Living with Russian terror in Kyiv

A couple of days before my arrival in Kyiv in July 2024, a Russian missile had hit a children’s hospital in the centre of the city. Amid Russia’s campaign of terror against Ukrainian cities, missile strikes, the deaths of innocents, of children, have become all too common place. But this attack struck a new low. It was Ukraine’s foremost children’s hospital. News reports showed pictures of children with bald heads, there to receive cancer treatment, sitting outside. Rescue workers desperately pulled through the rubble looking for survivors. Volunteers brought water for those labouring in the hot summer sun. How could the Russian attackers do such a thing? What possible explanation could they give for a missile strike on a children’s hospital?

The world was shocked by the terrible images. But after all, the world had been shocked by Russia’s brutal attacks many times before. Each time there are expressions of horror, and then the news cycle moves on. And still spineless Western leaders debate whether to send Ukraine the weapons that could counter Russian terror, and whether to allow Ukraine to use those weapons to strike the places in Russia from which the attacks are launched with impunity. Simply put, some Western leaders do not put a high enough value on Ukrainian lives. President Zelensky has repeatedly pleaded with the West to give Ukraine the means to defend itself. And in return more words “condemning in the strongest possible terms” Russia’s terror, and support for Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” To Ukrainians facing the continuous barrage of Russian missiles, such words sounded like empty “bla bla”.

Kyiv is always lovely in summer. The café terraces, the parks, Trukhaniv island, with its bucolic views, lily pads, bathers, rowing boats. So tranquil, despite the violence that is never far away, the air raid alerts, the almighty bangs when missiles strike or are intercepted by air defence.

Trukhaniv Island, Kyiv

This summer, there were power cuts much of the time. This was not new. There had been power cuts since Russia started targeting the energy infrastructure in the autumn of 2022. But they were more frequent now, and lasted longer. They were not constant. During my stay in Odessa shortly before arriving in Kyiv, they were not too bad. A few hours each day, typically two hours at a time. There had been longer cuts before my arrival. In Dnipro, there were four-hour cuts, two or three times a day. That made it difficult to get on with normal life. In Kharkiv, despite all the wreckage, my stay was free of power cuts almost the whole time. I was lucky. But in Kyiv, when I arrived, there were cuts of up to seven hours, twice during the daytime. Some days there would just be a couple of two-hour windows with power. This was disruptive. Most cafes and restaurants in the city centre had generators, so it was possible to get a coffee and a croissant, to check my emails and social media. And then one day, after a couple of weeks of that, it was all much better. Power cuts few and far between, whole days with no outages at all.

I suppose, I hope, the electricity providers were using the warm summer months, with their long hours of daylight, to carry out repairs, to bolster capacity before the winter. This has been the story each year since Russia’s full-scale invasion; anxiety, fear about the coming winter. Would there be power? Would there be heating? So far, the country had done remarkably well. But the relentless Russian attacks continued, with the aim of making Ukrainians freeze, of making their cities uninhabitable, of breaking their spirit.

More than two years into the war, spirits were frayed. On the surface, Kyiv could appear quite normal. People went about their business. They went to work. They drank coffee with their friends. They went to bars, although, admittedly, the midnight curfew put a dampener on the city’s nightlife. But it was hard to escape the sombre mood. The disappointing failure of the previous summer’s offensive, the realisation that there would be no speedy end to the war, the relentless Russian attacks, the deaths, the tragedies, the streams of lies from Trump-supporting politicians and journalists who cynically blamed Ukraine for Russia’s aggression. It all took its toll.

On 28 July, the second anniversary of the mass-murder of more than 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war at Olenivka, in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, there was a rally in the central Maidan square in Kyiv. Several hundred participants included family members of Ukrainian prisoners, as well as soldiers of the Azov Brigade, formerly known as the Azov Battalion, whose members had been among those killed at Olenivka. Olenivka was the site of a POW camp where Ukrainian prisoners were kept who had defended Mariupol during the early weeks of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine.

Azov torches on the Maidan

It had not been possible to carry out a proper independent investigation of the explosion at Olenivka during the night of 28-29 July 2022, as the Russian occupiers and their local proxies did not allow access to UN investigators. However, Russian claims that the explosion was the result a Ukrainian rocket attack did not seem to stand up to scrutiny. Rather, it appeared that it was caused by an incendiary device within the prison. The Ukrainian authorities, based in part on intelligence findings, concluded that the explosion had been caused by members of the Wagner group, a private military company responsible for numerous war crimes in Syria and Africa, as well as Ukraine. It was suspected that the motivation was to cover up evidence of the torture and murder of Ukrainian POWs that had taken place there.

The crime at Olenivka was a terrible trauma for Ukraine, prompting despair at the helplessness of international agencies such as the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to protect Ukrainian prisoners. The heroic defence of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol in the spring of 2022, as well as the brutal destruction of the city and the mass slaughter of thousands of its inhabitants, is a source of both pride and immense pain for Ukrainians. The murder of so many heroes of Azovstal at Olenivka redoubled that pain. While the release of prisoners brought back from Russia in prisoner exchanges is always a reason for joy, the evidence of their mistreatment intensifies the anger. That anger among the crowds on the Maidan on 28 July was palpable.

Following a speech by an Azov commander who had been among the Azovstal defenders to have been released in a prisoner swap, the ranks of Azov soldiers recited the Prayer of a Ukrainian Nationalist, and then held aloft flaring torches. Seeing these displays, I could not help but be reminded of the controversies that, despite the undoubted courage of Azov soldiers, have surrounded Azov from its inception. Azov was set up by far-right, neo-Nazi figures at the outset of Russia’s aggression in 2014. And despite claims that the unit has put its extremist origins behind it and become a regular, professional unit, shorn of the ideological baggage, displays such as this suggest that the brigade has not transformed itself as much as is claimed. For a start, the Azov soldiers still wear the modified Wolfsangel arm patch, a symbol associated with the Nazis. And then there is the so-called “prayer” of a Ukrainian nationalist, with its references to Ukrainian fascist leaders from the 1930s and 40s. And the holding aloft of torches looked more like a Nuremburg rally than a military parade.

