On hope – James Meek in LRB:

“An aspect of that defiance, and a source of guilt, is the refusal to renounce comfort or pleasure. The greatest source of resilience against the shock, anxiety and grief of invasion, Tatyana Li, a psychotherapist in Kyiv, told me, is the universal desire to live. She repeated this several times and laughed when I finally got what she was driving at, the double meaning of ‘Everyone wants to live.’ Everyone wants to survive; but even in wartime, especially in wartime, the urge is to go beyond mere existence, to the point where you feel you have a life.
There are parties, dinners, picnics, plays, conferences, concerts. While I was in town thousands came to the annual book fair at Kyiv’s former arsenal. Market counters are piled high with cherries and slabs of local veal at £4 a kilo. Curfew is from midnight to six, and since restaurant staff need time to clean up and get home, nightlife begins to shut down not long after nine. After eleven, the streets fill up with people rushing home. Mikhail Dubinyansky, a columnist for Ukrainska Pravda, describes the city as being like Paris during the First World War, almost within the invader’s reach for a time, before the front line moves further away, without quite disappearing. He quotes the Kyiv-born Russian poet Max Voloshin’s description of Paris in 1915: Before the Battle of the Marne it saw streams of refugees and hundreds of thousands of soldiers pass through, didn’t sleep for several nights in anticipation of the hoofbeats of the German cavalry, then settled down and got used to the idea that the Germans were eighty kilometres away. Life got back on its feet and adjusted to new circumstances.” (…)

“‘Marxism was essentially an ascetic doctrine,’ Yermolenko writes. ‘This asceticism was only radicalised on Russian soil: throughout the history of the Soviet Union the seeking of pleasure was considered a symptom of petit bourgeois attitude.’ The hedonistic shock to Russia and Ukraine in the 1990s, delivered from the West via consumerism, arrived in a place where, Yermolenko argues, pleasure was still considered a rarity. He sees Russia’s invasive policies and the endemic corruption of both countries as a response to the idea that there can never be enough good things for everyone, so you have to grab what you can before anyone else does.”

(…)

“You see a few soldiers on every metro train. You see crutches and slings; you see prostheses, not many, but when a young man is larking about and laughing with his right lower leg made of steel and rubber, you make your guess. I heard about an injured soldier, the brother of a friend’s friend, who was sent to a hospital in Kyiv. He was put on a ward with men who’d lost arms and legs, and was so traumatised by guilt that his sister found him worse when he was discharged than when he was admitted.”

(…)

“Kyiv is still under direct attack from the air. After each strike, the streets are cleaned and repaired, the rubble removed, and the scars become a little less obvious. A large city – before the war, Kyiv was the seventh most populous in Europe – can take many blows before the damage leaps out at the visitor. In summer, it’s shaggy with trees, and the foliage helps hide the marks. One day outside Lukianivska metro station, which was busy with people, in a street with heavy traffic, I realised half the windows in a nearby skyscraper were missing. I turned and saw the row of shops opposite was boarded up. A slogan on the plywood in the window of Flora de Luxe, a flower shop, read: ‘Even in wartime, flowers bloom.’ All the glass in the windows of the six floors of apartments above the shops had been blown out, and the roof was a mess of shattered bricks. Later I searched online to see what had happened. The area had been hit by Russian missiles a few weeks after the invasion began, when Russian troops were still on the outskirts of Kyiv. Pictures of the immediate aftermath show the street barricaded against Russian ground assault with tyres, concrete blocks and makeshift tank traps. All that’s gone now, but the flats, offices and shops haven’t been repaired. The residents have joined the displaced. The invasion has escaped the confines of eventhood and become a narrative, with episodes. Instead of an extraordinary thing that happened, it threatens to become the entire framework within which personal memories have to find space.”

(…)

“But as I write, the offensive has been going for two months, and Ukrainian troops are five miles from where they began, taking losses, having to fight for every treeline, every field, every yard.”

