Rosemary Jenkinson writes: The best way to envisage a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is to start with a story. In September 2022, on my way to Kyiv, I was waiting on a packed platform at a Polish train station when a scuffle broke out. I was oblivious to the cause until I got on the train and met a Ukrainian man now based in Ireland. He was partially blind, carried a white stick and was heading to a Warsaw hospital where his Ukrainian soldier son was being treated for serious shrapnel wounds. The man was hoping to bring his son back to Ireland for specialised care. I finally discovered that the skirmish on the platform happened because the man found himself standing next to a Russian woman in a red jacket.
‘What do you think of Putin?’ he’d asked the woman.
‘I think he’s very good,’ she’d replied.
At that point he’d been so incensed and stressed about his son he’d tried to lash out at her with his stick.
Our train pulled in at Warsaw Central and the man said goodbye to me. A minute later, I noticed him teetering perilously at the top of the stairs, when the Russian woman in the red jacket let out a cry and lunged out to grab his arm. She helped him down each step and neither said a word to each other as they parted, but their togetherness felt like a huge, unexpected moment, almost heartbreaking in its humanity.
April 28th, 2024. In Kyiv the anti-Russian sentiment is highly visible. I’ve visited the city five times since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war and on this occasion, I notice the removal of the imposing bronze statue of Red Army commander Mykola Shchors from Shevchenko Boulevard. Shchors is particularly loathed by Ukrainians as he helped destroy the independent Ukrainian state that had emerged by the end of World War One. Now, however, all that remains of his image is a concrete plinth plastered in anti-Russian graffiti. While most Ukrainians strongly believe in writing their own history to contradict Russian narratives, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four does warn of the dangers: ‘The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had actually been destroyed.’
History is complicated here. The shared past with Mother Russia is manifested everywhere. The hotel I stay in is next to the Victory Square Obelisk of the Hero City of Kyiv, celebrating Kyiv’s defence in World War Two. This impressive monument was built by Russia, but thankfully is being preserved to commemorate Ukrainian casualties.
The prioritisation of Ukrainian history and culture is also reflected in new literature about the war. I take a taxi over to the writers’ organisation PEN Ukraine, where I’m given a copy of Stanislav Aseyev’s The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, based on his time in a Russian-run prison. While Aseyev managed to survive, many of his literary compatriots did not. Victoria Amelina, who wrote the poignant ‘Poem About a Crow’. died in a missile attack on Kramatorsk, while Maksym Kryvtsov was killed on the front line. ‘He left us not just his poems and testimonies of the era but his most powerful weapon, unique and innate,’ said his friend, the poet Olena Herasymiuk. ‘It’s the kind of weapon that hits not a territory or an enemy but strikes at the human mind and soul.’ Kryvtsov is part of the new generation of war poets – the Ukrainian Wilfred Owens and Siegfried Sassoons if you will. Kryvtsov’s very last poem is now internationally famed for its visceral line ‘my hands torn off will sprout violets in the spring’.
May 1st, 2024. The burning question in Ukraine right now is when the war will end. In the centre of Kyiv, I meet up with a soldier, Alex Matiash, who believes that Ukraine is only halfway through the war. The West seems in no hurry to end military support and the British government has agreed to host Ukrainian refugees until September 2025, suggesting that the war will last at least till then. If we look at the Bosnian War, the last major conflict in Europe, it lasted three and a half years. The Russo-Ukrainian war has already lasted two and a half and, given the Bosnian precursor, it won’t be surprising if the allies put pressure on President Zelensky to negotiate a deal with Russia in the latter half of 2025.
It is hard to say to what extent Ukraine can win this war. It has lost eighteen per cent of its territory to date and there is a sense that much as the allies want to inflict damage on Russia, they aren’t fully committed to victory. A vast country like the USA doesn’t seem to want Ukraine to beat Russia as presumably it would subvert the world order in which the strongest dominates.
The allies have warned us that Putin won’t end his imperialist ambitions in Ukraine. David Cameron exerted pressure on the USA to fund Ukraine by comparing Putin to Hitler, but are Putin’s aims what they are said to be or are such claims just an excuse to increase Western military intervention? One can’t help being sceptical after the duplicitous grounds the UK and the US posited for invading Iraq. Putin’s plans to subjugate Europe may be as apocryphal as Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, but the crucial difference is that Putin does hold nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, even if Putin does harbour expansionist aims it is doubtful if he will be able to execute them, judging by the attritional nature of the ‘special military operation’. At the rate of progression in Avdiivka and Bakhmut, it would take Russia decades to advance into Western Europe.
Escalation into a nuclear conflict is still possible, even if the West calls Russian threats ‘sabre-rattling’. There is the other considerable risk of Russia wreaking nuclear disaster if forced to withdraw. The Russian soldiers occupying Zaporizhia nuclear power plant will not hesitate to destroy it. The war moreover has had the unfortunate effect of sending Russia into the arms of China. In my forthcoming novel, The Memorisers, due to be published in January 2025, I envisage Russia unleashing nuclear war on the West, then uniting with China to conquer Europe. Fanciful? The war in Ukraine has sparked our paranoia as well as stoking fears about the durability of the existing world order.
