Everyone has suffered. Everyone shares the pain. Everyone lives in uncertainty. Everyone believes that the war will continue. But they want it to end now. Everyone is trying to continue on their land and now they no longer want to leave: they will not be refugees, they say, because this is their country. they are Ukrainians.
The world has never talked about it so much. They are new, if you like, in Western mental construction. Ukrainians who were on the map of Eastern Europe, but until now not in the Western gaze. Until before the invasion, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, a sovereign country, was not seen as dissociated from Russia, perhaps from its motherland. But now Ukraine is Ukraine, even if Russia – as this note is writing – is very close to securing 20% of the conquered territory and accelerates the annexation of the eastern cordon.
Ukrainians see as the Donbas, that agricultural and metallurgical industrial corridor, escapes him. He is taken by them. But that’s not why they resign or assume defeat. These are critical weeks, of blood and exhaustion for them, but even so, listening to them, guess what collective dream: a free country, seeking to enter the European Union and to get out of the Russian anachronism of the past.
The war continues and the women and men they talked to Clarionealong the more than a hundred days of death and disaster.
To those from Kyiv, the capital, they are offended that kyiv is not pronounced Kyiv. The West uses the Russian pronunciation. Not the word in Ukrainian language. The West has a hard time understanding this. And this Ukraine was Russia and it shares its cultural heritage, its idiosyncratic footprint, its people are the same people, its features are similar, its history is common, that of the tsars and that of socialism, its architecture is similar. The divorce of the two nations is so violent because the glue that unites them is so powerful.
But the Ukrainians are above all that: Ukrainians. Clarione entered their lives. The correspondents of this newspaper visited their stories and accompanied them in their routine. Some in their classic routine, in their usual life; others, in their new routines of warfare and survival.
The Mariupol survivor sang the same songs as the Kiev student. The electrical engineer-turned-soldier in Zapoiriya equaled the young bartender who fled Kharviv. Natalia was also returning to Kharviv from Odessa to see if her house was still standing. But above all to try to resume her life, since the vast majority of them tried the same at the end of May.
Although the war was still going on in the Donetsk and Lughansk regions, in the 1,500-year-old capital of kiev, the return of the movement was evident: trams, subways, skateboards, bars, soldiers returning from the front to meet their wives and girlfriends again, street performers back on the streets. A certain relaxation at the checkpoints.
Lives have reorganized with an aura of hope. Even in the eyes of Igor, another survivor of the destroyed Mariupol, there were new dreams. “How can I live in Argentina?”, I ask. He seemed serious, but then, when he was told that it might be possible to help him, the man hesitated: his country is Ukraine and anyway, he said, there he had to exhaust the possibilities for himself and his family.
Artem did not dare to toast “because the tragedy continues”, but he had opened his own brewery. He blamed a certain melancholy for the dispersion of his family. “My relatives are in Odessa and Mariupol”, he said, “I don’t know when I will see them again. But I hope soon”.
Ukraine is at this point a country without political divisions. With a bureaucracy and without opposition. An immigrant from Nicaragua, Vanesa, ran an underground theater in Kiev. She was a young leftist, open and progressive in her ideas of hers. Until before the war she had been critical of President Volodomyr Zelensky. You said you were a center-right populist, “more of a clown than a president”. But her attitude towards the Russian invasion had changed her mind. “That man defended our interests, he did the same as we would,” she explained.
Now him soldier president, which addresses usury and human loss, perhaps already too much, remains a reference for all Ukrainians. While asking for more weapons from NATO, he is managing a new period of war: that of the exhaustion of the troops of his country, that of the hundred soldiers killed every day and that of Russia which is established in the eastern geographies. It does not lose popularity.
Secretly, Ukrainians believe that sooner or later the time will come great counter-offensive. They feel like they are preparing for it. The teacher, the nurse, the rescuer, the journalist, the students. They are reflected in the same fighting spirit that fueled the Maidan protests in the winter of 2014, when police batons shook them in the name of a government that was presumed to be pro-Russian at the time.
That force is the same one that resists now. Ukrainians are not surprised at all. They are used to living in resistance. They don’t despair because they have learned to wait. They have learned to defend themselves. They managed to drive the Russians out of Kiev. They wait a little longer. Rebuild and rearrange to fight. They know they will have to wait for that, but in the meantime, they say, they will try to keep living.
Photo production: Sergio Araujo (special correspondent in Ukraine)
Gonzalo Sanchez
Source: Clarin