The glorification of Stepan Bandera and the OUN fascists who resisted Soviet occupation in the 1940s, but also massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles, as well as Ukrainians who did not subscribe to their extreme nationalist vision, had at one time only had marginal appeal in Ukraine, mostly in the far west of the country. But the Maidan Revolution and Russian aggression have seen acceptance of the historical legitimacy of Bandera and the OUN, together with its symbols, spread to the mainstream. Russian propaganda makes preposterous claims about the supposedly Nazi leanings of Ukraine, with its Jewish president. But the normalisation and acceptance of the veneration of murderous fascists of the past, the erection of statues of them, and the naming of streets after them, is only grist to the mill of Russian propaganda. And there is no need for it. Bandera and his ilk have nothing in common with today’s democratic, European Ukraine. The courage of Ukrainians resisting Russia’s brutal aggression owes nothing to the warped heritage of such extremists.

Life amid the terror of war in Odessa

I had last visited Odessa in the summer of 2022, just a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (see post of 2 August 2023). The city had felt half-empty, with little traffic, and many shops, restaurants and cafes closed. There had been checkpoints manned by armed men all over the place. Returning in June 2024, the city had somewhat revived. Some people, at least, had returned. And some of the gaps had been filled by people displaced from war-torn places further east. A bit more life had returned to the streets. The roadblocks had mostly gone. The seaside boulevard close to the Potemkin Steps, Odessa’s most celebrated landmark, was open to the public again. There was a greater air of normality. The agent from whom I rented a studio apartment told me there were even a few visitors from other parts or Ukraine, come to enjoy the summer season in Odessa, even in wartime.

The Potemkin Steps and the wrecked Hotel Odessa

But new scars had appeared on the city as a result of Russia’s terror strikes. The high-rise hotel at the end of a promontory at the bottom of the Potemkin Steps had been wrecked, as had the marine terminal next to it. It had been an ugly hotel, as even its owner acknowledged, and had been disused for several years, a dreadful blot on the view from the top of the famous steps. If its destruction would not be entirely mourned, the same could not be said of the strike on the Transfiguration, or Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral in July 2023. During an attack that also saw strikes on residential buildings, a missile blew a hole in the cathedral’s roof, collapsing the altar. The shocked population came out to clear up the rubble caused by the explosion. In the afternoon, the Archbishop and the head priest of the cathedral led prayers outside the building. The city’s controversial mayor, who had been seen by many as pro-Russian, made an emotional statement, switching to Russian to speak directly to the Russian people, to tell them how much Odessans hated and despised them, calling them people without morals or values.

Damaged Transfiguration Cathedral, Odessa

In a dreadful irony, the cathedral belonged to the part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that had remained affiliated to the Moscow Patriarchate up until the 2022 full-scale invasion (a rival Orthodox Church of Ukraine, inaugurated in 2018 with the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, unambiguously stood with Ukraine’s struggle for its survival). The original cathedral had been destroyed by the communist regime in the 1930s. Having been rebuilt in independent Ukraine, it was consecrated in 2010 by no less a figure that the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Despite the Ukrainian Orthodox Church having broken with Moscow in 2022, many Ukrainians still regarded it with suspicion, and some of its clergy had been accused of collaborating with the invaders. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch had given his forceful backing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He blessed Russian troops and declared that those who died in battle would be cleansed of their sins. For his part, following the attack on the cathedral in Odessa, the head priest was unequivocal in denouncing the Moscow Patriarchate and the Patriarch himself. A year after the attack, the cathedral was closed, its windows boarded up. Renovation work was already under way. At the front of the cathedral, which had been undamaged by the blast, it was possible to step just inside the entrance. Notices outside the church were now in Ukrainian, no longer Russian.

Odessa’s Ukrainian identity had long been in question. Historically multiethnic, and with a large Jewish population, it was Russian speaking and, before the onset of Russia’s aggression in 2014, part of its population had identified as Russian. When I lived in Odessa in 2015-2016, one almost exclusively heard Russian in the streets of Odessa. Only in summer, when visitors from other parts of Ukraine flocked to the city, did one hear much Ukrainian. War had changed the character of the city, just as it had changed Ukrainian society in general. Under the onslaught of a brutal invader, few wanted to identify with Russia anymore. Waiters and waitresses, as well as shopkeepers, spoke to their customers in Ukrainian, as required by law. While Russian was till widely spoken, Ukrainian was now much more frequently heard in the streets. Shop signs were in Ukrainian.

Catherine the Great, off her pedestal

Outward symbols of the old Russian connection are also disappearing. The statue of Catherine the Great, the founder of the city, had been removed from its pedestal close to the Potemkin steps, replaced for the time-being by a Ukrainian flag. Little flags commemorating people who had been killed fighting for Ukraine had been placed around it. The bust of the great Russian poet, Pushkin, close to the city hall, was still there, as was the statue of Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, a governor of New Russia in the early 19^th century, with his seat in Odessa, next to the Transfiguration Cathedral. Pushkin had lived in Odessa for a time, and reputedly had an affair with Vorontsov’s wife. But such associations with the city’s Russian history are out of favour now. Not all Odessans were happy with such attempts to re-write the city’s history, even among those who were 100 per cent loyal to Ukraine. A couple of my Odessa friends were sorry about the removal of the statue of Catherine. But in the present climate, such views tend not to be voiced publicly.

