When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began last year, I was sleeping on a mattress in the kitchen of a seventh-floor rented apartment in the eastern city of Kharkiv. At a little after four in the morning, when the missiles began to strike military installations around the country and Russian tanks poured over the border, this was not an ideal place to be. My first message, aside from a few reassurances to family members, was to a friend at NBC: Where were his people staying?
The answer was the Kharkiv Palace, a five-star luxury hotel in the center of the city. My reporting partner and I put body armor underneath our parkas, packed our bags, and rode the subway with a mix of confused commuters and people already fleeing the city.
When we reached the Palace, its lobby was a hub of frenetic activity—news crews bustling in and out, distressed tourists frantically trying to organize rides, staff who looked just as terrified as anyone else. For the next four days, I scarcely left the Palace’s doors, sleeping on the floor of the lobby or parking garage when air strikes drove us away from the crisp sheets and comfortable beds of the upper floors.
The Kharkiv Palace became, and still is, a perfect example of the war hotel, a tradition that has persisted through generations of conflict. Ernest Hemingway was so obsessed with Paris’s Ritz hotel that he dedicated most of his efforts “covering” the war to “liberating” the Ritz from the Third Reich, who allowed sympathetic Parisians such as Coco Chanel to rub shoulders with the Nazi elite during their occupation of France.
In Israel and Palestine, once again the tragic center of global news, reporters and heads of state are both a common sight at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, though some correspondents, especially British ones, favor the smaller, luxurious American Colony Hotel, which sits right on the “seam” between the Eastern and Western sides of the city (the writer John le Carré is said to have written one of his books at the American Colony).
When the U.S. invaded Iraq, in 2003, journalists watched the first bombs of the “shock and awe” campaign fall from the balconies of the Palestine Hotel, in Baghdad.
Ernest Hemingway was so obsessed with Paris’s Ritz Hotel that he dedicated most of his efforts “covering” the war to “liberating” the Ritz from the Third Reich.
The CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward wasn’t at the Palestine at the beginning of the Iraq invasion, but she stayed there in 2005, on her first rotation through the country. “It was a strange place, because there was a bowling alley and tennis courts and restaurants,” Ward says, “almost all of it closed down, except for this tiny souvenir store in the lobby that sold DVDs of [Iraqi cleric and militia leader] Muqtada al-Sadr sermons.” With violence all over the streets of Baghdad, Ward’s world often shrank down to the walls of the Palestine and its immediate surroundings—the same kind of isolation I felt in Kharkiv in the early days of the war.
“There’s a real logistical advantage to staying in these hotels,” Ward says. “They tend to have generators, diesel fuel, people trying to source food. When you’re working 18 to 20 hours a day, staying at a hotel can be a really, really big advantage.”
In the worst cases, that security can become a refuge after close calls. Erin Lyall, a longtime producer for CBS News, spent weeks in the Donbass Palace, a luxury hotel in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk that was frequented by U.N. workers and high-profile cable crews during the short window of access to then Russian-backed separatist territory in 2014 and 2015. During one routine trip to the nearby city of Slovyansk, Lyall’s crew was pulled off the road by separatist forces and driven, blindfolded, to an interrogation center. “They held us for what felt like the whole day but must have been only four or five hours,” Lyall remembers. “There’s something surreal when you have a scary day and you retreat to a place where it doesn’t feel like anything is happening,” she says.
Sometimes that contrast is so surreal it becomes comical, like when Lyall and her crew spent several nights sleeping in their vehicles with Kurdish Peshmerga forces during the Mosul offensive against ISIS in Iraq. “We spent all day out in the dusk and grime. At the end of the afternoon, we’d gotten our story, so we retreated to this beautiful hotel in Erbil,” Lyall recalls. “We haven’t showered, we’re covered in sand and mud, and we walk in and there’s, like, elegant businesswomen in high heels.”
For Ward, one of the more surreal war-hotel experiences was after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021. She was staying at the Serena hotel, one of Kabul’s finest establishments, which was soon playing host to major news crews and Taliban fighters alike, who rubbed shoulders at the breakfast buffet. “None of us knew how to interact with each other,” Ward remembers. “Like, do I wait for them to finish serving themselves? Do I smile? Do I look away?”
