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.