It felt like watching your loved ones being tortured and having to provide a running commentary.
For the first 10 days of the war, I felt paralysed, waiting for the moment when staying silent would become more unbearable than speaking out.
When that moment came, I started putting my feelings down on paper in no chronological, or any other, order: just as they came. It was the only way I could do it. Please do not judge the notes below by any literary criteria—but accept them as random memories and impressions.
...An early childhood dream, or rather a nightmare: our city of Kharkiv is occupied by the Nazis. I am hiding at home, knowing that the German patrols will soon start raiding our houses, one after another. Someone’s heavy footsteps are heard from afar. They are getting louder and louder; I can already hear our worn-out apartment door squeaking on its rusty hinges… I scream for help… And wake up in a cold sweat.
Sixty years on, that nightmare has become reality for many. The only difference is that the invaders are not Nazis, but Russians: the people I used to think of as my own—spiritually and culturally, if not ethnically. The vicious zombie of the Soviet Union has come back to add more victims to the many millions devoured between 1917 and 1991…
As my late friend, writer Alexander (Sasha) Kabakov, used to say, paraphrasing Marx: “A mafia gangster state is the final stage of communism.”
It is precisely this mafia state that has invaded my native Ukraine. Sasha was able to forecast this war more than 30 years ago. He didn’t live to see his sombre predictions come true.
I often tell my creative writing students that the scariest thing is a blank sheet of paper. Since the start of the war, however, the scariest thing is a portable DAB radio, for the carnage it broadcasts is at times too much for my poor, patched-up heart.
Yet the fear of not knowing is even greater, and I keep the radio on all day long, while trying mentally to limit the war to the confines of the white box.
“No, this cannot be real,” I keep saying to myself. “This is not real, no… Just some invisible toy soldiers playing war games inside the box.” Yet the muffled sounds of explosions, followed by screams, bring me back to reality.
There are crowds of Ukrainian refugees—some carrying their old dogs in their arms.
I am haunted by that gnawing sensation of helplessness and guilt, an almost physically painful realisation that much more could have been done to stop this war from happening.
“I feel almost too ashamed to breathe,” another writer said on the radio a couple of days ago. I know exactly what he meant.
Ignorance is bliss. Had the west known more about Ukraine and its tormented history, they wouldn’t have swallowed Putin’s annexation of Crimea, or the hybrid war he unleashed in the Donbas and its largest city, Donetsk—a place far more “British” than you might think.
The city’s former name was Yuzovka, with “Yuz” being a Russian approximation of the last name of John Hughes, a Welsh businessman who came to the coal-rich area in 1870 and built a steel plant and a couple of mines. He brought with him a small crowd of British engineers and workers, who became the region’s first foreign settlers. There was even an English primary school in Yuzovka for the children of Hughes’s trailblazers, who could see the region’s huge industrial potential. The Donets Black Coal Basin (named for the Donets River running through it) once accounted for 90 per cent of Ukraine’s coal, though in recent decades the country’s coal production has been on a downward trend, and it plummeted after the 2014 war.
There’s a sad irony in the fact that, in the 1920s, the future city of Donetsk would be renamed Stalino. Is there a danger of it soon becoming “Putino”?
“So, you were born in Russia!” Queen Elizabeth assured me at a press reception in 1992, when I was introduced by her press secretary as “Vitali, who was born in Ukraine.” I tried to object, but Her Majesty, having muttered something like, “big changes in Russia these days…” moved on, unconvinced.
Modern Ukraine, which is Europe’s largest country by size, rich in both history and geography, remains for many a westerner “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” as Churchill said of Russia. As a Ukrainian by birth, I am often (much too often) mistaken for a person of uncertain identity at best—and, at worst, for someone who is basically Russian. “So, as a Ukrainian, you must be thrilled with Russia’s World Cup progress?” I was asked once by one British colleague, to whom I had to explain patiently that supporting (even in football) a country which has annexed a chunk of my native land and is also conducting a proxy war against it would be… erm… unusual, if not downright masochistic.
That was long before the all-out war started.
As for the books, particularly good books, on Ukraine available in the UK, there are probably more of them on offer than on, say, Kiribati—but that’s not saying much.
I remember having a coffee in Muswell Hill, north London—where I lived in the 1990s—with the author and historian Anna Reid. She was then in the process of writing Borderland—the first comprehensive book about Ukraine and its history published in the UK since the Second World War, and I was quite happy to answer her questions.
For the most part, however, my friends’ and colleagues’ queries about Ukraine were rather blunt: is Ukraine the same country as Russia? Is the language the same? And so on. I heard such questions constantly from seemingly intelligent people, who wouldn’t have thought of asking whether they spoke the same language in Italy and Spain, say.
It took a real war for British journalists to learn how to spell and pronounce Ukrainian names more or less correctly (they still make mistakes, but fewer); and to avoid the definite article before “Ukraine” which—to the ear of the English speaker—has the connotation of a province. It would probably take them another war to start putting the correct stress—on the penultimate syllable—in the Russian-Jewish name “Abramovich.”
