TIM JUDAH
In the spring of 2014, when Russian-backed separatists were seizing
parts of eastern Ukraine, I wrote a piece from there for these pages titled
“Ukraine: The Phony War?”1 Well, here we are again: for the past couple of
months Russian forces have been gradually massing along Ukraine's borders. One
day in mid-February, as darkness fell over Kharkiv, the country's
second-largest city, I noticed about twenty people kneeling at the edge of a
park on Sumska Street, the central boulevard. 2 They were silent and were
holding their hands as if in prayer. Were they local peace activists, I
wondered? In 2014 I had seen a group of people close to the front line in
Mariupol who were imploring the Lord to save their city. But this time, as I
got closer, I noticed a little placard that said: “endccp.com.”They were
Chinese, maybe students from among the thousands of foreigners studying here,
demanding, their website explained, an end “to the evil Chinese Communist
Party.”
The next day the news was alarming. A Russian attack was imminent, said
a US intelligence official. The center of Kharkiv is only a fifty-minute drive
from the Russian border, or a bit longer if you're in a tank. So I went to the
supermarket to buy some cans of tuna in case war broke out. It was packed, but
the shelves were full. As a dutiful journalist I stood by the checkout with my
notebook watching to see if there were any signs of panic buying. But there
were none. That night no attack came.
Millions of words have been spewed in the last few weeks about what
Russian president Vladimir Putin wants. He wants to destroy Ukraine, say some.
No, he craves respect, say others. He wants this…or maybe that. No one knows,
and in Ukraine very few people I've met think he is about to launch a
full-scale invasion.
At the Hoptivka border crossing twenty-five miles north of Kharkiv, a
steady stream of people were dragging suitcases toward the Russian side or
coming the other way. I asked some if they were worried; everyone in Kharkiv
had seen the videos on social media of Russian military convoys allegedly near
Belgorod, an hour or so further north. One woman arriving from Russia said with
a serious face, “Yes, and that is why I am coming home to fight!”Before I could
ask her name, she hurried off, laughing loudly, to catch a mini-bus to Kharkiv.
I asked for permission to visit the border. By a hamlet called Zv'yazok
there were three guards in snowsuits and a black Labrador called Lucky on
patrol. There was nothing to be seen on the other side of the ditch the
Ukrainians had dug in 2014. On both sides the snow lay thick on the fields, and
I wondered what the Labrador was supposed to be sniffing for. Tanks? In
Washington and in European capitals, leaders kept saying that an attack was
imminent. But at least where I was allowed to visit, no preparations were being
made for it, and there was no military activity on the main road from Kharkiv,
as might have been expected.
People in Kharkiv may not believe much in a Russian attack, but by the
time you read this it may have begun. When I started writing it in the Half an
Hour café in Kharkiv, there was news that the puppet regime in
separatist-controlled Donetsk was evacuating the population, which sounded like
a prelude to war. By the time I finished it, Russian troops were reported to be
arriving there. Meanwhile they were playing Michael Jackson's “Heal the
World”in the café, which was full of earnest young people poring over their
laptops or relaxing.
In my experience it is quite normal to refuse to believe that you are
about to be engulfed by a cataclysm that will change your life forever—or kill
you.
In 2014 I was invited to a Passover Seder by the Donetsk Jewish
community. During the dinner the rabbi said unexpectedly, “We have a foreign
guest, he can make a speech!”I said that “Next Year in Jerusalem”was all well
and good but there were separatists constructing checkpoints on the highway
into the city, so “Next year in Donetsk”might be more apt. “Nah,”they said, “it
will all be fine!”A few weeks later they probably all fled. It was the same in
Bosnia and Herzegovina just before the war in 1992. People said that since
everyone knew that tens of thousands would die, there would be no war.
I met a teacher who told me that she veers between panic and shrugging
it all off. In January Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that the
Russians might try to occupy Kharkiv, which alarmed people here. President Joe
Biden was said to have told Zelensky a few days later to “prepare for
impact,”though that was later denied. But then you think about it rationally,
which of course Putin may not be doing, and you wonder how he could hope to
seize a city of some 1.5 million people, let alone much of the rest of Ukraine.
In Kharkiv's history museum there is a section devoted to World War II.
Battles here were as bloody and devastating as anywhere in Europe. Millions of
Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were killed or starved to death. Then
something caught my eye: a panel explained that by the time the Red Army
expelled the Germans from Soviet Ukraine in 1944, it numbered 2.3 million men.
