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Ukraine: the price of freedom

2020-06-07T03:42:57.682Z


Chronicle of a trip through Ukraine a year after the arrival to power of President Zelenski. From the magical city of Kiev we enter the country in an attempt to understand how the citizens of this motley and multicultural territory in the heart of Europe breathe, resist, fight and dream, in continuous tension with an overwhelming and expansionist Russia.


Ukraine, land of contrasts, seeks itself in harsh conditions. This key country for the stability of Europe has been attacked by Russia, which took the Crimean peninsula from it and which supports separatists in the Donbas region. It has also been the victim of corruption, incompetence and selfishness of its ruling class. More than a year after the inauguration of President Volodímir Zelenski, in May 2019, faith in the future is cooling and new challenges, such as the coronavirus, have added to the previous ones.

The task of uniting the Ukrainians, divided between those who looked towards Russia and those who oriented towards Europe, is titanic, due to the magnitude of the accumulated problems and due to the inexperience of the president, a comical actor supported by 73% of voters .

In search of clues to understand why one of the richest countries in Europe has become the poorest on the continent, we undertook several trips around Ukraine. A veteran colleague advised us "to start with the Ukrainian soul, the land of our great poet."

Taras Shevchenko, the father of the modern Ukrainian language, painter and revolutionary, was born in 1814 in Mórintsi, as a servant of the Engelhardt, a family of landowners who vacationed in places now integrated in the province of Cherkasy. The Engelhardts paid painting classes to their gifted servant in St. Petersburg and a group of admirers rescued him for 2,500 rubles.

So, one Saturday morning in a rickety bus we headed to Shevchénkov (formerly Kirílovka). It is the center of the writer's "homeland", understanding as such the geographical and cultural environment of his childhood and adolescence. The contours of two Orthodox temples, one of the Moscow Patriarchate and the other of the Kiev Patriarchate, were sharply cut into the sky upon arrival.

In the town, the monuments to the famous son represent him as a fragile and angelic boy, and statues of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, do not exist and never were, according to Sergui Smalkó, head of the United Territorial Community (OTG in its abbreviation ukraine) from Shevchénkov. The OTG consists of the union of four neighboring towns, with a total of 4,350 inhabitants, Shevchénkov being the most populated (from 2,300 to 2,400).

The merger of municipalities is part of the decentralizing reform initiated by Ukraine. In Shevchénkov, the new management multiplied municipal revenues, but it shows ineptitude and corruption. Engineer and pedagogue, Smalkó complains that it is "easier to steal money from the State than to spend it correctly".

The old Engelhard estate is today a natural park named after the poet, who, as a child, grazed cattle there and sneakily copied his owner's paintings. We wander through mansions, stables and pavilions come to less. "It would be a great tourist destination if they restored it," says Smalkó.

The people live on agriculture and prepare for the trade in the land. Under a law passed in March, from July 2021 Ukrainian citizens will be able to acquire up to 100 hectares in a single transaction and own up to 10,000 in total. Initially, the bill included sales of up to 200,000 hectares, which alarmed farmers such as Nikolái Olínik, head of a family-owned agricultural company in Shevchénkov. Practice will tell whether their fear of the dictatorship of large agricultural companies and over-exploitation of the land was justified.

see photo gallery A street market in the same town. Oleksandr Klymenko

Olínik owns 10 hectares (two parcels of an old Soviet collective farm “bought irregularly”, as he himself confesses) and leases 4 more hectares. Owner of three tractors, three trucks and a refrigerator, he has no debts and avoids intermediaries.

Fruits from the region cannot compete in the EU, and on the Ukrainian domestic market, Polish apples rival local ones in price. The blockade of trade with Russia, as a consequence of the 2014 conflicts, damaged fruit exports. "Before, dozens of trucks left every day for Russia, which now can choose Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian apples and their own," says Olínik.

Beyond the sanctions, there is still a network of capillaries or “alternative routes through the Crimea, Donetsk or Belarus” between Ukraine and Russia, and trucks loaded with apples continue to pass through them, Olínik explains. Similarly, on twisted roads, raw materials and industrial products circulate between the two Slavic countries, which use intermediaries in Belarus or Kazakhstan.