In the early weeks of the full-scale invasion, Odessa had been in Russia’s sights. But Russian forces had been beaten back before Mykolaiv, to the east of Odessa, and then pushed out of Kherson and across the Dnieper river in the autumn of 2022. A series of Ukrainian strikes against Russian warships, and on the naval base at Sevastopol, in Crimea, had effectively pushed the Russian navy away from the western side of the Black Sea. While Odessa, like everywhere else in Ukraine, was not safe from terror attacks by Russian missiles and drones, Russia’s attempts to capture the city had failed. Whatever its history, Odessa’s future is as a Ukrainian city.

Summertime in Odessa

Odessa in summer is always delightful, even in wartime. People sit in the city’s well-tended gardens, eating ice creams, listening to street musicians. Children play. Delivery cyclists flit about with their boxes of hot food on their backs. Yet the mood in 2024 had a sombre edge. As throughout much of Ukraine, there were power cuts, the result of Russian attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure. There were frequent air-raid alerts, ignored by many, but threatening nonetheless. Sitting with a friend on a café terrace one lunchtime, we were startled by a loud bang. It turned out it had come from the port city of Chornomorsk, more than 20 kilometres along the coast. It often surprised me how loud the bangs were from explosions quite some distance away. Many Ukrainians had become used to air raid sirens and loud bangs, even blasé about it. For others, it was a constant strain on the nerves. But after more than two years, it was becoming exhausting. The failure of the previous summer’s much heralded Ukrainian counter-offensive had dampened spirits. The prospect of a long-drawn out war, with the uncertainty of continued western support, was draining. The need for ever more recruits for Ukraine’s army was stretching the commitment of some.

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, volunteers had flocked to the army. Young men queued up at recruiting offices. Techies used their expertise to send drones against the columns of Russian armour. Elderly ladies prepared Molotov cocktails and knitted socks for the soldiers. Two years on, all those who wanted to volunteer had done so. Now the army was having to draft people who did not want to go to fight. Walking in Ukrainian cities, one all too often passes men (and some women) walking with prosthetics, or with an arm missing, an all too vivid reminder of the dangers involved in going to war. In Odessa, I heard stories of men being pulled off the street and forced into the army. Most men between the ages of 18 and 60 were not allowed to leave the country. The age at which men could be drafted had recently been reduced from 27 to 25 (younger men could volunteer). But some had either bribed officials to let them cross the border, or slipped out of the country illegally. Close to the Moldovan border, one could see abandoned vehicles. I was told they were left by men who had sneaked across the frontier. I was also told of police officers offering to let men evade the draft if they paid a bribe, otherwise they would be sent to the army. Probably such tales of corruption were rare. But they were widely believed.

The impression that the sons of rich or influential families could escape the draft, that the longstanding poison of corruption continued to afflict the country, even in wartime, had a corrosive effect. There had been scandals concerning military procurement, of defence officials on the take, even at a time when the country was fighting for its very survival. A defence minister had been sacked, reportedly for having failed to get to grips with such shaming dishonesty. The sense of a united country, of shared sacrifice, had been degraded by such stories. The very fact that life in Odessa, even with the air raid alerts, the bangs, and the nightly curfew, appeared so normal was surreal. Was this really a country locked in an existential struggle? I had heard that many soldiers, returning on leave, were disturbed to see the extent to which normal life continued. President Zelensky, with his regular addresses to the population, tried to sustain a sense of purpose, of pride, and of optimism. But in a drawn-out war with little good news, it is not always easy.

Kharkiv: living with Russian terror

I arrived in Kharkiv by minibus from Dnipro on a hot summer’s day at the end of June 2024. I had briefly visited the city a year earlier (see post of 6 September 2023). I had been struck then by how, despite the widespread destruction, the city was very much alive, and people continued to go about their daily lives. Walking out of the bus station, a short distance from the city centre, the destruction of war was immediately evident. Shattered buildings with boarded up windows, what had once been rooms now exposed to the open air. There are many streets like that in Kharkiv.

Strolling through the central Shevchenko Park an hour or so later, between manicured lawns and beautifully kept flowerbeds, it was easy to imagine that all was well with Kharkiv. The covered-up statue of Shevchenko, for protection against missile strikes, was, however, a reminder that it was a precarious well-being. And then, all of a sudden, there was a tremendous bang. Unprepared for such a noise, I jumped slightly. A small group of children quickened their pace. But most Kharkiv residents just carried on walking or chatting with their friends on park benches. This was the kind of everyday experience that after two years of war was barely even noticed by the citizens of Kharkiv, inured to the noises of Russia’s war of terror against their city. I later learned that the bang emanated from the small town of Derhachi, just to the northwest of Kharkiv, which has been savagely mauled by repeated Russian strikes.

Shevchenko Park, Kharkiv

Kharkiv carries on with its life. People go to work, meet friends for coffee, go out for family dinners. But the war is inescapable. Air raid alarms are a familiar fact of life all over wartime Ukraine. But during my few days in Kharkiv, there were air raid alerts almost all the time. They were so frequent, that it became hard to remember in any moment whether there was an air raid alert or not. Apart from the missiles and drones lobbed at the city, sometimes in the background the dull thuds of artillery fire could be heard. A few weeks before my arrival, Russia had launched a new incursion north of Kharkiv, seizing a few villages. Ukraine’s defenders had held firm, and the Russians had not got very far. But the fighting was still going on.