Putin has amassed anywhere between 150,000 and 190,000 on Ukraine's borders, we
are told, not all of whom of course will actually fight. Some are
quartermasters, mechanics, and cooks. One of the videos circulating on social
media, also allegedly from Belgorod, showed army mobile kitchens—identifiable
by the chimneys poking out from under their tarpaulins—flowing past in a
convoy.
In Lviv, in western Ukraine, I saw Ukrainian soldiers practicing with
new antitank missiles that the British had given them. Some commentators
scoffed that, in the face of overwhelming Russian military might, these were
symbolic. Oh no, said the Ukrainian soldiers, these were great for the 200-400-meter
range, which they did not possess, and were especially suited for urban
warfare.
When he talks about Ukraine, it
is clear that Putin believes many Russian myths and has outdated views about
its people. He published a long essay last year on the “historical unity”of
Ukrainians and Russians. But what he and even many liberal, intellectual
Russians may not appreciate is that Ukraine is not the same place it was when
Mikhail Bulgakov grew up in Kyiv at the beginning of the last century. It is
not the same place it was at independence in 1991 or at the time of the Orange
Revolution in 2004, nor is it the same country that was wracked by revolution
and war in 2014.
In Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and finally Kyiv, something struck me for the
first time after many years of coming here: their post-Soviet feel has finally
been cast off. That is not the case in smaller Ukrainian towns, but for the
first time these big cities feel like anywhere else in Europe.
Unlike Russians, Ukrainians have not needed visas to visit Europe's
twenty-six-country Schengen area since 2017, and thanks to cheap flights
millions have done so. Most young Ukrainians, who have no memory of the Soviet
era (for which you need to be close to forty), are now just like other
Europeans. They are no longer people from Russia's periphery who mentally,
culturally, and socially orbit Moscow. I can imagine that older Russians like
Putin, if he knows this, must hate it. It relates directly to the wise maxim of
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security adviser: “It cannot be
stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with
Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an
empire.”As the links that have bound Russia and Ukraine for centuries slowly snap
with every passing year, no wonder Putin is worried and thinks this is his last
chance to suborn and subordinate.
And Putin's war since 2014 has made a big difference here. There are no
longer direct flights or trains between the two countries. At Hoptivka,
Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Trubachev of Ukraine's Border Guard Service told me
that before 2014 some 25,000 people crossed there every day. Now that figure is
2,500, and even if you discount the effect of Covid it is symbolic of the
frayed ties. While I was there a two-mile line of trucks was waiting to enter
Russia. A driver told me they had been there for perhaps three days, and it was
the same to enter Ukraine. There is no logical reason for this, but as Taras
Danko, a professor of international business in Kharkiv, noted tartly, “You
need the cooperation of the border authorities and for that you need the
cooperation between states, not talk of one state invading another.”
The imposing Soviet-style façade of the main government building in
Kharkiv has a giant Ukrainian flag mounted across it. In front of it stretches
the city's vast Freedom Square, one of the largest in Europe. In the middle
people twirl happily around an outdoor skating rink. At the far end there's no
trace of the Lenin statue that still stood here in 2014, close to Derzhprom,
the famous constructivist building, which was finished in 1928 but looks like
it could have been built today.
On May 1, 2014, I was inside the government building while it was being
besieged by pro-Russian protesters waving little flags of the “Kharkov
Republic”that they believed was about to be created alongside the ones in
neighboring Donetsk and Luhansk. Pensioners waved Soviet flags and some people
had the black, yellow, and white flag that the Russian Empire used until 1883.
The building was ringed by riot police. It was not the first time that
pro-Russians had attempted to storm it, but in the end they could not muster
the numbers and dispersed. Many of the people in such demonstrations were not
locals: they had been bused in from Russia.
In those chaotic weeks entire parts of the security services and
administration in Donetsk and Luhansk defected to the pro-Russian cause, but in
Kharkiv things turned out quite differently. Later it emerged that the crucial
moment had come when Gennadiy Kernes, the powerful mayor, had opted for
Ukraine, probably on the advice of one of the Ukrainian oligarchs who did not
want to lose his assets if Russia seized control. Until then he had opposed the
Maidan Revolution, which in February had kicked out Viktor Yanukovych, the
pro-Russian president.
Once Kharkiv was saved for Ukraine—like Odesa, though for partly
different reasons—Russia's aim of seizing Ukraine from within collapsed and,
apart from Crimea, which it annexed, it was left with parts of Donetsk and
Luhansk in the Donbas region, which it now has to support financially. Since
then Ukraine's security services have been purged of Russian sympathizers, and
Kharkiv has changed, like much of the rest of the country. Tens of thousands of
locals have gained combat experience fighting the Russians or their proxies on
the Donbas front line. Behind them stands a network of committed volunteers.
