Everything in the vast country of Ukraine is larger than life. We shuttle through Rivne, its central square full of giant ceramic eggs for Orthodox Easter, and eventually reach the wide roads of Kyiv. Compared to Kyiv, my hometown of Belfast looks like Lilliput. As the bus arrives, the trees froth with fresh green livery while a few late-leafers stand out like ghosts from a hard winter. The blue wall around St Michael’s Monastery is covered in photos of soldiers who have died in the war. There are now so many dead, every available inch commemorates them, even the plinth. The following day I meet my friend Natalya in a sushi restaurant. She works as an accountant, but her life irrevocably changed when her student daughter emigrated early in the war to Riga. The restaurant is busy, the upbeat song being played is Sia’s ‘Unstoppable’ and it’s hard to think we’re in the third year of war. Natalya tells me how Russia recently attacked Kyiv’s infrastructure prompting long electricity cuts.
‘Blackouts aren’t so bad,’ she admits. ‘Sometimes they can be a good thing as they remind everyone living a normal life in Kyiv of the war in the east.’
The war in the east is ever-present in soldier Alex Matiash’s mind. Alex is in Kyiv on a rare couple of days’ leave and has been fighting for two years. He says that Ukraine needs to recruit a massive 300,000 new soldiers to hold the defence line, an impossible number without NATO providing troops. He plays me a clip of scores of dead Russians in Avdiivka, explaining how hard it is to fight an enemy who posts such videos. Russia, according to him, doesn’t care about its losses, an attitude typified by Marshal Zhukov who brushed aside mass casualties in World War II with the comment, ‘Women will make more babies.’ We are joined in the café by Alex’s friend Volodymyr. Alex makes sure to tell me Volodymyr is ‘an IT engineer and rugby player,’ as if humanising him, refuting their identities as expendable soldiers.
Talking to Alex reveals the same sense of black humour which helped Belfast through its own years of the Troubles. He shows me the sitcom Point Zero from 2020 about the Russian-Ukrainian war in the Donbas. He along with other soldiers wrote it and acted in it, playing out absurdly hilarious scenarios such as impersonating Orthodox priests, while not shying away from the brutal realities of war.
Later, a café worker asks me, ‘How can anyone negotiate with Putin?’ The country is still invested in defeating Russia, but the fact that she uses the word ‘negotiate’ is already a huge sea-change from a year ago when it would have been frowned upon. The war keeps evolving. It’s only by being on the ground that you can understand the progression of public mood.
I take the overnight train to Zaporizhia, a big industrial city in the south of Ukraine, and as the train pulls in, plumes of pink smoke are rising from the steelworks. My translator, Oleksiy Stoyanovsky, drives me to my hotel along the main Sobornyi Avenue lined with placards of fallen soldiers. Next, we go to Khortytsia Island to see the Zaporizhian hydroelectic dam which was hit by strikes on 22nd March. The ongoing construction work echoes across the river. If Russia does succeed in destroying the dam, there will be serious flooding, but to guard against this, water is currently allowed to cascade. A rainbow arches in the spray and in the warm sunshine it feels like a glimpse of hope.
My main purpose of coming to Ukraine is to revisit Myrove as I’m longing to see how the people I bonded with on my last trip are coping. An hour away from Zaporizhia, the Myrove community is comprised of a cluster of villages, some of which are in range of Russian artillery. It is idyllic here, a field of garlic next to roadside banks of meadowsweet known as ‘brides’.
We stop off at a closed nursery school in Myrove and are shown the small pink-duveted beds where children used to nap, preserved in readiness for their return. The sight is unbelievably poignant. Even if the school reopens, only ten new births have been recorded this year compared to over eighty before the war. The rapid depopulation is due to IDPs, husbands serving on the front line and the physical stress of the war on female bodies. In the meantime, a new underground shelter has been built and, though its cold walls are lined with UNHCR plastic, it’s brightened by homely rugs and coloured toys. Happily, teenagers are already meeting up here to play sports.
While the classrooms await a better future, the kitchen, by contrast, is a buzzing hive of activity. Ira and a group of locals are making varenyky, a type of Ukrainian pierogi, to be sent to soldiers on the frontline. The women come here most weekdays to make the soldiers’ favourite meals. I help out with baking individual Easter cakes in tin cans and enjoy the camaraderie.
