hundreds of people were packed shoulder-to-shoulder. “There’s a specific kind of fear that comes from being trapped underground, unable to move,” he says. People stared at the ceiling, almost as if they weren’t sure they’d ever see the sky again.

“War rewired the way I see everything.”

Sherman also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of the Trump-Putin Alaska summit in August. “I met a tense, but candid man,” he says. Zelensky made clear how much Ukraine needs the United States, telling the assembled reporters, “I believe in President Trump.”

Based on his reporting, Sherman says Americans might be surprised by the imbalance on the ground. Yes, Russia’s firepower still dwarfs much of Europe, but Ukraine also has the largest standing army in Europe if Russia is excluded. “The United States is the biggest ‘X’ factor on the chessboard,” he says.

Gaza, meanwhile, introduced him to a different kind of conflict.

He recalled to me having met Palestinians at an aid site who smiled easily, in spite of everything. Some told him they hated both Israel and Hamas, the sort of thing he’d never heard Gazans say in public before. It reinforced an idea he learned over time: “If you try to understand the situation by viewing whole countries or regions as monolithic societies, you’re going to miss the target.”

At one point, I asked whether advice from any older correspondents had stayed with him. He mentions something he writes about in a chapter called “Into the Fire,” when he was trying to get to Israel just hours after the October 7th attack. A more-experienced British TV crew took him under their wing, offering a warning that he never forgot: “Do whatever you have to do to get home safely.”

On war changing the meaning of home

During his reporting tours, Sherman has been questioned by militants, run toward explosions, and immersed himself in other people’s grief. He remembers a Ukrainian mother and her young daughter who fled their city. Every time the mother mentioned home, the girl covered her ears. “Home was now a word too painful to bear hearing.”

War changed the meaning of home for him, too.

“War rewired the way I see everything, especially home,” he told me. Before Ukraine and the Middle East, he continued, the idea of home “used to mean geography” to him.

“Now, it means identity—the place that shapes your values, your lens, your instinctive way of understanding the world. So Cleveland will never feel the same, because I’m no longer the same. I carry my Midwestern roots with me, but I also return with new pieces of the world stitched into them.”