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.
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