The Long War #3
KYIV—The train connecting the Polish town of Chelm to Kyiv stops for some time at the Yahodin border crossing point. Once all passports had been checked, I took the opportunity to enjoy some fresh air (these compartments get hot) and went out onto the platform with dozens of other passengers. It was quiet and peaceful, a light breeze, birds chirping above the train station. And it made me wonder: could someone, dropped in that train and on that platform with zero knowledge of the current situation, guess that the country around him is at war?
Let’s say that hypothetical person doesn’t speak Ukrainian or Russian. They cannot understand when a woman in the train car, hugging a tiny dog, recalls the first days of the Russian invasion, her frantic run to find pet food as missiles fell on her hometown of Boryspil, on the outskirts of Kyiv. Nervous discussions about military recruiting offices and whether to come back for good escape them as well.
They step out onto the platform and look around them. It’s a quiet evening, without air raid sirens or missiles falling down. A border guard walks past, a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung across his back. Not uncommon, even before the war, and none of the border guards look particularly tense. Most are smoking and barely paying attention to the passengers.
There is something unusual, however — along the platform, middle-aged women making nervous phone calls, kids running around, and teenagers forming groups and smiling when a dog lays motionless on his back, legs up in the air, for several minutes. Except for a few pensioners, there are almost no men.
It’s a hot July evening, and the train won’t leave for another two hours (not that strange for Ukrainian railways), so our observer decides to follow a group of passengers to the nearby magazin and buy ice cream. The border guards’ building is just on the left, so our observer may give a brief look to the sandbags laid down along one of its corners. Then again, the sandbags barely reach 50 centimeters high and already look old, as if they’ve been there for several years.
There’s one final clue that could tip them off. As they walk back to the platform, ice cream in his hand, our observer notices the transparent tape crisscrossing every single of the train station’s windows. If they know what the point of the tape is — to prevent the windows from shattering into hundreds of pieces in case of shelling — they will probably be able to deduce that they are, in fact, in a country at war. Still, for now, everything is calm.
Something to read
🏭 (Institute for Human Sciences) The “Russian Minority in Donbas” and the History of the Majority “For Ukraine, Donbas has been an unloved child, an unconvertible enfant terrible. Still, it was family. I grew up with all of this in the 1990s and 2000s. For years, I shared the common Donbas-centricity. In my father’s village, I laughed at mistakes in my cousin’s Russian-language workbook. In my school, I flipped with surprise through new textbooks with the greatest texts of Russian literature translated into Ukrainian.” (Yulia Abibok is one of the most knowledgeable people about Donbas, as well as a nuanced and humane researcher. Moscow claiming its main war goal to be the “liberation” of the Donbas region makes it all the more important to understand the complex history and identities for this region, and this piece is a great and personal attempt to explain it.)
🤹♂️ (openDemocracy) The rise and fall of Putin’s man in Ukraine (it’s difficult to overstate the role that Ukrainian oligarch and ferociously pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk played in post-Soviet Ukrainian politics. And, in the past two years, the increasingly intense pressure he faced from Ukrainian authorities - culminating with the ban of 3 TV channels he owned and his own arrest in the first half of 2021 - might have been one of the elements that convinced Putin that only an armed invasion could topple the current government.)
❓ (Sam Greene) Why Putin fights (the distinction between Russia’s national security and Putin’s regime security made here by Sam Greene, the director of the Russia Institute at King's College London, is thought-provoking. But it also more generally made me think about the evolution of the Russian regime in the past ten years and how it made this war possible. There’s a view that, had Moscow done what it is doing now in Ukraine back in 2014, it would most likely have managed to capture Kyiv and install a pro-Russian puppet government, as it would have faced a Ukrainian military considerably weaker now than it is today. That’s for the military aspect — but could the Russian regime have survived such an operation intact? Wasn’t Putin’s gradual turn to full dictatorship — marked by the August 2020 assassination attempt on Alexey Navalny and the subsequent crushing of any opposition — a necessary step to ensure that the Russian regime could start such an operation and keep the Russian state coherent?)
Something to see
Something else worth checking out
Supply of drinking water is a real issue in the frontline city of Mykolaiv, leading activists to put together a map to help locals find distribution water points.