Road Trips in Ukraine and tuneless whistling… (UKR5)

Things are changing out here and not necessarily for the better. Despite that, people are now fed up of being away from their homes and their lives. Many of their lives will never be the same, but people crave what they know and they want to return to ‘it’, even though they don’t have a clue what ‘it’ might be like.

I was tasked to find out if the roads to and from the major cities were passable for the refugees and supply runs. The only way to do that was to drive the routes. Just in case you think we’d do that blind, I wouldn’t and ‘we’ wouldn’t. We had help.

A couple of weeks ago, I had been renting rooms in a lakeside resort that would be used for people escaping from the fighting. The idea was that it would be overflow accommodation and somewhere for the families cooped up in hotel rooms with their kids to get outside and breath fresh air and if they had them, walk their dogs. Whist trying to arrange a weekend BBQ for the families, I ran into a very nice English speaking lady who offered to be our interpreter. I am going to call her Helen*.

Helen and her husband Ivor* had evacuated themselves from Kyiv at the start of the war and they had been couch surfing until mindful of outstaying their welcome, they arrived at the resort. Being retired, they couldn’t afford much and in exchange for her help translating and sharing information, we let the two of them stay in one of our empty rooms. Some time later, they decided to drive back to Kyiv and so we asked her to report on their experiences, particularly on the roads. She wasn’t our only source of information of course; we had some very good information from the US, satellites and other local sources. I also spoke to the concierges at various hotels. They are a great source of information as they have spoken to many of the incoming guests about their experiences and don’t mind passing it on.

*Obviously neither are their real names

Our first leg was to Vinnytsia, a riverside city of just under 400, 000 people. It had the nice wide cobbled avenues that you see in Paris and the sandbagged junctions, tanks and groups of armed men, made it look just like pictures of occupied France, but at least this time, the soldiers were on the side of good. We were maintaining a safe haven in the city where evacuated people were staying and trying to recover from the trauma of leaving their lives behind. We needed to talk with them and find out if the roads in and out were passable. It turned out that by and large, they were and we left early the next morning for the capital, Kyiv.

We deliberately headed south before taking secondary roads north into Kyiv, as our various sources had told us about suspected minefields, unexploded ordinance and booby traps all left behind by the retreating Russians. As you’d expect, the roads were not busy but every village had well fortified road blocks on the way in and out. No doubt advised by the military, the civil defence forces had done a good job of sighting their bunkers with good fields of fire and many of them had used natural barriers like swamps and steep sided gullies on either side to help prevent tanks from just going around the checkpoints. Wherever there was a ‘strategic’ site, such as a bridge or a major rail junction, there was usually a more elaborate checkpoint where we were ordered to open the boot of the car and show them that we weren’t smuggling weapons or other contraband. It goes without saying that these checkpoints were more than a little tense, but when they saw our passports, they soon became friendly and occasionally, even chatty.

Unsurprisingly, nobody on the road wanted to dawdle and except at the checkpoints, the traffic moved at very high speeds, in places in excess of 150kmh. As a result, peoples fear combined with the high speeds saw several vehicles that hadn’t negotiated bends in the road or road blocks properly smashed into pieces on the concrete and steel barriers. The checkpoints became more stringent as we got closer to Kyiv and the shot up, burned out and crashed cars were sadly even more common. I also noticed that the barriers often had trench systems running away from them to allow for the soldiers to get in and out of their bunkers out of sight from the enemy. Occasionally, we’d see the earthmovers that had been used to make the fortifications parked in the forests, ready for further use when needed. Groups of uniformed men stood around fires, their eyes tracking the cars moving past whilst trying to stay warm in the freezing weather. Taking pictures of checkpoints and military infrastructure is always a stupid idea and we knew better, but it was still a surprise to be told to remove our GPS from the windscreen as some of the guards thought that we might be filming or plotting the location of the defences. Lesson learned.

