On the long train journey from Warsaw to Kyiv, one of my travelling companions was a teenage girl from Kharkiv who had with her mother taken refuge from the war in a small town in Cornwall. Her home in Kharkiv was in the centre of the city, and she had heard the blast when a missile struck the central Freedom Square on 1 March 2022. In the early days of the invasion, Russian forces had briefly entered the northern suburbs of Kharkiv, and the city had been subjected to heavy shelling and missile strikes. Numerous buildings had been damaged, and civilians killed and wounded. Unsurprisingly, many had left. But as most men under the age of 60 were not allowed to leave the country, my fellow passenger’s father had stayed behind. This was the first time she had been back to visit him.
By May 2022, the Russian invaders had been pushed back from Kharkiv, relieving much of the pressure, although, like towns and cities throughout Ukraine, it continued to face missile and drone attacks. Ukraine’s counter-attack in September 2022 had liberated most of occupied Kharkiv region. People had started to return to the city.
My travelling companion appeared to have settled in well in Cornwall. She liked the elderly couple she and her mother were staying with. Her English had improved immensely, she told me. She had got a job in a hotel, and was earning enough money to be able to send some to her father. But she was homesick. Life in a small town did not suit her. She would rather have gone to a big city. She saw her future in Ukraine.
Like many people in eastern Ukraine with relations in Russia, the war had wrought terrible damage on her family bonds. While she was born in Kharkiv, both her parents were Russian, she said. Her father was from Crimea and her mother from Russia itself. She had fallen out completely with her grandparents on both sides. At the start of the invasion, they had told her that it would all be over quickly, and that Ukraine would be liberated by the Russian army. When she had said that she did not want to be liberated, one of her grandfathers had said in that case it would be better if they were all killed. It pained her to have to say that she now felt closer to the couple she was staying with in Cornwall, who cared about her more than her own grandparents did. Such stories are all too common. Several people from Donbas have told me how communication with parents or other relatives in occupied territory or in Russia, had become almost impossible.
The next morning we woke up to the news that the Kakhovka dam had been blown during the night, causing immense environmental damage and loss of life in the lower reaches of the Dnipro river. A friend in Odessa told me that all kinds of detritus, including animal carcasses and landmines, had washed up on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. One more horror inflicted upon the Ukrainian people.
In Kyiv, despite the constant trauma and weariness with the war, people continued to go about their lives as normally as possible. They sat on café terraces in the sunshine, or strolled in the city’s parks, or on the islands in the Dnipro. I too enjoyed beautiful peaceful afternoons by the water, trees and lily pads, eating shashlik and sipping cold beer. Kyiv in summer is always beautiful.
The previous month, in May, missile and drone attacks had been particularly frequent. People lost sleep. Nerves were frayed. But during my stay, the air raid warnings were less frequent. Around the city were signs pointing to air raid shelters. As on my previous visit in the autumn, people had to decide whether to go to the shelters. Many decided to ignore the warnings. A friend told me that they looked at the news feeds on their mobile phones to assess the degree of risk, and whether or not they should take to a shelter. One afternoon, I headed for the nearest metro station in response to an alert. The person I was with, scrolling through the news, told me this was a major attack. During air raids alerts, entry to the metro stations was free of charge. People stood around, some talking to each other, others glued to their phones. Apparently on the surface people had heard the explosions. Perhaps surprisingly, this Russian attack on Kyiv coincided with a visit to the Ukrainian capital by a delegation of African leaders. Might this affect the pro-Russian leanings of some of them?
Since the spate of missile attacks the previous autumn, attacking Ukraine’s power infrastructure, the country had received more modern, more effective western air defence systems, including the American Patriot system. But it had not received enough of them, forcing the Ukrainian authorities into an appalling dilemma, as to whether to protect cities or frontline soldiers embarking on their summer counter-offensive, and which cities to protect? Almost all the missiles and drones aimed at Kyiv were now shot down, although the pieces of destroyed missiles still had to fall to earth. But other cities were less well protected.
Towards the end of June, I travelled to Kharkiv. Taking the overnight train, I arrived early in the morning. Few people were about yet as I walked around the city centre. The debris of missile strikes had been cleared up, but the scars were still there. Many buildings, including the battered regional administration, had boarded up windows that had been shattered by the blasts. As in other cities, many monuments had been covered for their protection, including the statue of the great Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, and the World War I British tank that had been abandoned during the Russian civil war (actually a misnomer, as the multi-sided war was fought throughout the former Russian Empire, and much of the fighting took place in Ukraine).
Yet the city was very much alive. The gardens in Shevchenko park were beautifully tended. Families enjoyed the warm weather. Café and restaurant terraces were full of customers. I was delighted to find that my favourite café from previous visits was working normally. The cakes and pastries were still excellent. The only difference was that the waiters and waitresses now addressed customers in Ukrainian, as they are required to do.
My first visit to Kharkiv had been in the summer of 2014. The atmosphere then had been very different. In February to April that year, following the Maidan Revolution in Kyiv, Kharkiv had teetered on the brink, nearly going the same way as Donetsk and Luhansk. The regional administration building had briefly been occupied by pro-Russian activists. Pro-Russian thugs from a sports club attacked pro-Ukrainian demonstrators. The city mayor wavered and initially appeared to take the pro-Russian side. The local police and security services seemed paralysed. But decisive action by an elite police unit from the town of Vinnytsia bloodlessly ended the occupation of the administration building. The commander of the unit said that had swift action not been taken, support and weapons would have poured over the nearby Russian border, and that Kharkiv, like Donetsk and Luhansk, might have been lost. The atmosphere was tense when I visited that summer of 2014. Groups of police hung around outside the regional administration building. I was struck by how few Ukrainian flags were in evidence. Very different from Kyiv, or Dnipropetrovsk (now renamed Dnipro), which I visited after Kharkiv, where the Ukrainian flag was everywhere, the national anthem blaring out constantly in the central square.
This time, in 2023, it was quite different. Whatever pro-Russian sentiment there might once have been in Kharkiv had been blown away by Russia’s aggression. Ukrainian flags were all over the place. Posters expressed thanks to the Ukrainian army, defenders of Kharkiv and of Ukraine. Others showed construction workers or gardeners about their work, with a defiant quote from the mayor: “Kharkiv lives and works.” Indeed, it was remarkable that despite such severe blows, such destruction, the people of Kharkiv continued to work, and to live. But the cruelty of the war continues. Missiles sometimes get through. A sad little monument in the city centre, surrounded by teddy bears and other soft children’s toys, commemorates the children who will never grow up.
This is the cost of the West’s prevarication over sending Ukraine the weapons it needs to defend itself. It is measured in the deaths of innocents, of people who have suffered terrible injuries, children who dreamed of being gymnasts or footballers, but who now have to learn to walk with prosthetics. The air defence systems that protect Kyiv are highly effective, but the inhabitants of other cities are left open to Russian terror because of the niggardliness of Western leaders with their pathetic excuses about not wanting to escalate the conflict or to provoke Russia. Ukrainian soldiers have to fight with an arm tied behind their back because Western leaders hesitate to send the modern planes they need, or the long-range missiles that could hit the sources of Russia’s terror strikes. So many of us have been impressed by Ukrainians’ spirit and resilience in face of such terrorism. As they defend themselves against a brutal aggressor, they deserve all the support we can give them.
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