We visited the poet's youth spaces and left Shevchénkov by bus, after waiting for the number of passengers to suffice to pay for the trip to the capital of Ukraine.

The faded facades, the infinite potholes and the dark underpasses do not detract from the power of seduction to Kiev, a city of 2.9 million inhabitants where tracks are woven; of Slavic religious passions from the Middle Ages, of the industrialization of the early 20th century and of Soviet development.

People from every region of Ukraine come to this cultural melting pot that is Kiev, especially those destabilized by Russia.


People from all corners of Ukraine come to this melting pot of cultures, and in recent years especially from the regions destabilized by Russia. In Kiev, the Crimean Tatars rebuilt the self-governing bodies that the Kremlin vetoed on the peninsula; Isolazia, an art gallery in Donetsk, was reopened in Kiev, the original headquarters of which was an old insulation material factory and converted into a barracks and prison. More provincial than Paris or Berlin and more relaxed than Moscow, however, Kiev may be insecure for journalists and politicians, judging by the attacks against them here.

In Kiev we attended an exhibition by Olexandr Roitburd, director of the Odessa Museum of Fine Arts. Motifs such as salo (bacon), pickled cucumbers, herrings, vodka, and slices of black bread were repeated in the artist's still-life. Among the attendees we meet Russian journalists, fugitives from censorship in their country, and also Vladimir Kazarin, rector of the Tavrida National University (UNT), a Crimean educational institution, evacuated from Simferopol.

After the annexation of the peninsula, Kazarin resisted in his position as head of chair of Russian Literature as a foreign body in an increasingly police environment. In 2015, with the Federal Security Service (FSB) chasing him for his criticism of new leaders, he relocated his chair to Kiev. With the help of the Ukrainian Ministry of Education, he recast the UNT and is now fighting to secure it in the capital. On the Black Sea peninsula, Russia regrouped higher education centers into a new entity, the Federal University of Crimea.

Kazarin estimates that 17 Ukrainian higher education institutions were displaced by war and annexation. Some academic collectives split, such as the University of Donetsk, others were recreated in Kiev-controlled territory, sometimes alongside mines and factories, practically on the front line. Teachers and students lived through heartbreaking dilemmas.

see photo gallery A street scene in Lviv. Oleksandr Klymenko

"Our University has about 3,500 students and we hope to reach 3,000 graduates this course," Kazarin explained. “In 2016, the first year we handed out degrees, almost all of our students were from Crimea and Donbas. Later, the proportion of those who come from other regions and also from abroad began to grow, ”he explains. The UNT is financed by the State in 46%.

Among those displaced from Donbas is Irina Zemenchuk, a waitress in a hotel in Kiev. Zemenchuk was employed by a Donetsk chocolate factory and lived in Marinka, a nearby town, which the separatists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and the Kiev troops disputed in 2014. The former “hung up their flag and left a checkpoint of 10 people ”, the seconds“ freed us, destroying everything, ”explained this woman who, during the toughest fighting, spent almost an entire day sitting in a chair while the projectiles crossed the air.

“I drank all the alcohol I found in the house, then I put on my best clothes and went outside. Bullets hissed around me. A neighbor dragged me to his house and called my children, ”he says. He decided to leave. For his work he receives 9,000 hryvnas a month, about 300 euros. Irina concentrated on the present. One of her sons works in Poland, and the other, Andrí, 30, was a miner and is now a police lieutenant in Kurájove, five kilometers from Márinka.

In search of Irina's abandoned house in Marinka we traveled east on the train linking Kiev to the government-controlled area. Andrí opened the door of a dilapidated building with broken glass, walls swollen with humidity and full of pots, garbage and old newspapers. "Here my brother and I slept," he recalled, and his eyes scanned the "domestic Chernobyl."

“I drank all the alcohol I found in the house, then I put on my best clothes and went outside. Bullets whistled around ”

Since 2014 there is no gas in Márinka and all attempts to fix the supply pipeline end in shootings. Street markets display the salo, herring, and cucumbers portrayed by Roitburd, only here they are tangible and at poor prices. Retired miners like Igor trade with them, deprived of the free coal that corresponds to their pension. The mine where he worked is in independence territory, and coal would not pass controls from one area to another, from one world to another.