Destruction in central Kharkiv

The city centre is scarred by missile strikes. Almost every street has damaged buildings, the result of missile or drone strikes, often in clusters. Some have windows boarded up, having been blown out by nearby explosions. Others have been completely wrecked by direct hits. The regional administration building stands empty and forlorn on the central Freedom Square, having been struck by a missile in the early days of the Russian invasion. Several other buildings around it are also wrecked. This is the backdrop to peoples’ lives in Kharkiv. Life carries on, but after more than two years, the strain of living with Russian terror must take its toll.

In the northern-most suburbs, the destruction is even worse. During the early months of the invasion, in 2022, Saltivka district, in north-east Kharkiv, had been shelled on a daily basis. When I visited, on a hot Friday morning, around the metro station the streets bustled with life. Street traders sold ripe fruit, vegetables and flowers. Butchers did a thriving trade, as did kiosks selling pirogi, pies stuffed with meat, potato, cheese or cabbage. Walking a little further, I came to a picturesque lake, surrounded by trees. Men fished, children fed the ducks, and people bathed in the cool water, a refuge from the stifling heat. A pleasant weekend scene on a hot summer’s day. But walking further on into Saltivka, there were more and more buildings with boarded up windows, pock-marked by shrapnel.

Saltivka

And then the landscape changed altogether. One moment walking among buildings still inhabited, windows boarded up, but still serviceable. People sitting outside the blocks of flats, chatting with friends, others carrying home their weekend shopping. And the next moment, no more than a hundred metres on, a shattered scene of wrecked buildings, broken, crushed, burned out, collapsed. Every single building damaged. Children’s playgrounds now overgrown with vegetation, schools wrecked and boarded up. No more children. A place of desolation, empty, the people gone, no longer habitable. Outside one block of flats, an elderly lady tending her flowerbeds, a hold-out, too old, too set in her ways to move to a safer place. Amidst these abandoned, broken buildings, with no electricity or water, nature is already re-asserting itself. First it is the overgrown weeds. Soon, if the people do not return, new trees will start to sprout.

Close to the Russian border, Kharkiv is particularly vulnerable to Russian strikes. During Russia’s spring cross-border offensive north of Kharkiv, Ukrainians were beside themselves with frustration that, while the Russians launched attacks from just over the border, western countries would not allow them to use weapons they had supplied to strike back at the places from which the attacks emanated. Russian planes could launch their glide bombs across the border, knowing the Ukrainians could do nothing about it. The Russians could rain down terror on Ukrainian towns and villages with impunity, because western countries tied the hands of Ukraine’s defenders.

An attack on 25 May on a DIY hardware store and a residential area, killing and injuring several people, was widely reported internationally, and caused particular shock. People going about their weekend shopping ripped apart by Russian missiles. But this was the daily experience of Kharkiv. Finally, at the end of May it was reported that the US government had given Ukraine limited permission for strikes against Russian targets just across the border. This appeared to make an immediate difference, and the pressure on Kharkiv let up somewhat. But still, Ukraine was forbidden to use western weapons for deep strikes against Russian military targets. And Kharkiv residents continued to be subjected to frequent missile strikes.

A few days after my arrival, I was sitting in the park when there was another big bang. As before, people didn’t even look up. I later learned that a depot of the logistics company, Nova Poshta, a kind of Ukrainian UPS, had been hit. Again, Kharkiv residents carried on with whatever they were doing. But we should not accept that this becomes normalised. It should not be acceptable that western countries leave Ukrainians to face the barrages of Russian missiles and drones, wringing our hands every now and then when there is a particularly deadly attack, but otherwise leaving Ukrainians to confront it alone. More than two years into the war, why is Ukraine still lacking sufficient air defences, having to make impossible choices about whether to protect cities or frontline positions, which cities to protect, and which not? Why are Ukrainians still far outgunned by the Russians invaders when it comes to artillery shells? And why do we still tie Ukrainians’ hands behind their backs and deny them permission to use the weapons we provide to strike military targets deep inside Russia? Enough of this half-hearted support. Enough of leaving Ukrainians to pay the price for our angst about Russian escalation. Give Ukrainians what they need to defeat this evil.

A return visit to Dnipro

I had spent two months in Dnipro as an election observer in 2006. At that time, it had been called Dnipropetrovsk, in honour of the Ukrainian Bolshevik, Grigory Petrovsky. The city was renamed Dnipro in 2016, in line with the de-communisation policy that followed the onset of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014. The city had had other names too, including Yekaterinoslav (“Glory of Catherine”), in homage to Catherine the Great, who had decreed the city’s foundation in the late 18^th century.

Dnipropetrovsk had been an important Soviet industrial centre. Its particular claim to fame was as the centre of the Soviet Union’s rocket production, for which reason it was closed to foreigners until the glasnost era of the 1980s. There is a monument to the rockets that played such an important part in the city’s history close to the regional administration building in the city centre. The city was also one of the most important centres of political power, both in the Soviet Union and in independent Ukraine. The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was from the nearby town of Dniprodzerzhynsk (which reverted to its pre-Soviet name, Kamianske, in 2016) and made his early career in Dnipropetrovsk. Brezhnev built a network of allies and dependents there, the so-called Dnipropetrovsk mafia, which wielded huge influence when he reached the pinnacle of Soviet power.

Dnipro, Rocket City

Dnipro’s political importance continued after Ukraine’s independence. The country’s second president, Leonid Kuchma, had been the director of the Yuzhmash (“Pivdenmash” in Ukrainian) plant that produced the rockets and spacecraft. During and after his period in office, key political players and oligarchs from Dnipro, the Dnipropetrovsk clan, continued to play an outsized role in Ukrainian affairs, including prime ministers Pavlo Lazarenko and Yulia Tymoshenko and oligarchs Victor Pinchuk, Kuchma’s son-in-law, and Ihor Kolomoisky.