In Vyvodove, a school destroyed by Russian missiles also has a new underground shelter. The teachers and community raised the basic funds, but further help is needed to provide ventilation, heating and electricity. The problem is that aid organisations and charities prefer not to operate in ‘red zone’ areas less than 60 kms from the front lines. Vyvodove itself is less than 30 kms away.
The French teacher, Julia, takes me up to the bomb-scarred second floor where she shows me two painted glass panels in a bookcase. They feature a Russian girl with a backdrop of birches standing next to a Ukrainian girl amongst guelder roses. ‘A symbol of Russian and Ukrainian friendship,’ Julia says. The irony is that these paintings were the only ones to survive intact. When I ask Julia if they’ll stay in situ, she firmly replies, ‘No, they belong in a museum.’ In the past two years, the world has flipped on its head as any notion of Russian sorority has been permanently replaced by European alliances. Julia is still baffled as to why the Russians chose war over continuing to try and control Ukraine through propaganda.
‘They ran out of patience,’ says Oleksiy simply.
Julia tells us about her son who was a twenty-two-year-old lawyer. Because of the ongoing Donbas conflict with Russia, he’d decided a few years ago to study to be an officer at military school in case he would have to defend his nation. As war broke out in 2022, he left his studies for the trenches of Vuhledar. Just before he died that November, he rang Julia to ask about the words of a French lullaby she used to sing to him as a child. It had taken Julia by surprise as he hadn’t spoken French in years, but it touched her to know he sang the lullaby to his girlfriend whenever she was stressed. When Julia leaves us, she thanks us for visiting Myrove to distract her from her sad thoughts.
Oleksiy reveals another loss for Myrove. The community finance officer, also named Julia, recently held a funeral for her soldier husband. He’d been missing for a year and she’d held out hope he was imprisoned by the Russians, but news finally came from DNA tests in Dnipro that her husband was among the dead. On meeting the people of this region, one would never guess the extent of their suffering behind their smiles. The husband of Vyvodove’s school principal, Irina, is serving on the front line and she tells Oleksiy she hasn’t slept properly since February 2022. The war, however, has brought the people of Myrove closer together. While we’re there, an aid worker arrives. She’s from the occupied east like the majority of humanitarian workers in the red zone because they’re experienced and understand that speed is of the essence. Her aid van today has delivered wooden beams to help villagers fix roofs, walls and windows damaged by Russian attacks from across the river. Her charity Proliska is also running a shuttle service for the most endangered villagers to meet with the rest of the community. Staying connected is key during the war.
Across the road in the community centre, Vera and Ludmila are busy embroidering vyshyvanka shirts for babies and donating them to a maternity centre in Dnipro. The project is called ‘Born in Vyshyvanka’ and is designed to encourage women to give birth during wartime. When Ludmila talks of her hopes for victory, tears spring to her eyes. Vera adorns me with some traditional red beads and a gerdan. I can’t quite shake off the feeling I’m receiving tribal necklaces from remote indigenous lands, but one reason outsiders are so warmly welcomed is because red-zone communities have been starved of international attention.
Outside, we sit in the shade by the irises and peonies with Oleksander, the community leader of Vyschetarasivka, a village I visited last October. Oleksander has decided it’s too dangerous for us to return as artillery strikes have intensified. There is a new Russian drone-training base in the city of Enerhodar just across the river and the UAV pilots attack this coastline as part of their training.
Oleksandr is currently recovering from shell shock. At the end of March, he and three colleagues drove to the outskirts of Vyschetarasivka and were fixing a broken water pump when a Russian surveillance drone appeared. They ran into the pump house, but it had chipboard windows, so they raced out instead to a sandbagged hut. Inside, they lay down on top of each other as kamikaze drones arrived, blew up their cars and exploded against the hut. When I ask Oleksandr about the effects of shell shock, he explains that it was different for everyone. One man was so terrified he said, ‘Sorry, but I have to go to the toilet.’ Another guy was afflicted with anxiety and irrationally opened the door to check on his car, while Oleksandr himself felt compelled to issue orders. Eventually, the men were rescued by an army truck, but Oleksandr knows he was lucky to survive.