To visit his relatives "on the other side," Igor crosses the transit post in Mayorsk. You never know how long it will take in transit. Retirees come from the independence zone to register and prove that they are alive, just as Ukraine demands to pay their pensions.

Sandbags donated by the Red Cross protect the windows of school number two in Marinka. The front is close (at a distance of between two and five kilometers) and occasionally the bullets arrive here. Before the war, 300 children attended school, now there are 195. Since September 2019, education has been taught only in the Ukrainian language. Before, there were two parallel sections, one in Russian and one in Ukrainian, and all subjects were taught in both languages. Now English has more teaching hours than Russian, and Russian literature is studied as foreign, two teachers explain. “We have a state language and we must speak in it. Education must be in the language of the State ”, say Alina and Oxana, deputy directors of the school. In the secessionist zone, the Ukrainian language has been removed from schools. In speech, on the two sides of the controls, Russian, Ukrainian and Súrzhyk coexist, a dialect mixture of both.

see photo gallery View of the city of Kiev and the Dnieper river. Oleksandr Klymenko

While the east is consumed in war, the western Lviv is oriented towards the future. This city of 800,000 inhabitants bet on Europe and the creation of jobs to avoid the massive emigration characteristic of the beginning of this century, explains the Deputy Mayor, Andrí Moskalenko. “Our strategy has worked. We focus on tourism and technology, the most competitive areas for us. In 2019 we received 2.5 million visitors and we have the largest group of high-tech companies in Ukraine, a sector that employs 30,000 people here, ”says Moskalenko. A new technology park will create 10,000 more jobs.

"We have more than 100 companies employing 17,000 people," says Stepán Veselovski, 32, the chief executive of the Lviv IT Cluster, the high-tech group of companies the deputy mayor was referring to. Start Up Depo is in a converted kindergarten, where dozens of companies take their first steps. “When you have more than 15 employees, you usually go somewhere else. We are a working community with educational functions, ”says Veselovski. "My mission is to teach business," he adds.

Lviv specialists compete with other centers in Poland, Belarus and Romania, where there are similar salaries, around $ 2,000 (about 1,800 euros). The Catholic University of Lviv (UCL), a private institution, contributes to training in new technologies. The University is a member of the Lviv IT Cluster, has six faculties including a business school and collaborates with other European centers. Personally, Miroslav Marinovich, the vice chancellor of the University, is concerned about Europe's receptivity to the Moscow propaganda. “Russia has imposed its stereotypes on Ukraine to the West, and even in ecclesiastical circles in the Vatican. To defeat them, our country must work harder politically and diplomatically, ”says this man who was the founder of the Helsinki group in Ukraine and imprisoned for his ideas in the USSR.

In the university hall, an exhibition remembered the Lviv countrymen who perished in the so-called Revolution of Dignity in Kiev (2013-2014) and on the front. The photos and biographies of the dead added a dramatic dimension to the modern, open space, projected by a German architect.

Those killed by Ukraine were also remembered in the church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, which is the parish of the Lviv garrison, that is, of the military stationed in the province. The panels with the images of the "martyrs" were lined up in the temple erected for the Jesuits in the 17th century: Security, Interior, Army, Customs, each institution with its space and its dead, and around them ammunition, casings, exploded mines, instruments of war. Besides, the photos of the orphans.

In Ukraine there is the institution of the military chaplain, and the nine Greek-Catholic priests of this parish take turns to attend to the troops displaced to the east, Father Andrí said. It was Sunday and among the many visitors to the temple were groups of officers taking a course at a training center near Lviv, explained Tania Zioma of the 53rd Army brigade.

"The Church supports with prayers and money, it pays prosthetics, wheelchairs and rehabilitation, because the State does not do enough and this war lasts too long," said Father Andrí. "Europe does not want to recognize what is happening," sentenced the priest. And he continued: “Remember the Budapest memorandum [1994] whereby we surrendered our nuclear weapons and, in return, the United States and other countries promised to help us. Where's the help? They call it conflict because they don't want to fight. There is only one war here and it is with Russia. ”

Back in Kiev, we visited Vitali and Yulia, a couple that El País Semanal interviewed in 2005, when they dreamed of buying a flat in the capital. The couple comes from Luhansk and the parents of both continue residing in that area today controlled by the separatists. The couple continues to live in a rental apartment; Vitali sold the car he worked in as a taxi driver and transferred the small café that he later opened. Yulia continues teaching at a municipal school. The daughter, Dasha, studies at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, but has lost interest in drawing and aspires to be a tourist guide.