Denys Kobzin, the head of the Kharkiv Institute for Social Research, explained
to me that if soldiers lack something, they put out a call on social media,
money is raised, and the volunteers deliver the item. In this way tens of
thousands are mobilized, beyond those under arms, in defense of the country.
Socially the city has changed too. It is hard for foreigners to
understand, but for many in places like Kharkiv, the question “Am I Ukrainian
or am I Russian?”did not matter much until 2014, especially because in a city
so close to the border, many people have friends and family on the other side.
But, Kobzin told me, the events of 2014 forced many to decide, and the
majority, though not all, opted for Ukraine. As time went on, other
developments began to change the situation too. No one knows the numbers
exactly, but tens of thousands of people from Donetsk and Luhansk came to
settle here. Kharkiv's economy is growing, or it had been until now. It is, as
it has been since the founding of the university here in 1804, a major center
for higher education, and graduates don't have problems finding jobs. Much if
not all of the old Soviet-era heavy machinery and defense industry has gone,
but its place has been taken by hundreds of IT companies and smaller
enterprises producing everything from consumer goods to processed food.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky addressing the nation after the Russian
attack, Kyiv, February 24, 2022
Another important change is that now almost all schools that once taught
in Russian have switched to Ukrainian, which has helped nurture a new
generation proud to be Ukrainian. It is often said that older people tend to
harbor more positive feelings toward Russia because they are nostalgic for
their happy Soviet youth, and conflate the USSR with Russia. But the world
looks different if you can fly to Barcelona for the weekend for €30.
Like Kharkiv, Odesa is mostly Russian-speaking. Like Kharkiv, which side
it would support in 2014 was uncertain. Ukraine is a country with strong
regional identities, and Odesa has one of the strongest. More than one person
laughed and told me that if they went abroad and people asked them where they
were from, they would instinctively say Odesa before they said Ukraine.
On May 2, 2014, fighting broke out in Odesa between Maidan supporters
and pro-Russians. The latter retreated into the old Trade Union building, near
the city's very grand central station, and when Molotov cocktails were
exchanged it caught fire; forty-two died inside. While pro-Russians have since
then constructed a myth of Ukrainian Nazis incinerating them in a modern-day
pogrom, that is clearly nonsense, like Putin recently babbling about an
imaginary Ukrainian genocide against Russian-speakers. But that day was still
significant. The fire was a tragedy, while for those who aimed to carve out a
new Russian imperial “Novorossiya”from half of Ukraine and link it to Russia,
it was the moment their plans collapsed.
Those with pro-Russian sentiments have not gone away, but as it became
clear that Odesa could not be plucked from Ukraine like Crimea, without a shot
being fired, and as fighting engulfed the Donbas, most here decided that they
would not die for Putin, nor did they want to see their home turn into a
battlefield. They have also aged, and younger people who have only ever lived
in an independent Ukraine tend to be more at home in it, unless they come from
particularly anti-Ukrainian families.
Some young Odesans also have
direct experience of what the end of Ukrainian rule can mean. Evgenia Afonina,
a first-year philosophy Some young Odesans also have direct experience of what
the end of Ukrainian rule can mean. Evgenia Afonina, a first-year philosophy
student, came to the city at the age of fourteen when her family fled
separatist-controlled Donetsk. They are Ukrainian, and her parents had told her
and her younger sister “to keep quiet about that.”The anti-Ukrainian atmosphere
in Donetsk was “very aggressive,”she said. Her family eventually left because
her parents did not want her younger sister to be indoctrinated in a Donetsk
school. They were also frightened of Izolyatsia, once a modern art and cultural
center in a converted factory, but after 2014 a prison and a byword for terror
by the separatist authorities. 3
After the May 2 fire, pro-Russian activists fled to Crimea or Donbas or
Russia. In Odesa, as in Kharkiv, the mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, who had tilted
to the anti-Maidan, pro-Russian side (which he now denies), changed his
position, and today he is very clear: Odesa is part of Ukraine and Putin should
keep out.
When I went to see him, he was holding a meeting with local security
chiefs and municipal officials. They watched power points about bomb shelters,
and Trukhanov, a former military man, discussed asking Germany for help in
replacing their defunct air filtration systems and the US for emergency
communication equipment in case, as seems likely, all communications are cut by
the Russians.