Dnipro, like all of Ukraine, had suffered economic upheaval in the fallout of the Soviet collapse. When I was there in 2006, while there were a few slick cafes and nice restaurants, the signs of the impoverishment of much of the population were all too evident. The city had a rather drab look to it.

It was a very cold winter, with temperatures at night persistently below minus 20 degrees during much of my stay, and sometimes below minus 30. Such temperatures were a new and interesting experience to me. After a few minutes outside, my cheeks became numb. If I accidentally left home without my woolly hat, within seconds my ears were burning from the cold. If I wanted to take a photo, I had to be quick, as without my gloves my hands quickly became non-functional. But in my apartment, which overlooked the Dnieper river, close to the monument to the fallen of the Afghan war, I was toasty warm, even too much so. At night I slept naked on my bed, with no coverings, otherwise it was too hot. Sometimes I had to open a window to let in a blast of cold air as the only antidote to the insufferable heat inside. Like most homes in Ukraine, I had no control over the temperature of the heating system, which was switched on in the autumn and off in the spring by the local government. Ukraine received its gas from Russia at highly subsidized prices, and there was no need to economise with heating. Except that Russia’s goodwill was becoming uncertain and unreliable.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, there had been persistent controversy between Ukraine and Russia over gas prices. Given Ukraine’s desperate economic straits, the country struggled to pay even the below market prices that Russia charged, and often did not pay. As Moscow tried to maintain its dominant role in its “near abroad”, hoping to rebuild Soviet-era ties, it seemed unreasonable from a Russian perspective that it should continue to sell cut-priced gas to Ukraine as it asserted its independence. From Ukraine’s perspective, Russia was using the gas issue as a weapon to maintain its grip on the country and prevent it from pursuing its own course. Only a couple of weeks before my arrival in Dnipro that cold January in 2006, Russia had briefly cut off the gas supply to Ukraine. The thought of facing a Ukrainian winter without heating was a terrifying prospect for Ukrainians.

The failure of successive Ukrainian governments to reform the energy sector not only left the country vulnerable to such Russian pressure, it also sustained epic levels of corruption in the country, as well-connected oligarchs benefited from the cut-price gas supplies that enabled them to accumulate vast profits. While a shift to market prices would undoubtedly have been painful for the population, by simultaneously denying Russia a means of exerting pressure and tackling the grotesque levels of insider corruption that poisoned Ukraine’s politics and society, such reform would have put Ukraine in a much stronger position to fend off mounting Russian bullying and coercion over the subsequent years.

The hardship of many Ukrainians was disturbing. In the evenings, I would see teenage boys in the streets, boys with nowhere warm or safe to go, facing a night in the cold, fear and worry in their eyes. My assistant told me many of them had left home to escape drunken, abusive fathers, but had nowhere else to go. Sometimes the police would let them stay in the warmth of the railway station, she said, but not always. Arriving back at my apartment, I sometimes passed groups of youths huddled in the stairwell, having managed to get inside the locked entrance to the building. Snow cleared from the streets was piled high along the roadsides. My assistant told me that every year, when the snow thawed, some dead bodies were uncovered, homeless people or drunks who had fallen over and never got up.

I followed the progress of six electoral commissions in Dnipropetrovsk region. It was terribly stressful work for them, with extremely long hours, especially in the last days before the election. Three commission members suffered heart attacks. One woman in a small town close-by Dnipro had her son with her, sleeping on a couch while she worked through the nights. Apparently her husband was not sufficiently responsible to be able to take care of the boy himself. Her son was sick she said, and she had taken the job at the commission to earn some money to pay for his medical care. But she was damaging her own health in the process. Aged, I would guess, around 40, she was one of the ones who had a heart attack. Elections are important. But the sacrifices should not need to be so great.

Monastyrsky island, Dnipro

I revisited Dnipro briefly in the summer of 2014, as warfare was raging further east in Donbas. After eight years, the city looked very different. Perhaps this was partly because it was summer. Warm sunshine and parks full of luxuriant greenery always make a place look better. Walking along the bank of the broad Dnieper river, and crossing the footbridge to Monastyrsky island on a warm summer’s afternoon, Dnipro appeared to be blossoming. I was particularly struck by a dilapidated old building on the island’s bank, nestling among the lush foliage and the lily pads. It was a lovely sight.

The mood in Dnipro that summer of 2014 was intensely patriotic. Ukrainian flags were everywhere. The façade of the Soviet-era Parus Hotel, on the river bank, was adorned with an enormous Ukrainian flag. The Ukrainian national anthem blared out repeatedly from loudspeakers on a city-centre square. Statues of Lenin had been felled during the recent turmoil of the Maidan revolution. Dnipro was a predominantly Russian-speaking city, but the outpouring of national feeling in response to Russia’s aggression gave the lie to claims that Russian speakers were pro-Russian or in any need of being rescued by Russia. The majority had voted for the Party of Regions of ousted President Yanukovych. But they had never wanted to be part of Russia, or to have Russian tanks overrunning their country. Dnipro had had its pro-Russian protesters, but they were well outnumbered, and had never presented the same level of threat as their counterparts in other eastern cities. The recently appointed regional governor, Kolomoisky, had responded firmly, offering financial rewards for information about separatist activity.

Returning again in the summer of 2024, the impact of the war was ever present. As a result of Russian attacks on critical infrastructure, there were four-hour long power-cuts two or three times per day. As in other Ukrainian cities I had visited since the 2022 full-scale invasion, the frequent air raid alerts were largely ignored by the population, but they were unsettling, and Dnipro too had suffered its share of missile strikes raining down murderous terror on innocent civilians. In an exposition in a corner of one of the city parks, amidst broken military vehicles, were the road signs of occupied towns in eastern and southern Ukraine, pock-marked with bullet holes. Many of them were towns I had come to know in my time in the east almost a decade earlier, and to which I still feel a strong sense of attachment: Luhansk; Severodonetsk; Lysychansk; Popasna; Shchastia; Debaltseve. As well as names that have become all too familiar because of the tragedies associated with them: Ilovaisk; Avdiivka; Mariupol. In the centre of it all was a statue of a little girl holding out an apple to a soldier, a symbol of the gratitude of the Ukrainian people to those who defend them against the monstrous aggressor.

