Goodbye to Ukraine and all that…

I have a thing about dawns and sunsets, but this is an apt goodbye to Kyiv. Note the statue surrounded by sandbags and protective scaffolding.

I’m now back at home having spent a great Christmas there and thankfully (but with reservations) I’m now finished working in Ukraine and I have a new job, back in Australia. I haven’t felt like writing for a while and I have been trying to finish various administrative tasks that really don’t float my boat and so sadly, I drag my feet and try to catch up on sleep. But as much as I miss home when I’m not there, after the past 18 + months of being in and out of Ukraine and the surrounding countries, it’s fair to say that when I wasn’t there, I felt a strange emptiness, especially as the conflict is very much ongoing and in some areas has got markedly worse. That certainly doesn’t mean that the whole of Ukraine is under fire all of the time, but the whole of Ukraine is still liable to be hit by missiles and there are still a lot of folks there doing their best to help the people.

This arch in Kyiv was originally dedicated to the ‘friendship’ between Ukraine and Russia. It’s now just known as ‘friendship arch’

Over my last deployments there I found myself spending long periods travelling by road from the North to all points of the compass and I saw the Cemeteries in all of the small towns full of floral tributes and military banners flying. Official estimates of fatalities are around 70, 000. Those sources who are in the know and it isn’t public knowledge, estimate that Ukraine has had almost a quarter of a million people, military and civilian killed and injured. Despite that, the Ukrainians are a people who aren’t giving up.

At one of our bases, we noted a surge in ‘strangers’ coming in and out of the hotels. The staff in one, some of whom speak Russian, recognised the strangers accents whenever they spoke Romanian or English and they knew that they were Russian, even when they were travelling on foreign passports. The hotels realised what was going on and with a nod from the intelligence services, simply refused to take the new guests. It was interesting to note that they complained about the cost of everything in the cafes and restaurants and didn’t seem 100% comfortable being anywhere nice.

I had experienced several unnerving incidents when out for early morning walks, as described in a previous post. I started to see the absence of the normal with people I had never seen before walking the routes I regularly covered. They greeted me in English each time and became aggressive when I answered them in in Romanian. They were clearly trying to discover what foreigners were out and about that time of the morning, for whatever reason.

It became ridiculous with the newcomers trying to listen into your conversations and look at your laptop screen when you were checking your email in the business centre. Several times, I slammed the lid of my laptop shut as a response to some very obvious snoopers trying to edge around the back of my chair (which was almost against the wall!) and trying to see what I was doing. It got worse when there were uniformed US Military staying at the hotel and I wasn’t sure if it was their electronic ‘hoovers’ at work on the internet or Ivan’s, but whatever it was, it really slowed the internet down. Some time later I was talking to a retired diplomat who worked as a contractor advising the embassy there. He confirmed that at that time the Brits and the Poles had brought their TSCM (Technical Surveillance Counter Measures) people into the hotel to ‘debug’ the rooms they were using and found numerous listening devices and even some hidden cameras. Maia Sandu, the Moldovan President confirmed the Russian had been planning a coup at that time, so clearly they had been fairly advanced in their planning.

Because of the nature of my previous work I did get to see a lot of the country and I don’t know why I was surprised but Ukraine has many castles dotted around and maybe I’ll post about them another time. Kyiv also has fantastic buildings and there are some great historical statues in beautiful squares, which I loved to walk though, with one eye on the nearest air raid shelter of course.

This is a feminist addition to the Princess Olha (Olga) statue. It’s a protest against the fact that bullet proof vests are not made with women’s bodies in mind. There are moves afoot to change that apparently.

The beautiful blue St. Micheals Cathedral.

St. Micheals is at the eastern side of Mykhailvska square. It’s also on the edge of an escarpment that overlooks the Dnieper river. The constant gregorian chants from the monks who live in the surrounding complex are hypnotising and its easy to spend an hour or more in there listening and looking at the icons and paintings. I didn’t ever have that kind of time however.

Now that I am back in Australia and in a new job, Ukraine is behind me but its not going to leave me. Time for a new chapter. Literally.