Daily life in Ukraine involves uncertainty and its suppression. And teaching kids to manage in a world of danger and evil.
By Francis Harris
November 14, 2024
CEPA
Maksym, a former prisoner of the Russians, meets me in a seriously upmarket coffee and cake shop in a glitzy, central Kyiv mall that could plausibly slot right into London or Berlin. Nearby is a fishmonger, hundreds of miles from the nearest body of saltwater, its pricey sea fish exhibited on beds of ice. And there are serious restaurants, fashion outlets and an exceptionally stylish female clientele wearing clothes that look as though they cost a small fortune. So, I ask Maksym, does this shimmering prosperity feel like reality? Or is it still the Russian prisoner-of-war camp where you were held and tortured every day for more than 10 months? “It’s this,” he says. “The camp was the nightmare.”
One way or another, Maksym Kolesnykov has seen Ukraine’s future, but which one? A future of prosperity and political freedom, or Putin’s dream of the reconstructed empire of Russky Mir? For now, at least, no one has any idea. A new US President has been elected and there are suggestions of peace negotiations, but there’s no clarity on what comes next.
But that’s not new. Uncertainty is daily life. You see it in the vulnerable eyes of the military wives. Late one night, I met a soldier in an Azeri take-out restaurant near Maidan that’s popular with students. A veteran of the 2014 war, he’s already suffered PTSD but rejoined in 2022. He’s heading back to his frontline drone unit on the eastern front the following morning, and his wife stays close. She’s anxious, of course, and says that she suffers a crippling depression.
But we squeeze laughter from the evening because who wants to be serious in wartime? We jam ourselves into a battered “battle wagon” belonging Nastya, another drone warrior, and barrel off into the Kyiv streets. It’s not an official vehicle, she says, because that would make it part of the military inventory. You really don’t want to be dealing with the military bureaucracy, whose demands are impossible to meet.
Another wife, Veronika Puhach, keeps a simple compass with her throughout the day and night. Her husband is stationed to her southeast, she knows. It’s some comfort to be able to look in that direction, even when operations make him vanish from his online accounts.
The women know their partners may die, return without an arm or a leg, or be taken prisoner and suffer Maksym’s fate. I reach out to touch one of these woman on the shoulder, to say it will be ok, and immediately realize the stupidity of the gesture. They don’t need you to recognize their vulnerability.
Uncertainty is also daily life for relatives of at least 50,000 missing Ukrainians, who may be held captive or may be dead. No one knows, and the Kremlin won’t help. Russia’s descent into the pre-modern means it spurns 21st-century decencies, like informing families of a loved one’s fate.
Talk of peace brings weary smiles from the women who campaign to release their men held as prisoners of war in 130 jails across Russia. Whatever settlement is reached, “Russia won’t return all the PoWs,” says one campaigner, Natalya Epifanova, who points out the Kremlin continued to hold a healthy stock of hostages held since 2014. “They will go on torturing families.”
The nightly air raids represent another form of torture. Iranian drones whine across the capital and are brought down by a now-sophisticated air defense system, but it’s a noisy and sleep-depriving routine. “Dear guest,” crackling hotel room tannoys blare throughout the hours of darkness. “Air raid alert. Please go to the shelter.”
Some nights this happens three times, or more. Sometimes just once, or not at all. The damage done is not London Blitz levels, but debris falls onto buildings. Apartment blocks are set alight. Spent .50 caliber rounds ping onto the streets. Many adults can deal with this and simply ignore the alarms.
But if you’re a small child, it’s extremely frightening. “My 10 year-old became so anxious, she was so scared,” said one mother. So now the girl and her older sister live in Dublin, and another Ukrainian family’s life is changed forever by Russian terror. “You know want really made a difference for our children? Harry Potter,” says the campaigner and former MP, Lesia Orobets. “They all read those JK Rowling books and it taught the kids that there’s a world without adults, where there’s evil and where you have to fight it yourself. They know they have to play their part.”
Teachers usher youngsters into the metro stations during air raids, and the kids look happy enough, waving at the passing train passengers or sitting in lines all the way up the long staircases, working their smartphones.
Kyivans say the bombing will get worse when Russia fires missiles that are harder to shoot down. “They’re not sending missiles at the moment,” CEPA fellow Elena Davlikanova said in early November. When I ask why, she smiles: “They’re waiting for it to get colder.” Then they will target the already-battered power distribution and generation network. And sure enough, early on November 13, with nighttime temperatures not far from freezing, the missiles began to arrive.
Ukrainians are resilient, but you have to wonder what that means. Veronika Puhach says the routines of daily life help a lot, but there’s always the nagging question of what might happen next.
Things could go horribly wrong for Ukraine. The US may end support, or the front might collapse, For many, that would mean fleeing a westward from a beloved homeland, likely never to return. (The German government estimated on November 14 that this could mean an exodus of anything from 10-18 million Ukrainians.) “I couldn’t stay here,” a professional woman told me. “They know what I’ve said and what I’ve done. They would kill me.”
That is true for many who have campaigned and spoken freely since the 2014 Maidan Revolution. It’s all there, on the record, easily accessible by FSB revenge squads who have been gathering incriminatory material for years.
The country can look to the east and see one future. It’s a place without modern amenities, where human life is sacrificed for rubles, where no one has rights unless granted by the despot, and anyone can be taken to a prison camp, like Maksym, where they are paraded for beatings at 8 a.m. and paraded for another beating at 8 p.m. In between, they must stand and not speak to fellow inmates.
To the west is Poland. The borderlands that I saw as a correspondent in 1991 were poor and gray rural areas where the ambition was often to have two cows rather than one. The houses were often half-built, and the roads were pot-holed and made lethal by reckless drivers.
It’s now transformed. Modern rolling stock glides through a landscape covered in new dual-lane highways populated with modern cars, sleek bridges, shopping malls, reconstructed schools, and sports facilities, all for the benefit of Poles living in smart, bright housing.
The lights to the west or the darkness to the east? It’s hardly a difficult choice. They’re on the borderlands of terror, but also of hope.
Francis Harris is Managing Editor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and oversees Europe’s Edge. He was a foreign correspondent with the Daily Telegraph and served in Prague, London, New York, and Washington.