Driving into the city was a surreal experience. The long tailbacks at the roadblocks belied the amount of vehicles actually going into the central business district as it was very quiet. In order to properly assess the place and not just turn around and come straight back out; we needed to stay the night and I had found a hotel on the internet that not only was open but it had rooms. Before heading to it, we needed to assess the atmospherics on the street. That’s an essential part of judging risk and without it, you cannot hope to get what is known as ‘ground truth’ Our morning walk around the CBD was even more revealing. The few people on the street were purposeful, eyes darting everywhere looking for danger and moving quickly, in order to minimise their exposure out in the open. In the main, the only vehicles on the roads were ambulances and police cars, lights flashing, but sirens off as they slowly moved through the chicanes of traffic obstacles. It was just like a scene from a ‘day after’ disaster movie.

Overlooking the city there is an enormous stainless steel statue of a woman holding a sword and shield. That’s her at the top of the page. It’s undeniably impressive and given that it was built when the Russians held Ukraine, it’s a wonder that the hammer and sickle on the shield hasn’t been removed, along with all of the street names and other soviet era paraphernalia during the ‘decommunization’ of Ukraine post 1991. I got yelled at by a ‘jobs worth’ security guard for attempting to take a picture of the steel lady and with very bad grace, we wandered off to another area of the hilltop, with the intention of taking a picture when he wasn’t looking.

After a few minutes, we approached the Holodomor memorial* and were immediately accosted by an armed patrol, who clearly meant business. We slowly pulled out our passports and said hello. Ahhhh English? the patrol commander asked with a half smile. All over the world when challenged by armed men, I have found the best way to defuse a distinctly tense situation is to talk about football, their best beer and also to ask them if you can have have your photograph taken with them. Thank goodness it worked on this occasion too because their eyes were hard and it was clear that they weren’t in the mood to let any potential saboteurs get away with wandering around their city. We knew that earlier in the day elsewhere in Kyiv two cars full of suspected Russian infiltrators had been intercepted carrying homing beacons, which were presumably to help missiles to hit their targets. They’d been badly beaten by the citizen soldiers who were defending their home town and were eventually thrown into the cells. Our subsequent conversation with the patrol was invaluable and it enabled us to find out what areas of the city were ‘safe’ in terms of unexploded ordinance and where not to go after dark, which in reality was pretty much anywhere.

*And the Russians really thought that the Ukrainians would welcome them back?

The memorial is in a very upscale area of Kyiv and many foreign embassy buildings are nearby. The amount of sandbags banked up against the buildings and taped windows reminded me immediately of London in the blitz. In amongst the sandbagged militaristic statues, mature trees and well groomed squares, there had been trenches dug and Armoured Personnel Carrier’s stood on the junctions in anticipation of street to street fighting, which in this area at least, hadn’t happened. The combination of the tall buildings and narrow streets conspired to confuse our GPS and we took a couple of wrong turns in succession, bringing us to the rear of the Ukrainian Parliament building.

We had no sooner turned into the cul de sac leading into the back gate than we realised that we had driven up to a road block. Half a dozen soldiers who had previously been standing around chatting and smoking backed away from us slowly, with their weapons raised. They assumed firing positions and looked intently at us, clearly assessing our next move. We gestured depreciatingly (think face palm) and my colleague did a very slow three point turn out of the dead end street – an unfortunate name for what might have been just that and we waved to the soldiers as we drove away tunelessly whistling. They didn’t wave back.

Our beds for the night were in a smart three star business hotel right in the centre of Kyiv. Members of the international media were arriving around the same time and listening into their conversations as we had a much needed beer was very interesting. We learned about which parts of the city had been flattened, which areas were still a no go because of the danger of UXO and which routes in and out were passable. A little later whilst having dinner in the elevated restaurant, it was possible to see the preparations that the military had made for an expected urban battle. There were bunkers, steel hedgehog tank barriers outside of the luxury shops and even elevated observation points on the tops of the buildings in anticipation of air raids. Thankfully, there weren’t any when we were there.

We made a very early start the next morning and unfortunately missed seeing Helen and Ivor at their house on the way out of the city. Knowing what was safer, we took a similar route south and then west, avoiding the riskier areas and headed towards the beautiful city of Lviv.