It is regrettable that after years of cold war between the West and Russia, a hot war has finally arrived. David Cameron made an unfortunate reference to donating weapons to Ukraine that were ‘past their expiration date’, making killing machines sound as innocuous as out-of-date vegetables. As former UK defence minister Ben Wallace termed it, ‘Ukraine has tragically become a battle lab.’ The east of Ukraine is almost a showroom catalogue for British weapons or some sort of live expo from an Ironman movie. The UK company BAE Systems, has reportedly made huge profits. In spite of sanctions on Russia, the UK has also been happily selling components found in missiles and drones to countries like Armenia and Georgia who transport them to Russia. The one-upmanship between nations trying to land lucrative arms contracts is unedifying: not muscle-flexing but missile-flexing.
The allies mistakenly believed that the war was ‘an existential fight’ for the Ukrainians. For those in the east of Ukraine, it is an existential battle, but the west and centre have been largely untouched by warfare and some residents lead relatively normal lives. Senator Lindsey Graham made the infamous argument that, ‘As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.’ However, the Ukrainians’ westernised mentality means that most are too free-thinking and individualistic to sacrifice their lives for land.
May 3rd. My last full day in Kyiv. Ukraine’s Western leanings are why many of us Westerners are drawn there. Some go for humanitarian reasons, some to fight and others to write. Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier of his need to live among the destitute miners to ‘feel myself temporarily part of their world’. In the same way, meeting Ukrainians for me draws on an experiential tradition that stretches all the way back to Engels. In his address ‘On writing The Condition of the Working Class in England’, he said:
I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors.
In all honesty, there is a further reason to witness wartime Ukraine. Being here makes me understand the privilege of being alive. It’s often the case that we humans need constant reminders of our mortality in order to fully enjoy our existence.
During my trips, I think of myself as a soldier in the war of information and I’m on a mission to tell the truth as I find it. I appreciate the freedom I’ve been granted in travelling to war-torn cities like Kherson and Kharkiv. My passport has been checked by soldiers and police at numerous train stations in Ukraine, but no one has ever questioned me, except for the time I naively wrote notes on a Kharkiv street and a soldier confronted me. Because I come from a culturally divided society in Northern Ireland, I understand the sensitivities and contradictions. Not all Ukrainians are in favour of joining the EU and some still speak in their native Russian or call cities by their Russian names in spite of supporting Ukrainian forces. Overall, Westerners are warmly welcomed as our money helps the ailing economy and our moral support sustains the Ukrainians when they perceive that the allies are wavering.
We writers are, however, considered dangerous by Russia and are frequently targeted. When I recently posted an article about Ukraine on Facebook, a propagandist responded with pro-Russian comments. He was hiding behind a Gaelic name, posting nothing but the occasional Irish landscape photo and giving no clue as to his Russian identity, but these disrupters are increasingly infiltrating social media.
It’s only when the war is over that the true human cost will be evaluated. There is much more to be uncovered than torture chambers in Russian-occupied basements. Some foreigners have exploited the chaos of war for their own nefarious ends. A humanitarian worker, Yasya Golovko, told me in 2022 that she knew of a female aid worker going missing in Ukraine, presumed dead. She said that the missing woman had been working with a supposedly rich philanthropic American who had since disappeared from Ukraine himself.
It is hard during times of war to tell the truth. Zelensky tried to show transparency by admitting in February 2024 that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died in the war, but the US had already estimated that the number could be close to 70,000. The balance between propaganda and boosting a nation’s morale is very fine. Ukraine is infinitely more open than Russia, but naturally they too suppress the truth. For example, you might hear of an attack on a Ukrainian school with no mention of the soldiers billeted there. This doesn’t negate the fact that Russia has implemented a policy of terror on Ukraine by killing nearly 11,000 civilians.
May 4th. The bus from Kyiv to Warsaw is nearing the Polish border, shuddering over railway tracks and slaloming past the concrete blocks and tyres of military checkpoints. On my very first bus journey from Ukraine in June 2022, I talked to a teenager, Dasha, who told me fervently that she didn’t want the war to end. ‘We have lost too much,’ she explained, ‘to be able to stop now.’ But there is no such thing as losing too much, as there is always more to lose. I can only hope that the allies will enable Ukrainians to claw back enough land to feel that they have won overall.
As I’m writing these words, a message comes through on my phone from Alexei, my Zaporizhian translator. He tells me the latest news about Natalya, the mayor of Vilniansk. I’d met with Natalya on a sunny day last September when she’d spoken to me about her son, Igor, serving on the front line and her hopes for his safety. Alexei informs me that Igor has been killed in battle and all I can think of is how Natalya had talked of her mayoral duty to view the bodies of soldiers repatriated to their families in Vilniansk. It’s unbearably painful to think of her viewing her son’s body in both her official and personal capacity.
The one thing I’ve learnt above all from visiting Ukraine is that war is not about nations or patriotism or ideology: it’s about people; it’s about flesh and blood. The truth is that there is nothing like war for making you value your own body. The most powerful moments in this conflict that linger in the mind are the small private moments of individuals. In the giant theatre of war it is not the military leaders but the minor characters who tell the most compelling tales.
23/9/2024