Yet Dnipro was very much alive. Now with many more delightful cafes and restaurants than when I had first stayed there, full of people enjoying the warm summer weather. The population had been augmented by people displaced by the fighting further east and south. Dnipro had become a major hub for humanitarian organisations. A friend told me about the conditions displaced people lived in, many of them crammed into student accommodation, families occupying single rooms, sharing kitchen and bathroom facilities among many. Though it was far from ideal, many did not want to move further on, she said, let alone abroad. They wanted to stay as close as possible to the homes they had been forced to abandon.

Kryvyi Rih, a city built on steel

I had visited Kryvyi Rih several times in 2006, when I spent two months as an election observer in Dnipropetrovsk (renamed Dnipro in 2016), the capital of the region to which Kryvyi Rih belongs. I found it an unprepossessing place, although I never really took the opportunity to get to know it. What struck me most was how spread out it was, with great distances from one part of town to another, and wide spaces in between. I hardly had any sense of a city centre. Most striking and most memorable was a row of four huge cooling towers at the giant Kryvorizhstal steelworks, as one drove down a road towards the industrial heart of the city. It was an impressive sight, which more than anything represented what Kryvyi Rih was, a town founded on the mining of iron ore and the production of steel. For me that cold winter, Kryvyi Rih was a place we visited quickly, had our meetings with local officials, grabbed a quick lunch, and then headed back to Dnipro. Even when I spent a couple of nights there, I never took the chance to get to know the city.

Kryvyi Rih vistas

Revisiting 18 years later, in the summer of 2024, did not greatly alter my earlier impressions. Two of the cooling towers that so impressed me before had gone. Kryvyi Rih does have a city centre, around the city council building and a large, well-kept city park. But the city does not seem to have been built with humans in mind. Spread out over a wide area, with large empty spaces in between districts, with its huge industrial zones it was built for steelmaking, with minimal consideration for the thousands of workers who troop in and out of the vast industrial plants each day. It is a typical Soviet city, whose success was measured in the quantities of pig iron and steel produced, not in the good life that it provided for its inhabitants. Kryvyi Rih is not a city for walking. The distances are too great, and it lacks the pleasant café and restaurant-lined streets that make many other Ukrainian city centres such delightful places.

For those interested in industrial landscapes, Kryvyi Rih is, however, a bit of a gem. I was particularly struck by the contrast between natural beauty and brutal industrialism. The scenes across placid lakes, with men fishing, children feeding the ducks, and youngsters bathing, and across the water, the steel plant belching out red smoke from its chimneys and cooling towers, flames shooting into the air. It seemed like a vision of heaven and hell all in one vista.

I visited the Kryvorizhstal steelworks, and had a guided tour of the company museum. In 2005, the steelworks was bought by Indian-owned Mittal Steel, which became ArcelorMittal the following year, when Mittal took over its international rival, Arcelor. The privatisation had been the subject of considerable controversy, with political overtones. The steelworks had initially been sold to a Ukrainian consortium in 2004 that included Viktor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of the country’s former president, Leonid Kuchma, as well as Rinat Akhmetov, reputedly Ukraine’s richest oligarch. The sale price was generally seen as far too low. To many this seemed like an egregious example of the kind of cronyism that had enriched a new class of well-connected business oligarchs after the demise of the Soviet Union. Following the 2004 Orange revolution, the new prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, invalidated the privatisation, and the company was re-sold to Mittal for six-times the original sale price. However, this reversal did not turn into a more general attack on the privileges and ill-gotten gains of Ukraine’s oligarchs, and in hindsight looked more like an act of revenge by Tymoshenko against the beneficiaries of the Kuchma regime.

The Kryvorizhstal steelworks

The story of the Kryvorizhstal steelworks told at the museum is largely the story of Kryvyi Rih itself. The city name, which means “crooked horn”, predates the foundation of the city, when it referred to the general area, a part of the Cossack Zaporizhzhia Sich. The growth of the town as a centre for the iron and steel industry began in the late 19^th century, and took off during the Soviet period, as part of Stalin’s brutal, breakneck industrialisation.

I struggled to follow my guide’s explanations. Despite telling him that my Ukrainian language was very poor, and that I understood Russian much better, he gave the whole tour in Ukrainian. Perhaps because Ukrainians can invariably understand both languages, and routinely hold conversations in which one person speaks Ukrainian and the other Russian, he did not appreciate that, for many foreigners, being able to speak one did not necessarily mean being able to understand the other. That there has been a widespread move away from speaking Russian and towards Ukrainian since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 is unsurprising and understandable. Kryvyi Rih, like other cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, had been predominantly Russian-speaking. Quite possibly my guide still spoke Russian with his family and friends. It is notable, for example, that frequently waiters, waitresses and shop assistants speak Ukrainian with customers, as required by law, but converse among themselves in Russian. No doubt Russian will continue to be widely spoken for some time to come. But a generational shift is taking place. The days when Russian-speaking foreigners could expect to get by in Ukraine with Russian are almost certainly numbered.

My guide presented a positive story of the steelworks and of the town. ArcelorMittal had invested considerable sums in the plant, and its future, he said, was bright. He proudly pointed to photographs of famous buildings and edifices built with Kryvorizhstal steel. These included the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower, built in east London for the 2012 Olympics, and largely financed by Lakshmi Mittal, the company’s chairman, as well as the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.

