Here in Kharkiv, amidst the daily siren wails signalling imminent missile and drone attack – echoed by app-shrieks from mobile phones warning of the same – and occasional strikes on apartment buildings, Ukrainians exist.
“But even now, almost one thousand days since the war started” says Lluda Goroshko, “it’s still difficult to believe they want to kill us.”
Unlike many of their friends, it did not occur to Lluda or her husband Yegor to leave their native Kharkiv. Yegor is a doctor of radio physics who managed a large IT company of 160 people spread between Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Prague up until the first day of Russia’s invasion. Instead, they and a friend stayed, founding “Hell’s Kitchen”. The kitchen’s volunteers have provided hundreds of thousands of hot meals and bread to medical staff, the city’s vulnerable, and defending troops.
Kharkiv is this country’s second largest city and is just a couple of dozen kilometres away from pitched trench warfare between Russian and Ukrainian forces further east. At the beginning of the war, Russian forces reached the outskirts before being counter-attacked. Now, missiles and drones, produced in varying proportions by an alliance of Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian technology, loiter above the city before finding their targets, mostly in the industrial edges of this urban sprawl.
Thousands of foreigners have stiffened the fight by coming to support Ukrainian survival – feeding the vulnerable, providing medical training, rescuing animals, rebuilding houses, repairing vehicles, their very presence boosting Ukrainian morale.
Vladimir Putin’s argument for invasion was simple, Hobbesian, and purpose-made for a Russian population captive to the nationalistic monotones of state-controlled media: Ukrainians and Russians spring from the same root; Ukrainians speak Russian, and the Ukrainian language is but a crude dialect; Ukrainians lived under the Czarist state since the late 18th century, and they had been a constituent part of the USSR; ergo, Ukrainians are Russian.
Inextricably linked to the Russkiy mir, or Russian World, in Putin’s clearly articulated world view, Ukraine is now a delinquent state gravitating to EU and NATO accession. “Golda Meir said if people say they want to kill you, believe them,” says Yegor. “But to believe them, you have to change your whole life, to change the way you think, and we didn’t want to do that. But they meant what they said, and our mistake was not to believe them, and not to change soon enough.”
To say that Ukrainians “exist” underscores the unintended consequence of Putin’s miscalculation of Ukrainian national feeling, as well as a truism of war. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its mass killings of civilians, the high-explosive dismemberment of cities and villages, and large-scale transfer of Ukrainians into Russia, Ukrainians overwhelmingly rallied around their flag, government, and cultural singularity. Invasion provoked the opposite result of what Russia had calculated: it prompted national indignation.
This life-force of indignation has sustained Ukraine’s stubborn resistance ever since. Surely, as one travels from western to eastern Ukraine, language changes, much as it changes moving from south to north in the United Kingdom. While in the far western city of Lviv Ukrainian predominates, in Kharkiv most speak Russian. To assume, however, that Russian speakers regard themselves as Russian is as mistaken as believing that English-speaking Scots must regard themselves as English.
If one were to do so, it would stoke the kind of indignation, frigid anger, resistance, and patriotism which is a truism of many wars. Transpose the feelings of Sarajevans resisting Serbia’s siege, Londoners during the Blitz, Poles under Nazi occupation, you have this generation of Ukrainians.
Apart from their trade in common armaments, what is common in the confluence of Russia, Iran and its proxies, North Korea, and China is their totalitarian instinct. What has been surprising for many in the Western generation, which came of age at the end of the Cold war, is the resurgence of totalitarianism as a political force in great power politics, and as a political instinct now playing out in the echelons of elite Western universities, and in the streets of liberal democratic countries whose systems make open protest possible. It comes from the Left and the Right.
But not here in Kharkiv. Alighting from the train, a young soldier takes my hand in thanks. This spontaneous gesture signifies a different stripe of instinct common to those who find themselves in Ukraine, helping with the war effort and the resistance to totalitarianism in great and small ways. Thousands of foreigners have stiffened the fight by coming to support Ukrainian survival – feeding the vulnerable, providing medical training, rescuing animals, rebuilding houses, repairing vehicles, their very presence boosting Ukrainian morale.
At first, war brought Yegor and Lluda “a loss of freedom”. Quickly however, everything they once regarded as important lost its value. Instead, material value was usurped by values. “Things become black and white. There’s a saying in the movie Fight Club,” says Yegor. “It’s only when you lose everything you become free.” Within a month the first foreign volunteer arrived under shellfire. “It was a huge shock for us, and huge motivation. These people, they came to help us. For what? Why?”
What is also remarkable and a source of optimism for a person of liberal democratic instincts in Ukraine is those volunteers who are not Ukrainian, but who sacrificed their lives for the highest ideals. In the memorials here to the tens of thousands of people who have died defending Ukraine, you will find Uyghurs, Iranians, Chinese, Russians, Americans, Latinos, South Africans, Indians, and Australians and New Zealanders, people whose bodies mostly will forever lie in a foreign soil. Here, where every citizen does what they can for the war effort, volunteerism is fundamental to Ukraine’s survival.
For anybody steeped in history, this volunteerism answers a profound question hovering over human affairs and sharpened since the Second World War: what would we do, when confronted by tyranny? On the battlefield and in the soup kitchens of Ukraine, that question is answered by those who came here and who see resistance to Russian aggression as a common human enterprise. The fight against Russia’s imperialism is a first line of defence against the current erosion of democratic norms and ideals throughout the world, and against the use of violence so blithely promoted by those who have only ever known peace.
To assume that Russian speakers regard themselves as Russian is as mistaken as believing that English-speaking Scots must regard themselves as English.
“The Russians were honest with us,” says Yegor. “It’s very important for the whole world to listen to what Russia says, because they mean it. Don’t listen to us, listen to them. When they say they want to bomb London, when they say they want to fight Americans, believe them. If it is allowed to happen here in Ukraine, it will happen anywhere. War is now on the table and will not go away by itself.”
There is a stirring refrain exchanged here, almost as common as a “how do you do?” The phase Slava Ukrainii! – glory to Ukraine! – is answered in unison by Heroime slava! – glory the heroes! To an Australian ear, this Homeric cry seems archaic at first hearing, like a line from the movie Spartacus. It signifies, however, a steadfast joint enterprise as imbued with a truth borne of bloody experience and determination as the Republican phrase No Pasaran! – they shall not pass! – during the Spanish civil war.
Of course, war attracts plentiful brigands, profiteers, psychopaths, predators, and the wayward. “There are enough bad and corrupt Ukrainians, too,” says Lluda. But I’ve asked dozens of foreign volunteers why they came here. Their answers are remarkably consistent. Although quietly shared and more prosaically framed than that of a Hollywood film or a propaganda poster, these answers stir in their simple articulation by ordinary people who express a deeply humanistic indignation: It was Russia’s invasion of a peaceful country, and it must be stopped. It’s just wrong.
