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 18th 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.
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