Hello everyone,

My name is Ndio Mitchell. I’m a student at West Shore who’s set to transfer to the University of Michigan in the coming summer for interdisciplinary study. I attended public school until eighth grade and was self taught through high school before attending West Shore starting in 2019. Recreationally, I enjoy stuffy literature, writing, and have a few personal projects involving intersections of the social and natural sciences that I chip away at in my free time. My interest in the Russian Invasion of Ukraine stems from a lasting curiosity in international relations coupled with the overarching importance of the topic at hand. At first, that was all it was. The outset of this semester saw no war, and the experts predicted that there would be no war. It wasn’t so. I began documenting what was at first an undeclared hybrid conflict that had only nominally changed in years, and watched it develop into a real one–a war as approximately as real, as devastating, and as criminal as Europe has seen in lifetimes. Suffice to say that it was a unique experience for someone my age.