He did not mention the major industrial unrest at the plant in 2017 and 2018 over low wages and lack of investment in safety. In 2018, a roof collapse had killed a young worker at the plant. He also denied there had been any tension in 2014 between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian activists, when violent confrontations broke out in several towns across the east and south of the country, including Kryvyi Rih. As in most of eastern Ukraine, the Euromaidan revolution and the overthrow of President Yanukovych had aroused widespread antagonism in Kryvyi Rih. In April that year, a pro-Russian plan to hold protests and seize the city administration building was forestalled by a mass pro-Ukrainian counter-rally.

"Together to Victory!" Kryvyi Rih

Russia’s aggression was the last straw for most Ukrainians who had previously looked positively upon Russia and hoped for continued close ties. A striking example of this shift concerned one of Kryvyi Rih’s most prominent politicians, Oleksandr Vilkul. One of Yanukovych’s key lieutenants, Vilkul had served as governor of Dnipropetrovsk region and as a vice-prime minister under the disgraced president. Following Yanukovych’s ouster, he continued his political activity with the Opposition Bloc party, a successor to Yanukovych’s pro-Russian Party of Regions. Yet following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Vilkul emerged as a staunch defender of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Three days after the invasion, he was appointed as head of the military administration of Kryvyi Rih. A few weeks later, Oleg Tsaryov, a Ukrainian politician who had taken the separatist side in 2014, addressing Vilkul as his “fellow party member”, called on him to surrender the city to the Russians, asserting that Vilkul had always been pro-Russian. Vilkul responded with a Facebook post telling Tsaryov “Fuck you, traitor, along with your masters.”

In the first month of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kryvyi Rih was threatened by Russian forces pushing northwards from Kherson. An attempt to land paratroopers to secure the city’s airport was foiled, and columns of Russian vehicles were repulsed. Metinvest, one of Akhmetov’s companies, shut its open-cast iron ore mine and used its huge vehicles to block key roads. As in many places, such improvised defences, involving local companies and ordinary citizens, made an important contribution to the defence of the country during those fraught early weeks. As many other Ukrainian cities, Kryvyi Rih has repeatedly been struck by Russian missiles, damaging vital infrastructure and residential buildings. After a strike against a reservoir in September 2022, President Zelensky, a native of Kryvyi Rih, accused Russia of attempting to flood the city.

Mykolaiv, "Hero City"

Travelling by marshrutka (minibus) from Odessa to Mykolaiv in June 2024 was a rather normal experience. Aside from a police checkpoint along the way, there was to all appearances little out of the ordinary. When I had been in Odessa two years previously, only a few months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the situation had been quite different. Mykolaiv was at that time a city close to the frontline. Eastern districts of Mykolaiv region were under Russian occupation, as was the nearby city of Kherson. As a result of damage to a water pipeline, Mykolaiv was reliant on water from the river Bug which was not suitable for drinking or cooking. Much of the population had fled. Volunteers were bringing drinking water to Mykolaiv from Odessa every day.

Mykolaiv nearly fell into Russian hands in the early days of the invasion. As Russian forces poured out of Crimea, inadequately prepared Ukrainian defences enabled them quickly to reach Kherson, and by the second day Russian troops were battling their way into Mykolaiv as well. There remain many questions about the poor initial performance of Ukrainian forces in the south of the country, which enabled the Russians to occupy so much territory so rapidly. One of the most important is why a key bridge out of Crimea was not destroyed? The Russians, not expecting strong Ukrainian resistance, had planned quickly to sweep across the south, and to reach Odessa and link up with Russian-occupied Transnistria, in Moldova, in just a few days. But despite repeated Russian assaults on Mykolaiv in the first two weeks of the invasion, the city’s defenders held firm and drove the Russians back.

The determined and effective leadership of General Dmytro Marchenko in organising the defence was no doubt crucial. But the resilience of civilians who piled tires in the streets and prepared Molotov cocktails was also important. As so often in war, the combination of a capable and charismatic commander and high morale among soldiers and civilians can make all the difference. Two weeks after the invaders had entered the town, the governor of Mykolaiv region, Vitaly Kim, announced that the Russians had been driven back 15-20 kilometres from the city.

Wrecked Regional State Administration building, Mykolaiv

On 29 March, a Russian missile struck the regional administration building in the centre of the city, killing and injuring dozens of people. The wrecked building now has a gaping whole in its façade. As in many towns in Ukraine now, there is a display of destroyed Russian tanks and armoured vehicles. In Mykolaiv, they are placed along the road leading up to the regional administration building, a testament to the fact that despite the Russian attempt to terrorise the city into submission, Mykolaiv had not yielded.

Destroyed Russian military vehicles, Mykolaiv

Another crucial battle took place in and around the small town of Voznesensk, north-west of Mykolaiv. The Russians’ rapid advance entailed military units bypassing towns, leaving others to try to capture them, and moving on to the next target. Thus a Russian force had pressed on to Voznesensk, a key objective, as there was a bridge over the Bug. If the Russians had captured Voznesensk, they could have closed off the whole south of the country, and the road to Odessa would have been open to them. Regular Ukrainian troops were joined by territorial defence forces, many of them ordinary local men who picked up a gun and headed off to face the Russian army. Local businesses were tasked by the town mayor with digging up the shores of the Mervovid river, a tributary of the Bug that flowed through the town, to prevent Russian vehicles fording it. Other businesses used their vehicles to block streets. Military engineers blew up the bridge. The defenders lacked tanks, but they made good use of artillery and US-supplied shoulder-launched Javelin missiles to drive back the Russian tanks and armoured personnel carriers. As in Mykolaiv, the strength of Ukrainian resistance surprised the Russians. As they fled, they left behind numerous dead, as well as tanks and armoured personnel carriers, several of which were salvaged by the Ukrainians. The battle for Voznesensk was an inspiring victory for Ukraine, particularly given the spirited involvement of local people who joined the fight for their town.