I discussed with Oleg Brindak, his deputy, what he expected to happen if
there is a Russian attempt to take the city. What worried him most, he said,
was that about one third of the city council were pro-Russian, and they might
try to rabble-rouse and seize buildings if there was conflict. I wondered if
they could try to mount a local coup and take over the town hall. Brindak
laughed and asked if I could imagine the mayor giving up power just like that.
Trukhanov has some legal problems. He has been charged with corruption and
accused of being a former mafia member. “Lies,”he said when I questioned him
about this, before launching into a lengthy diatribe against a local oligarch
he claimed was responsible for cooking all this up. True or not, the tough guy
reputation of the burly shaven-headed mayor does rather precede him.
Odesa is in many ways the city of
Russian imagination. I stayed on Mayakovsky Street. Pushkin was exiled here, and
I saw where Isaac Babel lived. Outside the town hall there is a cannon salvaged
from a British ship that ran aground in 1854 and was destroyed by Russian
forces defending the city during the Crimean War. Today, according to the
analyst Hanna Shelest, it is hard to predict how Odesans would react if war
comes, and “most don't even want to think about it,”but in the main people just
want to be left alone to make money. It was ever thus, she said.
Artem Fylypenko, the head of the Odesa branch of the National Institute
for Strategic Studies, told me that “the majority of people are neutral”and
that their main concerns were higher salaries and lower taxes. Still, he added,
attitudes had shifted in Odesa in the last few years, especially as
anti-Ukrainian TV channels spreading Russian propaganda were gradually taken
off the air. I was told the same thing in Kharkiv by Maria Avdeeva, who studies
Russian disinformation and propaganda. The shutting down of pro-Russian
stations has led to criticism of Ukraine in the EU and the US for restricting
free speech, but as she points out, Ukraine is at war and the media are one of
“the tools of war.”
With the sociologist Viktoria Balasanian I discussed what being
pro-Russian even means anymore. One thing is certain, she said: a liking for
Russian literature, music, TikToks, and YouTube videos hardly means you want
Odesa to become part of a renewed Russian empire, any more than speaking
English means Dubliners want Ireland to rejoin the United Kingdom. Still,
old-fashioned snobbish prejudices continued to permeate even the younger
generations in Odesa, “who think culture can only be in Russian.”At the same
time more than 91 percent of young people in the traditionally pro-Russian
south considered themselves Ukrainian, only a little less than the 98 percent
in other, traditionally more Ukrainian, regions.
When we talked, Fylypenko was wearing a tie, because he was going to
participate in a TV panel; it was quite likely that he would be speaking
Ukrainian while the others spoke Russian. Balasanian showed me research that
found that 61 percent of young Ukrainians in the south spoke both Russian and
Ukrainian with their families. The languages are close, but Russians find it
hard to understand much in Ukrainian. Fylypenko said that he planned to join
Ukraine's brand-new Territorial Defense forces, which are aimed at securing
critical infrastructure and buildings away from the front lines, thus releasing
men from the army and other branches of the security forces to fight.
Capturing Odesa would be hard,
mused Fylypenko. We discussed the White Russian amphibious landing here in
1919, which had British naval support and succeeded thanks to a coordinated
uprising in the city, and a Soviet diversionary amphibious landing in 1941, but
now, he said, Putin was in a pickle. If it came to fighting and civilians died,
it would destroy his concept of Russians and Ukrainians being one people. A
week later, in the market in Kharkiv, I asked people if they feared an attack,
and with astonishing unanimity they scoffed and said they did not, but one
woman became aggressive and demanded to know if I had a brother. When I said I
did, she replied, “Well would he attack you? No! So, Russia will not attack
us!”Still Fylypenko cautioned me against assuming everyone was rational. One of
his acquaintances had surprised him by saying, “I am against the EU because it
is full of gays!”
Balasanian said that research showed that Ukrainians were peculiarly
pessimistic. “People always say things are getting worse and worse,”she said,
even if they are not, and when there was a change in leadership people were
“full of hope for a year”before reverting to a mood of gloom. As for Russians,
she says, too many continue to think of Ukrainians through the prism of daft
and old-fashioned stereotypes. “Either we are good, happy peasants or
nationalist Banderites,”she said, referring to Stepan Bandera, the
controversial Ukrainian nationalist leader who had both allied with the Nazis
and been imprisoned by them.
