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.