“There’s a real logistical advantage to staying in these hotels. They tend to have generators, diesel fuel, people trying to source food.”
Christopher Miller, a longtime Ukraine correspondent who currently covers the country for the Financial Times, remembers similarly bizarre interactions at the Ramada, in the separatist-held city of Donetsk, which, like the Donbass Palace, was a hub for journalists and aid workers when Western organizations still had access to areas of Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed proxies.
“The Ramada hotel was an oasis amid the chaos but also the heart of the weirdness,” Miller writes in his new book, The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine, describing tanks and car wrecks on the streets outside, artillery strikes rattling the windows, and a bar “crawling with sex workers” and playing soft-rock covers of Western pop songs sung in a faint Eastern European accent.
But what set the Ramada apart was that it was the favored hotel of many of the fledgling separatist government’s warlords and bigwigs—often sharing space with the reporters tasked with covering the brutal effects of their work. “We’d go out and see their handiwork, visit the front lines and witness all these Russian atrocities,” Miller says. “Then you’d come back for dinner and sitting across from you would be one of the warlords you’d just filed a story about, sitting there smoking a hookah.”
What made these kinds of interactions possible was the concept that many war hotels were, for better or worse, neutral ground. There’s generally an unspoken rule that the war hotel is “off limits,” as Miller puts it, to the armies fighting outside. That doesn’t mean they never come under fire—the King David was bombed by Zionist paramilitaries in 1946, and other terrorist groups have targeted hotels in Beirut, Managua, Kabul, and elsewhere—but the international press often assumes their collective prestige and resources will act as a buffer.
In Kharkiv, for instance, word went round the Palace that someone high up at one of the networks had warned the Kremlin not to strike the hotel, which provided some slim reassurance when someone spotted members of a Ukrainian military unit lug several black Pelican cases through the lobby and up to the roof without speaking a word.
“You’d come back for dinner and sitting across from you would be one of the warlords you’d just filed a story about, sitting there smoking a hookah.”
This sense of security—at times complicated by the presence of soldiers or amorous warlords—is what every correspondent I spoke to mentioned when they thought about the ideal of a war hotel. But in Ukraine, at least, that picture might be changing for the worse: in several front-line-adjacent towns, hotels frequented by journalists have been targeted by Russian strikes.
“These places are no longer seen as off limits by the Russians,” Miller says. “They’re now striking them like any other military or civilian place that they deem to be an important target to sow terror.”
In Kyiv, the war hotels are still doing a brisk trade under a heavy cordon of Ukrainian air defense. In February, during the war’s one-year anniversary, I went to the InterContinental for a live hit on MSNBC and found that cable-news crews had completely taken over the hotel’s top-floor suites, constructing entire production studios in rooms with the beds pushed against the walls so visiting anchors would have space to do live shots with their backs to an expansive view of the city.
And they’re still playing host to all the other nefarious elements of conflict—a New York Times story in September detailed a major arms deal that was run in part through meetings at a swanky hotel bar in the center of the city. (I can say from personal experience that the arms deals are perhaps the only thing that makes the hotel’s New York City–priced cocktails seem cheap.)
“These places are no longer seen as off limits by the Russians.”
But outside the glitz of Ukraine’s capital, some war hotels are becoming a place where you’re as likely to lose your life as you are to get a hot shower. When I last visited the front lines, in September, my team eschewed hotels in Kramatorsk and Slovyansk in favor of rented private apartments in inconspicuous areas of town. The first night we were there, Russia hit the city around us with four cruise missiles, shaking the walls of our tiny flat but leaving us otherwise unscathed.
At the time, I was sleeping on the floor, with a sick photographer and our fixer taking the single bed and couch, respectively. It was a far cry from the crisp sheets and fire-hose showers of the Kharkiv Palace, but for my first time in a war zone, I was glad to be checked out.
Jack Crosbie is a New York City–based journalist