"If growth of 3% was expected before the coronavirus, forecasts now indicate a fall of between 4.5% and 11.5%"

“They have reduced the resources that [President] Petró Poroshenko increased for us. Again we will have to ask the parents of the students to pay for the toilet paper and the repair of the classrooms ”, says Yulia, who earns 14,000 hryvna per month (about 475 euros).

"The years go by and with horror I think I can end up like those poor retirees who receive 2,400 hryvn of pension," exclaims the teacher. In Ukraine the average pension is 3,100 hryvna (105 euros) and 80% of retirees earn less than 4,000 hryvna, explains Ella Libánova, director of the institute of demography and social studies. "The number of those who claim to have neither money nor to eat increases and constitutes 15% of the population," said Volodímir Paniotto, director of the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS). That was before the new coronavirus arrived.

Yulia and Vitali have decided to emigrate. The goal is Canada. At the moment, Vitali got a contract as an international trucker for a company in Poland. The coronavirus delayed the issuance of his work visa, but in May he was already driving the roads of Europe driving a heavy vehicle.

Despite its more than 14,000 deaths, the war is fading into people's consciousness. "They are still firing, but the statistics of deaths from accidents and fires exceed those of deaths at the front," observes Olexandr Martinenko, director of the Interfax news agency. The journalist is optimistic "the many supporters to focus on lifting the country and ending the war or at least achieving a truce, to avoid more victims." "This was the message with which Zelenski won the elections," he says. "Ukrainian patriotism that focused on language and support for ethnic traditions is now evolving into a new concept based on support for Ukraine's independence and development," says sociologist Paniotto.

Ukraine is an increasingly agricultural country. Those who consider industry as an essential part of national sovereignty now fear that their homeland will become a colony of multinationals. The industrial production index fell by 8.3% in 2019 and, due to the virus, GDP will need a minimum of seven years to recover the 2013 level, says economist Andrí Nóvak. "If economic growth of 3% was expected before the coronavirus, now the forecasts indicate a fall that can vary between 4.5% and 11.5%," he points out. Positive is that agriculture has not been affected, he says. As for the industry, “it still breathes”, “it conserves knowledge and technology” and requires investments for its modernization. "Ukraine is one of the few countries that owns the entire cycle of space missile production and aircraft construction, but it does not have a state stimulus program because our government lacks strategic thinking," exclaims Nóvak. The expert censors the taste for foreignness of the country's leaders. The Interior Ministry bought helicopters from France instead of ordering them from Motor Sich, in Zaporizhia; the city hall of Kiev, in turn, purchased the trams it could have obtained in Lviv in Poland, and the state railway company awarded Hyundai the trains it would have found at the best price at the Kriúkiv Wagon Factory (KVSZ).

Vladímir Prijodko is the director and owner of the KVSZ and one of the great lawyers of the national industry. His long and distinguished career is associated with this company, of which his father was already a director. Located in Kremenchuk, a city of 220,000 inhabitants next to the Dnieper, the KVSZ produced mainly for Russia until 2013, the year in which Moscow stopped importing wagons and thus ended the cut in purchases, started in 2011, according to Prijodko. "Russia went on to defend its national producers and even blocked our sales to other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States such as Belarus or Kazakhstan," says the executive, adding: "Ukraine must defend the national industry as the United States, China and the European Union and create a structure to lead it. "

In 2012 the KVSZ produced 11,700 wagons, of which about 8,000 were exported to Russia. In 2019 its production was 5,300 wagons. In March, President Zelenski went to the factory and promised that the state would buy him three locomotives and 90 passenger cars. For 2,000 workers, whose average salary is 17,000 hryvna, and 12,000 people in the components industry, these promises would mean work until the end of the year, Prijodko said when we visited him in March.

In his office at KVSZ headquarters, Prijodko claimed that his trains are better and cheaper than Hyundai's, but KVSZ cannot compete with the financial incentives of the Koreans, who "in a conspiracy" were awarded Intercity trains between venues for the Euro 2012 matches.