Well, it is easy to rename Chicken Kiev to Chicken Kyiv, as Sainsbury’s has done (in Ukraine, Chicken Kiev was better known as Chicken Moscow!). It is much harder to alter the post-imperial mentality with its deep-rooted scorn or at best indifference to everything non-British. Had Britons, Americans and other westerners known and cared more about Ukraine and its distinctive language and culture, Putin would have thought twice before invading.
As it stands, a couple of London-based educational organisations, whom I asked to circulate an aid appeal which came via a Ukrainian MP during the first week of the war, refused to do so, saying they didn’t want to get involved.
“Don’t trouble trouble until trouble troubles you…” is a shameful English proverb. Big trouble is knocking at our gates. If instead of confronting it we run away and hide, the gates will soon be rammed through.
As the war continues, the amount of British media coverage is dwindling—slowly but surely. Are we going to come to accept it as an unfortunate, yet distant, reality in a far-off country of which we know little?
On TV, I see a Freudian slip by a presenter: “prior to the German invasion of Ukraine a week ago…”
I am fascinated by the Buddhist concept of karma and the seemingly unbreakable cycle of cause and effect that it signifies. This war, however, is breaking the cycle, with its own peculiar karma: horrible effects with no obvious causes.
Yes, it is the purposelessness that is so mind-boggling. No serious religious (like in Bosnia and Syria), linguistic, social or other divisions existed between Russia and Ukraine. Looking back at my school in Kharkiv, officially (and prior to the current war) the largest Russian-speaking city in Europe outside Russia, I still find it hard to determine which of the kids were Russian and which Ukrainian. It simply did not matter. We all spoke the same language—Russian, with an option of studying Ukrainian if we so wished. I did.
If there was a discrepancy, it was rather Russian-leaning: out of 200 secondary schools in our Ukrainian city of over a million people, only one was fully Ukrainian (meaning that all subjects, apart from Russian language and literature, were taught in Ukrainian), and that school was a vosmiletka, providing an incomplete, eight-year-long course of studies, as opposed to the rest of the schools where kids had to study for the full 10 years.
Every Russian bullet shot at Ukrainians will ricochet onto Russia itself
That discrepancy in secondary education was crudely balanced by the city’s media, with three Ukrainian daily newspapers and only one Russian. But—again—none of that mattered, for we all felt part of the same community, with the same daily routine and same problems: queues for food under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, to which queues for drinks were added under Gorby; a permanent housing crisis, with lots of Kharkivites—Russian and Ukrainians—living in slum-like basements and crowded communal flats; all-permeating corruption and so on. There was never even a hint of Russian/Ukrainian friction.
It took one belligerent psychopath, suffering from a lifelong inferiority complex, to generate the current mutual hatred that is destined to last for centuries.
The story (which may be apocryphal) goes that, aged 16, Putin went to the Leningrad KGB headquarters in Liteyny Prospekt and begged to be hired as an agent. He was told to go home and wait. Which he did. We do know, from his KGB school classmate Yuri Shvets, that Putin was bullied and his nicknames were okurok (cigarette stub) and blednayamol (pale moth). One can only speculate over how this aggravated his low self-esteem, which would have been further impacted by one of his first postings in Dresden. Much of his work there was humdrum; his apartment was drab. He must have loathed his seniors, the higher-rank snitches. I can imagine him resentfully walking the freezing platforms at the city’s main train station, eavesdropping on the passengers’ conversations.
I think I know why Putin hates Zelensky so much: in one of the latter’s satirical sketches on Ukrainian TV (you can watch it on YouTube), the former comedian plays Alina Kabaeva, a Russian gymnast and reportedly Putin’s lover. Dressed in a provocative pink tracksuit, Zelensky cuddles up to the actor playing Putin, muttering flirty banalities in a high-pitched voice. An utterly unforgivable affront well worth a polonium or Novichok poisoning—or even a military invasion.
Putin’s unspeakable cynicism: laying flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin—one day before the invasion of Ukraine—knowing for sure that he was about to create countless new unknown and known soldiers’ graves.
“Our city is no more,” several of my old Kharkiv-based friends concluded on leaving their metro and basement shelters after the first few days of heavy bombardment, which had turned the city where I was born into a 21st-century Stalingrad.
The whole of the formerly coveted residential Nagorny area, where I grew up, was effectively razed to the ground. What for? Did the Russian murderers seriously regard my “Young Guards” secondary school in Kulturi (formerly Barachnaya) Street; the kindergarten in Rimarskaya, to which I went as a small kid; my father’s old research institute in Gudanova, formerly Yumovskaya; or the regional hospital in Trinklera, where I spent a month in 1976 recovering from a stomach ulcer, as legitimate military targets?
To suppress the grief, I try to perceive the ghosts of all those destroyed buildings as pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of a new rebuilt Kharkiv, waiting to be put together again.
Every Russian bullet shot at Ukrainians will ricochet back onto Russia itself.