(…)

“The Anglicisation of Kyiv is a marker of wary openness towards what are seen, in this still highly gendered, socially conservative country, as ‘European values’. A new law privileging the use of English, requiring senior civil servants to know the language, which in its original form barred the dubbing of English-language films into Ukrainian, begins with a reference to ‘the European identity of the Ukrainian people and the irreversibility of Ukraine’s European and Euro-Atlantic course’.
What are the ‘European values’ Ukraine aspires to, when its staunchest West European ally has flounced out of the European Union that Ukraine is desperate to join? One obvious aspect of European values is essentially leftist, a welfare-rooted social contract between capital and labour, but socialism, even social democracy, is all but dead in Ukraine. Mention of the executed renaissance seldom leads to discussion of the nature of the communism under which it flourished. Even now, in the middle of the war, civil politics continues in Kyiv: posters outside my hotel bearing Orwellian slogans like truth is our strength and weapons are the language of war turned out to be from an army fundraising campaign run by Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky’s predecessor and rival. Yet neither the Zelensky nor the Poroshenko camp have ideologies in the usual political sense, just a list of tasks: beat Russia, join Nato and the EU, fight corruption. When Zelensky’s quickly formed party won a parliamentary majority in 2019, the new intake went to a summer school in a Carpathian spa to learn from the Kyiv School of Economics what economics was.”

(…)

“In Kyiv I met Alisa Shampanska, a gender-fluid queer anarchist and member of the Ukrainian feminist group FemSolution, which until the invasion took a pacifist, anti-militarist line; Russia’s limited intervention in eastern Ukraine, starting in 2014, didn’t seem to them worth fighting over. Shampanska was in Odesa in the early days of the Russian assault. Overnight they went from being a pacifist to filling sandbags and trying to enrol in the territorial defence force. Their girlfriend lied that she knew how to weld so she could get a job building tank traps. Gradually Shampanska came to the difficult conclusion that one of the country’s most unpleasant social minorities, the queer-bashing ultra-nationalist racists, had been right about one thing all along. ‘All those years, they told us Russia is the main enemy,’ they said. ‘That Russia will attack us, that the Russians don’t give a shit about us and they will come and kill us and we should prepare ... at the time I thought yeah, this is populism. And this is bad populism and they are bad for human rights. But about this, they were correct.’ It wasn’t easy to be Shampanska before the invasion, with their male ID designation and appearance, their uncertainty over whether to seek hormone therapy, and their difficulties in navigating a gendered language: to use the female first-person ending of the past tense is to expose yourself, to use the male ending is to hide. They still have that to deal with, but now they also worry about their friends and family being killed, and that the troops fighting the Russians in Zaporizhzhia are short of gear. I read Shampanska the UCU resolution; they disagreed with it, not angrily, because it so closely echoed their own lost illusions. ‘Maybe if I was living in Europe, I would be saying something like this. Maybe I would be another kind of person. But for us, there’s no other choice. We don’t have big cool tanks and aircraft of our own. It would be cool if them calling on Russia to withdraw troops would work. It would be a better option. It’s a very nice position. But Russia isn’t listening to teachers in Britain or politicians in Britain or anyone. It doesn’t care what we think would be better.’”

Read the article here.

This is a good and insightful article, once again, by James Meek about the situation in Ukraine. What kind of country Ukraine will become after the war is also according to many Ukrainians unclear.

When I was last September in Ukraine a man was very skeptical that the corruption would disappear. He saw a kleptocracy coming.

The lack of news in many Westerns news outlets is not only because than only the obvious war fatigue; the offensive is as successful as many offensives in World War I.

Solidarity does exist during war time, but it fades away very soon. As we know.

And despite the Anglicisation of Kyiv I don’t think that the conservative mainstream in Ukraine, which sees in anybody who is willing to accept different forms of family life and love an enemy, will be less strong after an armistice.

Putin managed to unite the Ukrainian people, but for how long that’s the question.