In the spacious KVSZ workshops are the fruits of unpaid labor, including sleeper cars commissioned by the Ukrainian state railway company and a restaurant car that Tajikistan's railways never picked up. Prijodko seeks joint projects with international companies in the sector, but they are more interested in selling their material than in promoting Ukraine's first wagon factory.

In defense of national industry, Volodimir Gorbulin, former secretary of the Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (1994-1999), also manifests himself. In Soviet times, Gorbulin was responsible for the development of missile systems at the Yushmash company in Dnipropetrovsk (today Dnipró). Gorbulin tries to convince Zelenski to invest in the missile technology Yushmash was championed in the Soviet Union. "Ukraine was the third nuclear power in the world and produced two missile systems, SS 18 and SS 24, which determined the strategic parity of the USSR with the United States in the eighties," explains the engineer, today vice president of the Academy of Ukrainian Sciences.

As the USSR disintegrated, Ukraine had 220 carrier rockets, including 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles with 1,240 nuclear warheads and 44 heavy bombers, equipped with more than 1,000 long-range cruise nuclear missiles. To this were added hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons, he notes. "But the Chernobyl accident made the rejection of nuclear weapons the basic ideology of our country," he notes.

see photo gallery Police officers next to Parliament. Oleksandr Klymenko

Ukraine handed over its nuclear weapons to Russia and signed the non-proliferation treaty as a denuclearized country in 1994, in exchange for international security guarantees that did not become binding. Until 2014, Moscow requested Yushmash's services twice a year to maintain the SS 18 missiles it still owns. Yuzhmash produces for the International Space Station and exports aerospace and satellite launch technology. In the sale of military technology, the company is subject to limitations by Kiev's adherence to the international missile technology control regime.

"To commission our industry, we must convince our leaders that the country needs sufficient means of defense," says Gorbulin. "But our leaders are not strategically minded. They don't know how to play chess. They have not worked in factories and do not know that in order to maintain the industry it is necessary to produce in a chain and not loose units ”, he exclaims. "We must review the planning and management system of the military industrial complex," he says, without giving up.

We had already concluded our trips when the pandemic forced us to make a different one, this time by phone, to find out if our interlocutors had been affected by it. Thus we discover small and large effects of the virus. In Shevchénkov, criminals blew up the town's only bank teller and its inhabitants can only obtain cash in neighboring towns, with which public transport is cut off. Smalkó feared for the municipal budget and the decrease in tax revenues. He will not be able to hire a policeman as he would like and he is installing a firewood heating system in the town to end the monopoly of the gas supplier.

In Kiev, Irina is unemployed because the hotel where she worked dismissed the staff and closed. Depressed, she consoled herself by watching movies about the fields of the Gulag, a disgrace even greater than her own. Her Polish resident son, trapped in Ukraine during a visit due to border closures, was waiting to be reopened by living in the dilapidated family home in Marinka, the city they were still shooting at in April. In eastern Ukraine, checkpoints with secessionist territories were closed and transit was only permitted in exceptional cases. In Kremenchuk, the KVSZ supported the 6,000-person workforce, but 75% had a four-day shift and the president's promise to buy three locomotives and 90 wagons had not materialized. Prijodko denounced economic policy and continued to fight for a national industry.

Perhaps the common denominator of our various interlocutors has to do with freedom and the defense of the ability to choose. These are the two reasons why Martinenko, the son of a Soviet military man and Russian speaker of origin, is "proud to be a Ukrainian." And perhaps these are the reasons why, when asked about the feeling of belonging to this community, Gorbulin, 82, sparked his eyes and began to talk about the Cossacks, “those brave men and lovers of freedom, capable of dying defending their objectives and democratically organized in military formations, which Catherine the Great destroyed ”. And speaking, the engineer, awarded the highest honors of the USSR for his missiles, seemed angry with that empress of Russia.

The love of freedom that reigns in Ukraine has its reverse in individualism. "The Ukrainians have not created their own unified national narrative, and if they do not see the need to meet each other, they have no future," historian Vasyl Rasevich warned us in Lviv. That country of great dreams has not yet known how to add the individual liberties of its diverse people and put them at the harmonious service of a democratic and multicultural State.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-06-07

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