Tim Judah - In Wartime - Stories from Ukraine

Anna told me that as a schoolgirl she had written poems, but that because she had been the youngest of eleven, her parents could not afford to give her much of an education. Now, bored and unable to sleep at night, she had begun to write again. A poem called “Fighters” begins like this:

Novorossiya is the name of the would-be state comprising the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. The poem goes on to refer to President Poroshenko and the Ukrainian government:

And finally:

At this point, in the spring of 2015, Ukraine’s forces were not strong enough to retake what they call the “occupied territories,” and the rebels, even with Russian support, were not strong enough to take more territory from the government they called the “fascist junta.” Before the war there was no oppression of Russians and Russian-speakers in the east, as pro-Russians claimed, not least because President Yanukovych, who came from here, and his Donetsk clan actually dominated the whole country. There was no hatred between people. But the war had changed that: some were leaving and the region was becoming ever more of a strange, decaying and increasingly empty place that echoed to endless lofty-sounding exhortations to fight the fascists. What was clear, though, was that in a year the situation had changed. The Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics had emerged as real political entities just as in the other post-Soviet breakaway regions, and like the Serb areas did in the former Yugoslavia. In Croatia, one, Krajina, was swept away by war in 1995, but in Bosnia the Republika Srpska exists today as a semi-independent quasi-state. People live side by side in Bosnia, but don’t have much to do with one another. Both scenarios are possible in Ukraine’s east, and Ukrainian politicians have talked about the “Croatian model,” by which they mean freeze the lines, build up your forces and reconquer when you are ready.

Whatever happened, Anna said that if her home remained under Ukrainian control, eventually, “in the worst case,” she and her family would see if they could make a new home somewhere in Russia. She was not typical in being an eighty-seven-year-old bomb shelter poet, and neither was Olena, as a poet determined to put down her pen and pick up a gun. But, to return to the thoughts of the security source, the problem now was that whatever opinion polls said before the war, whatever people thought then and given that the social structure of the rebel-held territories had changed, especially thanks to the flight above all of middle-class and younger people, it was not just those who fought for Ukraine who believed they were fighting a war of independence. Both sides did and thus both were fighting for their borders.

According to the press in Odessa, Andrey Stavnitser is one of the city’s wealthiest men. That does not put him in Ukraine’s oligarch class by any means but, as he runs a particularly successful port business, which was built from scratch, it makes what he has to say especially interesting. In October 2013 he was thirty-one years old. A month later President Yanukovych was due to sign the two key agreements which would begin the process of integrating Ukraine and its economy with the European Union. It was a time of fierce debate. Those who were against the proposal said it would harm the Ukrainian economy because those Ukrainian exporters who were dependent on the Russian market would lose out. They believed that Ukraine should instead join Russia’s Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Supporters of the EU option said that while the transition would be difficult, the pain of transition would pay dividends within a few years. And there was a third position, as I found out from Andrey. Though for his business it would be better to enter the Customs Union because then he could expect more Russian cargoes, EU standards would be great if they could curb corruption and “as a citizen, I would vote for the EU.” In the Customs Union Russia would again dominate Ukraine and thus he said: “I would not go there again.”

Eighteen months later the political landscape had utterly changed. The Maidan revolution had come and gone and there was war in the east. Odessa’s people were divided, but the city remained firmly under Ukrainian control. Every now and then bombs exploded at Ukrainian volunteer recruitment offices, but as they went off at night they were clearly designed to intimidate rather than kill. Similar attacks plagued Kharkiv. On May 2, 2014, violent clashes had taken place between pro- and anti-Maidan crowds. The result was that one pro-Ukrainian had died and some forty-seven anti-Maidan pro-Russians, including forty-two in a fire in the large Trade Unions House. After that, the climate in the city changed. Pro-Russians understood that Ukrainians would fight back and Odessa and the south would not be snatched from them without resistance as Crimea had been. Maybe, many concluded, this was a cause not worth dying for. Ukraine’s security services were now on the lookout for separatist activists, and so many of them had fled to Russian-occupied Crimea or the east.

Odessa, founded by Empress Catherine the Great in 1794, is famous for its colorful history and stories. But for Westerners its name more often than not triggers associations with a city that no longer exists. It might conjure up images of the booming nineteenth-century cosmopolitan port in which every language from French to Greek to Albanian was spoken, or the great city of Jewish memory in which a third of the population were Jews. It might make one think of Isaac Babel, the famous writer, born here in 1894 and executed in 1940, a victim of Stalin’s purges. Or possibly the first association might be with the famous Odessa city steps, which lead down to the port and were immortalized in the 1925 Sergei Eisenstein Soviet movie, Battleship Potemkin . In the film, about the 1905 revolution, we see crowds fleeing tsarist troops who are firing on them, and in its most famous scene a pram with a baby careens down the steps. In reality none of this ever happened. Still, Odessa has a lot of history, Odessans are proud of it, but it is history. It is good for bringing tourists here from Ukraine and from Russia. Before the war, large numbers of Westerners also poured off Black Sea cruise ships to be marched around the historic center by fierce, matronly guides. Now I wanted to hear a story of modern Odessa and to hear what Andrey Stavnitser thought of the future.

The source of Andrey’s wealth lies on a deep inlet from the Black Sea, twenty-seven kilometers east of the city. The company and port are called TIS, or Transinvestservice. Ships sail up the inlet to either unload imports to Ukraine or, more likely, load its exports. Bulk carriers filled with fertilizers, grain, iron ore and coal leave from here. As grain pours down shoots into ships berthed at the terminal, clouds of dust rise from the holds. Along the dockside there are hills of coal and iron ore pellets. Vegetable oils and wood chips also flow out of Ukraine from here. The machinery is modern, the steel silos gleam in the sunlight and the foundations of a vast new warehousing section have been dug. Over the last twenty years some $350 million has been invested here, and it shows. The company employs about 3,500 people, and this is as modern and successful a business as you will find anywhere in Ukraine.