“Russia is no more,” my English wife concluded, looking up from her newspaper. And she was right. In most people’s eyes, Russia will never again be the land of great literature and ballet, the country that defeated the Nazis and sent the first man into space. For centuries to come it will be perceived as a cruel aggressor.
Ukraine will survive this war. Russia, as we know it, won’t.
A small Ukrainian flag is flying proudly above my house. Another—a much bigger one—has just been installed in front of my town council building. It is hard to imagine that in the Soviet Union of my childhood, one could get a prison term for displaying this “nationalistic symbol.”
Believe it or not, I first saw my motherland’s national flag in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania in Australia, in 1991, shortly after Ukraine declared independence. It was attached to the mast of a rusty Sebastopol-registered trawler, stuck in the local port for a major overhaul. Curiously, when the trawler first arrived, it flew a soiled red Soviet flag. A couple of months later, it was replaced with a makeshift yellow-blue one, crudely constructed out of coloured rags by the Ukrainian sailors.
It was amazing to see the banner of my native Ukraine proudly flapping in the wind, thousands of miles from home—above the tranquil beauty of Hobart harbour.
I waved to the flag—and it waved back.
Paradoxically, today, eight years after the Russian annexation of the Crimea—which was all but ignored by the west—a Sebastopol-registered vessel would be likely to carry the Russian flag, which, alongside the sinister swastika-like letter “Z,” has become a symbol of Russian aggression.
The little flag on the roof of my house has a history. I bought it in 2017, in Kyiv’s Andriyivskiy Uzviz—a steep and stunningly picturesque lane winding down from Podil towards the Dnieper River.
That was my first visit to Kyiv after the Euromaidan revolution of 2014 and the subsequent war in the Donbas.
It took one belligerent psychopath to generate mutual hatred destined to last for centuries
Having half-expected to find a war-torn city, I was stunned by its impeccably clean streets and countless bars, coffee shops and restaurants full of locals; by its shaded boulevards and parks where, just like in my childhood, young families promenaded in the evening while older folks became engrossed in the seemingly endless chess games under the acacia trees. The whole of Khreshchatik, Kyiv’s main thoroughfare, was pedestrianised at weekends, with children playing in its empty traffic lanes.
Seeing the same Khreshchatik on TV now—ruined, deserted and under layers of rubble—breaks my heart.
But then, in 2017, the city appeared safe, calm and relaxed, with the only reminders of the ongoing war in the Donbas being newspapers and fresh memorial plates on some of the buildings. People were reluctant to talk about the war, as if still refusing to believe that their largely Russian-speaking nation had seen so much of its territory annexed.
The biggest change has befallen the Ukrainians themselves. I had always believed it would take several generations to shake that haunted Soviet look from people’s faces, which I used to call “the seal of oppression.” In Kyiv in 2017, it was all but gone: its residents appeared confident and relaxed—a westernised, if not quite “western,” crowd in westernised, if not quite “western,” streets, dotted with “censorship is banned by law” posters and banners promoting human rights. It was indeed a “brave new world.”
A new emerging dignity could be felt everywhere—the dignity of a young and courageous nation confident of its future.
Listening to the broadcasts from Ukraine today, I cannot help admiring all those young and self-confident (in stark contrast to Putin and his cronies) Ukrainian politicians and military commanders—all speaking impressive English, and deeply convinced of the righteousness of their cause and indeed of their imminent victory.
Who or what has given them that new dignity and confidence? Paradoxically, it is Putin. He did it inadvertently (tyrants always end up achieving the opposite of their intentions) by methodically, for the last eight years, questioning Ukrainians’ very right to exist and to be free. It is Putin who has united Ukraine and made the choice between good and evil so strikingly obvious.
To me, Kyiv’s Andriyivskiy Uzviz is one of the world’s most sacred spots, for it was there that Mikhail Bulgakov, my favourite writer of all time (alongside George Orwell) and the author of the 20th century’s best novel, The Master and Margarita, lived for many years in his house at number 13.
Bulgakov made his real-life family home the set of his epic The White Guard, describing life in 1918 Kyiv, torn apart by the civil war. After Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the house became one of the world’s most moving museums with objects from Bulgakov’s day, including the famous Narnia-style mirrored wardrobe in the lounge, through which one could actually walk to Bulgakov’s study.
From what I have heard, after the recent indiscriminate bombing, the house is now in ruins.
I urge you to read in full this description of the 1918 war-torn Kyiv from The White Guard, which does not require any further comment:
The night flowed on. During its second half the whole arc of the sky, the curtain that God had drawn across the world, was covered with stars. It was as if a midnight mass was being celebrated in the measureless height beyond that blue altar-screen. The candles were lit on the altar and they threw patterns of crosses, squares and clusters onto the screen. Above the bank of the Dnieper the midnight cross of St Vladimir thrust itself above the sinful, bloodstained, snow-bound earth toward the grim, black sky. From far away it looked as if the cross-piece had vanished, had merged with the upright, turning the cross into a sharp and menacing sword.
But the sword is not fearful. Everything passes away—suffering, pain, blood, hunger and pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars. Why?
