She remembers seeing the destruction and the death on TV. “I was shocked,” she says. “I realised then what it took to be free, to become a nation.”
When Putin ordered his armies into Ukraine on 24 February this year, he was determined that it would under no circumstances ever be allowed to be a functioning nation. The very thought was bogus. So he sent his troops straight for its capital: he knew that in order to destroy the very idea of Ukraine, you must take Kyiv. Forces travelled south to encircle the city, while Special Forces (Spetsnaz) were also reportedly sent to infiltrate Kyiv but were quickly chewed up by the Ukrainians. Attempts to seize the airfields of Antonov and Vasylkiv were also unsuccessful, though troops did almost cause a nuclear incident when they took the town of Chernobyl. As they failed to make tangible military progress Moscow switched tactics: the goal was now to level as much territory as possible.
Ukrainian forces counterattacked and by 25 March they had retaken large swathes of the area surrounding Kyiv, eventually liberating Bucha on 1 April, where they discovered mass graves and evidence of widespread Russian war crimes. The Russian high command said their goal was now to “liberate” the Donbas. Putin’s dream of regime change and “restoring” Kyiv, the “Mother of all Russian Cities”, to his country was, for the moment, over.
But he won’t give up. For as long as Kyiv remains proudly Ukrainian, the Kremlin will never annex Ukraine to Russia. In early June, Russian warplanes strike the city from the Caspian Sea. Moscow says it will strike new targets if the United States starts giving Ukraine longer-range missiles. The Kremlin says Ukrainians are merely confused Russians; that Kyiv is not Ukrainian but simply the source of Greater Russia. And it is determined to bomb and kill them until they remember this fact.
Ukrainians resist. They want to be something else. In Podol, I watch hipsters edit graphics on laptops in coffee bars; they are self-consciously western. Europe, not Russia, is their collective dream. Vadym Halaichuk, a Deputy in the national parliament, agrees: “Culturally, we’ve always been Europe,” he says. “Obviously, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union for a long time and that has had a tremendous impact on how culture here has developed. But even those 70 plus years did not erase our European identity. So when Ukraine gained independence back in 1991 – or regained it – Ukrainians quickly began to realise how different we are from Russia and from what many Russians stand for.”
He continues. “There was still a lot of Soviet influence in the country and our corrupted communist elites did a lot to support that historical misconception that we are the same people.”
Putin, though, would drag Ukrainians eastwards, and back in time. Until then, he is content to sacrifice them at the altar to his own, mad, dreams.
***
It’s winter, 2014, the war is several months old, and there are parliamentary elections. Angelina has volunteered as an election observer. In the western city of Vinnitsa, she stands in a school and watches people casting their votes, to ensure the process accords with international standards. It isn’t much, but in a country legendary for its almost surreal levels of political corruption it is indicative of the new Ukraine that, though not yet born, many here are trying to midwife into existence.
Eight years later, Solomiia Bobrovska, the former acting governor of the Odesa region and a Rada Deputy, drinks coffee with me in Kyiv and tells me about the difficult birth of this new Ukraine. “We technically got independence in 1991 but for the majority of Ukrainians the nation was born, in fire in 2014, and the process is still continuing today,” she says, leaning across the table at me. Her white T-shirt is emblazoned with the Ukrainian trident (Tryzub) and she wears a blue and yellow wristband on her left arm. Bobrovska was born in December 1989, after the Berlin Wall came down. She has only ever known Ukraine. Now she is its future.
“Finally all Ukrainians understand what war means,” she tells me. “When you have funerals almost every day, when almost everyone has lost someone in their families, be they warriors or children, and how much it hurts.”
It is through this hurt that Ukrainian defiance has been forged. If Putin thought he could terrorise Ukrainians into submission he made a grave miscalculation. “After Bucha, there will never be any compromise with these people,” my friend Kirill tells me later that day. “Let them come and try to take my city again. We are waiting for them — and we all have guns now.”
***
The lady is 200 feet tall. In her right hand she holds a sword and in her left a shield. She stands in the Pechersk neighbourhood in central Kyiv. The Motherland Monument is probably the most famous statue in Ukraine. Throughout a large chunk of 2014 I lived in the city, just off Kreshchatyk. Every morning I would walk through central Kyiv to get breakfast, and there she would be.
I walk past it again more on my way to meet Angelina. We haven’t seen each other for several years but have been in constant communication since the invasion. In that time much has happened.
By mid-April 2022, the Ukrainian army has beaten the Russians back from Kyiv. Greater Russia remains a Putinist fantasy. Instead, something else has emerged that, when we meet for drinks a few weeks later, Angelina wants to tell me about. “This is our war of independence,” she tells me. “Never have we been so united. We all understand what our country is now. We all know that we are Ukrainians. We all know that we will never be Russians. We all want the West not the East.”
What Angelina and I saw in Euromaidan in 2013 and 2014 has only grown since then: the slow-motion birth of a nation. The gradual evolution of a post-Soviet state into the flawed, troubled, but undeniably culturally and politically independent Ukraine that exists today. Self-knowledge is painful. This is a nation that has been forged in the crucible of Putin’s stupid, pointless and bloody war.
This speaks to a larger truth about all conflict — and geopolitics: the Law of Unintended Consequences. Putin has, thus far, achieved almost the exact opposite of everything he intended. He wanted Ukrainians to identify with Moscow, he made them despise it. He wanted to put an end to Ukrainian national feeling, he galvanised it. He wanted to merge Ukraine with Russia; Ukrainians are dying to ensure he can’t. He wanted Ukraine to demilitarise, he made it more militarily capable than ever before. He reveres Orthodox Brotherhood; he pushed the Ukrainian Church to break from Moscow. He wanted to divide Europe, he united it (at least for the moment). He wanted to show the world the might of the Russian army, he exposed it as a paper tiger.
Just before dusk on my last evening in the city I go to my Airbnb overlooking Independence Square. Here in 2013 hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians risked their lives to protest their corrupt leader and in so doing set off a chain of events that brought me to this building today. Kyiv abides in my heart. It is a city of legend for me too, and it is where so many things began; both for Angelina, and for me, and, most importantly of all, for Ukraine.
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