If you look for him, you can see Bandera everywhere. There are streets
named after him, there are statues of him, and his face is spray-painted on
walls. All this is grist to the mill of Russian propagandists, and it is
lamentable that many Ukrainians do not know that his men not only fought the
Soviets but killed Jews and Poles too. But harping on about Bandera is a
distraction. Unlike in many Western countries, the far right has made little
headway here and, in a country once infamous for its pogroms, Zelensky, a Jew,
was elected president with 73 percent of the vote.
People who want to talk about Bandera usually also want to talk about
the staunch nationalism of western Ukraine and Lviv, its biggest city. But
people in Lviv want to talk about the future, not the past. Around its glorious
former Austro-Hungarian center new suburbs are sprouting. Like Kharkiv it is a
major IT center and, says Stepan Veselovskyi, the head of the Lviv IT Cluster,
an industry lobby group, the sector employs 30,000 people, who in turn create
another 40,000 jobs. Since Ukraine has not held a census since 2001, no one
knows exactly how many people live in the country. Officially there are 746,000
in Lviv, but Mayor Andriy Sadovyi thinks the real number is close to a million.
About a million Ukrainians work in neighboring Poland too, but mostly they come
and go rather than settling there, and if people leave Lviv, he says, then
others come from poorer parts of Ukraine to fill their jobs.
Across large parts of Central and Eastern Europe populations have been
dropping because of low fertility rates and increasing emigration, but as Lviv
has become part of the European and global economy and begun to boom, it has
joined a string of cities across the region that have halted these gloomy
demographic trends. Nowhere, unless it is destroyed by Putin, is a bright
future for all Ukraine as visible as in Lviv. Indeed, says Sadovyi, the quality
of life in his city has risen so much that “life expectancy here is seven years
higher than in the rest of the country.”According to the latest statistics, a
Ukrainian's life expectancy is 71.35 years—ten years less than the average in
the European Union.
After I left Lviv, embassies began evacuating there from Kyiv on the
assumption that it was far from any potential military action and that if an
invasion came, attacking it would be a step too far even for Putin. But Sadovyi
is not complacent. After all, the Russians and then the Soviets captured Lviv
in 1914, 1939, and 1944. On the way into his office I noticed a copy of a biography
of Golda Meir. When I asked him about it, he talked of his admiration for
Israel and said that after the Holocaust the Jews had drawn the conclusion that
“they could only rely on themselves,”which was a “model”for Ukraine as well as
Finland and Switzerland, countries he also admired. He told me he was sending
four hundred teachers and municipal officials to learn to shoot. I went to see
the teachers at the shooting range, where they were giggling like teenagers and
taking pictures of one another. But asking them to train seemed to me a shrewd
move. Quite apart from sending a message locally that the Russian threat was
real, their pictures would soon spread over social media and be seen by friends
and family in Russia, which would send a message to them too. Most Russians and
Ukrainians may not believe that a major war is coming, but a stream of images
of ordinary Ukrainians learning how to shoot is part of the information war.
In Kyiv I met the novelist Andrey Kurkov in a wine bar.
He told me he was writing a
series of detective stories that begin in Kyiv in 1919, when the country was
wracked by civil war. One of the reasons he wanted to write them, he said, was
that Ukrainians don't know much about this period of history. The Germans
occupied Kyiv in 1918 and in 1919 came the Bolsheviks, the Whites, Ukrainian
forces, Poles, and the Bolsheviks again. Then we discussed whether Putin would
go so far as ordering an attack on the entire country, including Kyiv. “It is
unlikely,”he said, “but I can imagine twelve Russian officers drinking wine
here!”
We talked about his book Grey Bees , which was first published in 2018
and tells the story of Sergeyich, who is one of only two people left in his
village in the dangerous gray zone that separates separatist regions from
Ukr.ainian government control. Kurkov said he had done some of the research in
the town of Sievierodontesk, which lies in the government-held part of Luhansk.
In 2015 he reckoned that 90 percent of the population there was pro-Russian;
now that figure was perhaps no more than 30 percent because people had seen how
miserable life was in the breakaway “republics.”
An hour after we talked Putin recognized them as independent states and
Russian troops were reported to be moving in, raising the question of whether
he would now try to seize militarily those parts of the region, like
Sievierodontesk, that remain under Ukrainian control. Putin rambled and ranted
that Russia had been robbed when the Soviet Union collapsed, that Ukraine had
been created by Lenin, and that it had “never had a true tradition of
statehood.”
Two days later Ukraine declared a
state of emergency. An attack was reported to be imminent. The streets of Kyiv
were very quiet. Everyone was holding their breath.
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