Thoughts on Ukraine

Ukraine has been much in my mind recently. When I started this post, several weeks ago, anarchic scenes from Kyiv were flashing on our TV or PC screens almost daily, and the level of violence compared to that of the Orange Revolution of 2004 was striking and alarming. Things have developed rapidly in a very short period, Crimea has been annexed, and as I write this Russian and American foreign ministers are due to meet to discuss the Ukrainian crisis.

I’m finding it hard to process the contrast of the images of the last few weeks and the Ukraine I visited back in 2007. I started in the western city of Lviv and then travelled east to Kyiv, on an overnight train that was ridiculously cheap for a Westerner, and surprisingly comfortable too.

Lviv was a thoroughly Central European city and wants to be so again. Tellingly, many of those who were killed in the recent violence were from the Lviv region. The elegant and slightly melancholy heart of Lviv is utterly beguiling, and uncannily similar to the Old Town of Kraków, another of my favourite European cities. And of course Lviv was part of Poland; Poles know it as Lwów. I spotted Polish street signed carved into facades, and on several occasions Polish tourists approached me, asking for directions. I wondered if they were the sons and daughters of that great post-war migration of Lvovians westwards to what is now Wrocław. Until 1945 the city was German and called Bresslau; then its German population was expelled from the new Poland.

Although I had some knowledge of Ukraine before visiting, my trip up-ended many of my – embarrassingly clichéd – images of the country. Lviv felt so instantly familiar, as if I had never left Central Europe; it was hard to believe that it was part of the Soviet Union for 40 years, and seeing Cyrillic everywhere seemed disorientating. Kyiv on the other hand conformed much more readily to my image of an “Eastern” city: the profusion of golden onion-domed churches rising up like a thicket of mushrooms, the great chunks of Social Realist architecture so absent from Lviv, or at least its historic centre, and the mix of Ukrainian and Russian languages. I had to keep reminding myself that Western Ukrainians, most of whom are firmly pro-EU and look West, regard a city like Lviv, rather than the Russian-speaking regions of the East, as quintessentially Ukrainian.

Such tensions of identity, and the wider issue of ordinary freedoms, ordinary people versus oligarchs, corruption, and Ukraine’s role in the world are being played out right now, across the country. It was strange, sad and disturbing to see Hrushevskoho street, which I strolled up and down, on balmy summer days, now the scene of violence and pent-up frustration.

Ukraine fascinated me then and is beckoning me back. Ironically, just when the violence escalated in the centre of Kyiv, I had been thinking about another visit, and I want to go back very much. I can only hope that when I do, Ukraine will have turned the corner.