Putin’s war perverts a personal geography

Bucha? That was the leafy Kyiv suburb where we spent a Saturday afternoon, eating ice cream cones and exploring a city park defined by neatly clipped hedges, classical sculptures and fathers teaching their sons to fish.

Mariupol? That was the pulsing steel-making city where I covered an international development conference. Bankers, company presidents and European ambassadors lined up to announce investments totaling more than $1 billion.

Chernihiv? That was the quiet regional capital where my wife joined a Ukrainian choir while my son and I explored a fine arts museum, a park and an 11th-century church.

Kramatorsk? That was a hockey match between the local team Bilyi Bars (White Leopards) against the Kyiv Sokils (Falcons). Leaving the rink, my Canadian sportswriter friend Lee Reaney and I joined some hockey players for a beery dinner at the Ria Lounge Bar.

This was my Ukraine, a cultured, family friendly country where I lived for six years until moving back to Lenox last fall. Based in Kyiv, my wife Pen Soy, our son George and I explored this little known European nation, an expanse larger than France.

Painful scenes, familiar places

After Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war of choice on Ukraine, every city I visited in Ukraine has been bombed. For me, reading the news is to see a friendly, familiar geography turn perverse.

From Kyiv, the now iconic photo of the bandaged young woman nursing her baby in a government hospital rang a bell with me. Last August, our George was interned in the same hospital — Okhmadyt National Children’s Hospital. We spent five days with him in the old wing. Scrutinizing news photos, I see the woman with the bandage around her head got a room in the new wing.

Bucha now is internationally notorious as the bedroom community where Russian soldiers bound the hands of prisoners behind their backs, shot them dead and then left their bodies on the streets as terror warnings to residents.

Mariupol now competes for the title of Ukraine’s Stalingrad. This once bustling port city now is a dusty landscape of bombed-out apartment buildings, an apocalyptic moonscape where 100,000 people cower in basements. Overhead, Ukrainian soldiers are fighting to defend every block and every street.

Chernihiv emerged this week from a monthlong Russian siege. In what may be the biggest damage to this ancient city since the 1239 sacking by Batu Khan’s Golden Horde, Russian artillery shelling and air bombing hit churches, museums, hospitals and apartment buildings. The mayor says 70 percent of civilian infrastructure is damaged or destroyed. At times, 100 civilians were buried every day. At a nearby village, used as a staging ground for Russian soldiers, 300 civilians were kept in a cellar for one month. Last week, most emerged alive after liberation.

Yesterday morning, two Russian missiles hit Kramatorsk train station, killing at least 50 and wounding nearly 100, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the government-controlled portion of Donetsk region. Platforms were packed because two days earlier the governor of neighboring Luhansk warned civilians that a Russian offensive was coming. “The cities of the Luhansk region are in ruins,” he said. “Thousands of residents have not yet left. Get out of the way!”

What once was …

Only two years ago — before COVID, before the war — Ukraine was a fast-growing destination for European Union residents looking for new horizons for city break vacations. Wizz Air and Ryanair opened up direct flights from 30 EU cities to Kyiv. Other flights took vacationers straight from the EU to Lviv, Odesa and Kharkiv. On arrival, Uber taxis took visitors from newly modernized airports to international chain hotels or Airbnb apartments.

Attractions included low prices — dinner for two, with wine, for $25 — and low crime. Today, a candlelight dinner for two in a basement bomb shelter may be romantic for some, but it certainly is not safe.

After HBO’s “Chernobyl” miniseries aired in spring 2019, 125,000 tourists flocked that year to the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. On the two-hour drive north from Kyiv, tour guides reviewed safety rules and showed off their radiation dosimeters.

Last month, thousands of Russian soldiers streamed through Chernobyl’s carefully monitored Exclusion Zone. They spared the new $2.3 billion sarcophagus built over the radioactive remains of reactor Number 4. But Russian army vehicle convoys churned through the “Red Forest,” a strictly off-limits, four-square-mile area considered one of the most contaminated places on earth. Last week, it was reported that 100 Russian soldiers were hospitalized in Belarus after digging trenches in the Red Forest. Of the evacuated soldiers, 26 were in intensive care and one died of radiation poisoning.

Heading east from Kyiv, IT investors often went to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and “the Boston of Ukraine.” Nicknamed “Smart City,” Kharkiv had 34 universities, 300,000 students and 25,000 IT workers. We went one fall weekend to visit friends and to explore the city’s newly renovated parks. The roller coaster, cable car and sculpture collections were far superior to what Kyiv parks offered. That Saturday afternoon, thousands of people thronged Kharkiv’s Shevchenko Park.

Today, Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, estimates that 15 percent of housing — 1,292 residential buildings — have been destroyed. Russian rockets and artillery shells have destroyed 16 hospitals, 76 schools and 239 administrative buildings. Oleksiy Arestovych, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, calls the military siege “the Stalingrad of the 21st century.” Adjacent to Shevchenko Park, Kharkiv Zoo says it may be forced to destroy animals.

… and where we are now

The siege of Kharkiv may be lifting as Russian troops shift south. One goal is to attack from behind Ukrainian troops who, for the last eight years, have been facing the other direction trading shots with the separatist forces. Another goal is to take over Mariupol, Ukraine’s main port on the Sea of Azov.

When I visited Mariupol three years ago, battle lines were static. After years of paralysis, investment was reviving. Metinvest, Ukraine’s integrated steel company, was planning $1 billion worth of investments to meet EU standards for “green steel.” Eurocape, a French renewable energy company, had gotten U.S. Ex-Im Bank loans to buy General Electric Co. wind turbines.

Mariupol’s population had increased to almost 500,000 people, swollen by refugees from the portions of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by Russia since 2014. To cope with the new population, France was loaning money to rebuild Mariupol’s drinking water system. The EBRD and its sister bank, the European Investment Bank were investing millions of euros to build a modern trolley bus and tramway system. With EU aid, the seaport was being modernized to handle more grain for export. Today, Mariupol looks like a European city after an epic World War II battle. In the words of one woman who escaped the siege, southeastern Ukraine largest city is now a “cemetery.”

Vladimir Putin claims he is “liberating” Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population. But his bombs are causing the most damage and the most victims in Eastern cities that are majority Russian-speaking. In Kharkiv, where 94 percent of the city population are native Russian speakers, bombs have fallen around Gagarin Planetarium, Gorky Park and Pushkin Street. Elsewhere in the East, the portion of Russian speakers ranges from 80 percent in Chernihiv to 98 percent in Mariupol. If Russia’s President wants a Ukraine without the Ukrainians, that is called genocide.