While the Russians had been driven back from Mykolaiv, they were not far away, and Mykolaiv continued to be menaced. A local government employee told me that eastern districts of the city continued to face artillery fire and suffered considerable damage. The situation changed for Mykolaiv when, in November 2022, under pressure from relentless Ukrainian attacks on their supply chains, the Russians withdrew from the western side of the Dnieper river. To the exuberant joy of its inhabitants, Kherson was liberated, as was almost the entirety of Mykolaiv region. While nowhere in Ukraine is safe from Russian missiles, the Russian withdrawal relieved the pressure on Mykolaiv, which was now no longer in range of Russian artillery.

Kherson was not so lucky. Before their departure, the Russians destroyed much of the critical infrastructure, water, heating, electricity. And the city, now finding itself on the frontline, faced Russian artillery attacks. Much of the population left. The local government employee in Mykolaiv told me that while the city’s population had almost recovered to its pre-war level, much of that was due to the arrival of people displaced from Kherson rather than the return of the original inhabitants.

Mykolaiv has been badly bruised, but it remains an attractive city, very much alive when I visited, its cafes and restaurants open and with plenty of customers. The water supply remained a problem. While there had been an improvement, and the water was reckoned to be fine for washing, it was still not fit for drinking or cooking. I noticed a chemically smell while I took my showers. In March 2022, President Zelensky named Mykolaiv a “hero city of Ukraine” in recognition of its resistance to Russia’s attacks.

The historic city of Chernihiv under Russian attack

In mid-November 2023, following a few weeks in Kyiv, I travelled up for a weekend in Chernihiv, close to the borders with Belarus and Russia. Chernihiv, a fine city of churches and parks, is, together with Kyiv, one of the oldest in Ukraine, and was one of the most important centres in medieval Kyivan Rus. Among the many splendid churches in the city, the 11^th century Transfiguration Church is thought to be the oldest in Ukraine, although it has suffered repeated damage during its history, from the Mongol invasion in the 13^th century to an 18^th-century fire. The current exterior is from the 19^th century. Unfortunately the church was closed when I visited.

The Chernihiv Collegium, Cathedral of Saints Boris and Gleb,

and the Transfiguration Church

Next door to the Transfiguration Church is the Cathedral of Saints Boris and Gleb, which was originally built in the 12^th century, but has also been frequently damaged, rebuilt and altered over the centuries. Under Polish rule, it had for a time been a Catholic Church. On the other side of the Cathedral is the 18^th century Chernihiv Collegium, with its tall bell tower, in its day one of the most important educational establishments in Ukraine and Imperial Russia. The fine Piatnytska Church, also from the 12^th century, has also been much restored over time. The Yeletsky Dormition Monastery, founded in the 11^th century, is one of Ukraine’s oldest. It has also gone through alteration, its church sporting 17^th century baroque cupolas.

Regimental Chancellery building

A more modest, but historically interesting building is the 17^th century Regimental Chancellery Building, the administrative office of Chernihiv’s Cossack regiment at the time of the Cossack Hetmanate, until it was abolished during the reign of Catherine the Great. A simple, rectangular, single-story building, it belonged for a time to Ivan Mazepa, Hetman of the Zaporizhian Cossack Host at the end of the 17^th and beginning of the 18^th centuries. Mazepa joined Charles XII of Sweden in his fight against Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. The battle ended in cataclysmic defeat for Charles XII, and the majority of the Cossack host did not follow Mazepa, remaining loyal to the Russian Tsar. Despite this, Mazepa is a heroic figure in today’s Ukraine, while in Russia he has long been infamous for his perceived treachery. St Catherine’s church, situated at the end of a tree-lined avenue, which was dedicated in 1715, was erected in honour of the bravery of the Chernihiv Cossacks during the storming of the Ottomans’ Azov fortress.

Ukraine Hotel, Chernihiv

Chernihiv came under attack from the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The city was surrounded and cut off for around a month, as fierce fighting went on in the surrounding region and in the outskirts of the city itself. The city was subjected to missile and rocket attacks that left many buildings, including residential buildings, damaged. While the damage had largely been cleared up, the city centre still bore the scars, and the windows of several buildings around the central Red Square were boarded up when I visited. The Ukraine Hotel had been particularly badly damaged, having taken a direct hit. Hundreds of people were killed, including many civilians, before Russian forces withdrew from much of northern Ukraine, their initial attempt to overwhelm the country having failed.

The full-scale war had been going on for nearly two years when I visited Chernihiv. Despite the damage, the city had largely returned to normal. Restaurants and cafes were doing a good trade, and tables were hard to come by that weekend in many places. Chernihiv, like Kharkiv and Kyiv and many other places, had survived. Ukrainians’ stout resistance had impressed and surprised many who had expected the country to fold in the face of Russia’s onslaught. What extraordinary times those were, as from day to day we prayed that Kyiv, Chernihiv and other cities could somehow hold out. And then suddenly the miracle, as it seemed, that columns of Russian tanks and armoured personnel carriers had been stopped, and were being destroyed by brave Ukrainian soldiers with shoulder-launched missiles and drones. And then the Russians were fleeing, leaving much of their equipment behind to be hauled off by triumphant Ukrainian farmers behind their tractors. Ukraine’s loss had been terrible. The discovery of the grisly evidence of the Russian occupiers’ barbarism in the towns and villages they had occupied was shocking. But Chernihiv and Ukraine had prevailed.