I VISITED Ukraine in the autumn of 2018, spending three nights in Kyiv, then three nights each in Lviv and Odesa. Within the previous 12 months, I’d also visited Minsk, capital of Belarus; and Moldova, including its break-away pro-Soviet enclave of Transnistria. I know the area and its geopolitics well.
The first thing you notice is how sophisticated and modern Kyiv’s city centre is. Busy, bustling and litter-free; with a lively nightlife, classy restaurants, extensive underground shopping malls, airy parks where old men play chess, imposing university buildings, and streets full of impressive architecture from the 19th century. It’s somewhere people go about their daily business in a relaxed and easy manner, just as they might in Paris or Berlin. Or was.
Kyiv is best known for the incredibly beautiful, well-maintained golden-domed churches: St Michael and St Sophia. They were allowed to fall into disrepair in the Soviet years, but now have been restored to their former glory. Far from being just tourist attractions, all Kyiv’s churches are well-used, with people popping in to light a candle and kiss the portrait of a Saint on their way to or back from work. This is a pious country.
Further afield, there is Lavra, containing one of the most important buildings in Eastern Orthodox Christianity: a monastery founded in 1051, with narrow caves containing the bodies of many Saints. It’s surrounded by open parkland with a huge statue, over 100 metres high, representing the Ukrainian Motherland. Plus, incongruously, displays of captured military equipment - including one Russian vehicle from the Donbas area in 2014.
It also contains the Holodomor Genocide Museum. This commemorates the time (1932-33) when Stalin’s deliberate policy of enforced food requisitioning from the countryside led to the death by starvation of at least three million Ukrainians - and possibly twice that number. Then as now, no-one was counting. Whatever Putin may say about them really being Russians, Ukrainians have a well-developed sense of their own history; and with it, deep-rooted reasons to fear the actions of Russian leaders.
On the other side of the city, an efficient underground train ride away, is Babin Yar. In 1941, the invading Nazis rounded up the Jews of Kyiv, telling them they were being deported to Israel. Instead they were marched to this narrow ravine, robbed, stripped, machine-gunned and buried. In just two days, 36,771 died: at the time the largest-ever mass-execution of Jews. Many more Jews followed, but also political dissidents, Roma, and the disabled.
The returning Soviet authorities did what they could to minimise the preponderantly Jewish origin of the victims: which has only been properly recognised since 1991, with a memorial. Which was badly damaged recently in the strike on the nearby TV tower, killing five people - some while paying homage to the victims.
My visit to Ukraine ended with a train journey to Lviv near the Polish border, a journey now being undertaken by tens of thousands of refugees. After a few days there, I took an overnight train to Odesa. My sleeping-car companion was a grandmother, moving to Odesa to stay with relatives, as things in her Russian-occupied home area of Crimea had become ‘intolerable’. I fear she may soon be on the move again, if not already. She won’t be the only one.
Lviv and Odesa, each delightful and distinctive in their own way, may soon also fall foul of Putin’s current unspeakable and deliberate destruction of the entire country. It’s sickening to think that the streets I walked down, and the buildings I entered, may soon be reduced to rubble.
Stalin is thought to have been responsible for the premature deaths of over 30 million people. Putin hasn’t got that far yet, but it’s worth remembering the possibly 8,000 killed in his obliteration of Grozny in Chechnya: and his contribution to over 30,000 killed in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria: here too by cynical air attacks on defenceless civilians. Who knows how many are now already starving in the Ukrainian cities under siege? Totalitarian leaders surround themselves with officials who will only tell them what they want to hear, confirming prejudices and obsessions. In these circumstances, it’s not at all clear when the current destruction of Ukraine will end, or what anyone can do to stop it without risking nuclear retaliation. Or what will be left, even when it does.
From a personal point of view, I’m so glad I made that trip when I did, because what I saw then will not be what anyone will see in future. My memories of that thoroughly rewarding visit will stay with me through the reports I sent back, and the hundreds of photographs I took - which I hope one day to make more widely available.
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