There is a phrase that I can’t stop thinking about since someone said it to me. ukrainian deputy of the liberal party during a meeting in kyiv in February last year. I asked her if she was willing to accept Ukraine handing over territory to Russia as long as the conflict ended. She agilely changed the focus of the conversation from territorial transfers to security guarantees with a couple of sentences: My husband is currently fighting on the front lines.he told me, and of course my priority is for him to come back. But we have a 13-year-old son, and what we don’t want for anything in the world is for him to have to fight in a few years the war that his parents couldn’t finish forever, he added.
That is why both ordinary Ukrainians and the Government of Volodymyr Zelensky constantly insist on these security guarantees as a condition without which not to silence the weapons. How can they be sure that Russia will not take advantage of a ceasefire or a precarious peace agreement to regroup, strengthen and attack again more fiercely in a few years, thus completing its goal of completely dominating Ukraine?
Ukrainians do not want to stumble over the same stone for the third time. They have been deceived twice already. The first, when they signed the Budapest Memorandum on December 5, 1994. In it, the Russian Federation, the United States and the United Kingdom gave guarantees of sovereignty to Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal. Yes, Moscow was committed to respecting the integrity of the country. Two decades later, Putin would forcibly steal the Crimean peninsula and part of Donbas from Ukraine. The second time was with the Minsk Protocols of 2014 and 2015in which an attempt was made to end the war in eastern Ukraine: bilateral ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, exchange of prisoners, humanitarian assistance and the beginning of a political dialogue on the status of the separatist regions. They were not respected while they were in force and Putin would completely violate them by ordering a full-scale invasion of the country in 2022.
Ukraine is a rebellious country. The first time I visited, in 2004, the capital was experiencing “orange revolution”: After a fraudulent election, the population, especially in kyiv, responded with mass demonstrations, strikes and acts of civil disobedience. They adopted the color orange because it was the symbol of the campaign of the pro-Western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. The elections were eventually repeated, and Yushchenko emerged victorious and governed the country between 2005 and 2010. He was allegedly poisoned by dioxin by Russia, and his face was strikingly disfigured.
My last two stays have been during the large-scale invasion. The first thing you learn there is not to tell them that the war started in 2022, because they angrily remember that they have been fighting the Russians since 2014. And they take you to see one of the walls in honor of fallen soldiers, where there are hundreds of photos of young people who died on dates spanning the last 12 years.
The second thing you learn in Ukraine is that life goes on, even in the midst of a large-scale conflict. In kyiv, the capital, the situation is apparently normal. Everything works: the subway, the universities, the cafes, the nightclubs (with the only exception that, if you stay after midnight, you can’t go out until dawn, due to the curfew). People sleep little and badly. The most cautious continue to go down to the shelters when there are anti-aircraft alerts. They wake up their children, dress them and quickly take them underground; or they prepare a makeshift bed for them in the hallway or in the bathroom, away from the windows. It’s the rule of two separation walls: the best way to be safe from shrapnel from drone explosions, although nothing saves you from certain death if what hits is a missile.
The third and most painful thing one understands in Ukraine is that everyone knows someone in the trenches, and many know someone close to them who died in combat. I remember talking casually with a young Ukrainian woman after a talk about the country’s precarious energy situation. In the middle of the conversation, she let me know that his little brother had died fighting against the Russians.
Ukrainians are hungry for peace. Quietly, they assume that the Russian-occupied territories of Donetsk and Lugansk They will probably never come back. Those who are refugees there admit it with deeper pain. I heard the story of saying goodbye to your hometown from a well-known journalist in Ukraine, from Lugansk, who took refuge in kyiv a few months after the invasion began. And the one who, by the way, had to change her home twice in the capital because on both occasions her apartment was destroyed by Russian air attacks, her luck is so bad.
Ukrainians have proven since 2004 to be very brave peopleand. The first of them all, its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who could flee when offered, but decided to stay, and thus changed the course of history. Ukraine also taught me that.
@MarioSaavedra
Subscribe to continue reading