Back at my hotel that night, Oleksiy phones to say there’s been an attack on Odesa from Crimea. ‘More attacks are expected on different cities,’ he warns me. Fortunately, the night passes silently and I wake up to a blue sky with the faintest dusting of clouds. In the morning Oleksiy and I take the hour and half’s drive to Nikopol a former industrial port city where we’ve been granted special permission to visit. Pylons tower over the lilac bushes on the road in. We drive past an oil depot badly damaged by ‘an arrival’, as the Ukrainians euphemistically call a missile strike, and stop off at the Epicentre Shopping Centre which was completely destroyed by two other ‘arrivals’ in March. From the slumped lettering, ‘Epicentr’, we can see that the very epicentre of the building was hit.
Nikopol is under frequent fire from the Russian side of the Kakhovka reservoir and from the hillside there’s a clear view of the occupied Zaporizhian Nuclear Power Plant 6 kms away. Despite these dangers, many people live here. The poorest in society who don’t have cars have stayed and, as the city representative Mykhailo tells us, ‘People keep returning as there’s no more money abroad for refugees.’ He takes us into a brand- new concrete bus shelter with an electric light and benches. When he opens the other door out into the sunlight, he comments wryly, ‘Door into another world,’ seeing the humour in the darkness of everyday life.
We pass disused factories, the quiet Victory Park and the deserted swimming pool which was completed in February 2022. Mykhailo points out the ornate pillars of the now closed Wedding Palace that used to feature in postcards. On one shelled building, slates are hanging down from a roof like a row of Christmas cards on a string and silver insulation festoons the upper walls like tinsel. In a local shop, we bump into a family with pale overweight children. The health of the new generation is being impacted by a life spent indoors.
Oleksiy says that the more he helps the nation of Ukraine the less likely his sons will have to fight in the future. ‘Against all hope, I hope,’ he says, quoting the famous Lesya Ukrainka poem. He shows me his neighbours’ house which was blown up early in the war. A photo of the family who died sits poignantly on the bare foundations. Another neighbour in a clay house was killed by the same ‘arrival’.
Life is different in Zaporizhia in ways westerners can’t imagine. Oleksiy’s car was broken into in January and in wartime it was hard to procure a new window. He also hoped on this trip to drive me to Kramatorsk, but the deteriorating roads we drove along meant that his wheels were too wrecked to make the journey.
At the same time, I can see some positives even with the exigencies of war. For example, I love how buildings in Kyiv are often painted in warm yellows and oranges, unlike the generic glass and concrete suburbs of its neighbouring capital Warsaw. The city centre isn’t filled with the sleeping bags of the homeless as it is with every European capital. There is a much bigger sense of community than in the atomised west. Clearly, the EU will bring some ills to Ukraine along with wealth, but for now parts of Ukraine are beautifully unspoilt. That’s not to undermine the fact that some eastern cities have been cruelly obliterated by Russia.
On my last night in Zaporizhia, I meet up with Anna Chupryna of MIG newspaper and Olga Vakalo of Radio On Touch which prides itself on broadcasting the views of international commentators. Anna tells me she’s been reading young revisionist Ukrainian historians who are writing about Ukraine’s thousand-year opposition to Russia. Their books convince Anna that ‘Russia can be broken.’ She has also become fascinated by the fate of former Ukrainian writers erased by the Soviet regime and is an avid fan of the literary critic Vira Ageyeva’s podcast, ‘Crazy Authors of Ukraine’. She’s inspired by this new revival and, alongside the work of contemporary authors, it’s ‘like food’ to her. The value of art has been showcased by the war in shining a light on atrocities as well as providing a source of escapism. Most of all, art has helped reinforce a burgeoning Ukrainian identity.
I ask both Anna and Olga how they think the war will unfold.
‘That’s a simple question,’ smiles Olga, ‘but a very difficult answer.’
At our meeting last October, Anna told me that she made hopes rather than plans for the future, but things have changed and she now ‘makes fantasies’ about Ukraine winning the war because fantasies are in her head and feel more concrete than airy hopes. She’s certain that Ukrainians will survive if they persevere. To illustrate this point, Olga tells the tale of two frogs who fall into a pail of milk and try to swim, but the one that gives up dies whereas the other frog churns the milk into butter. For Olga, ‘The longer the war lasts, the stronger my belief that God’s will is in everything and faith will win victory. I’m starting to think my prayers could even be more important than my work with the international press. Belief may have dropped, but you must find the strength and power to go on.’
No matter what, the fighting spirit in Ukraine lives on.