On Wednesday we celebrated Yehor’s 12th birthday. He was ten when he and his mother, Vera, came to live with us in East Sussex, as part of the Homes for Ukraine scheme. While Yehor was delightedly unwrapping his presents, I was thinking of what his mother had told me about his tenth birthday party, on February 21, 2022, three days before Russia began its bombardment of Kyiv. “There were going to be ten children there. Only two came. I can’t describe the atmosphere. We knew that those with access to private jets were leaving the country, and also from the British and American embassies.”
Three nights later the family, along with countless others in Kyiv, were sleeping — or trying to — deep underground in the metro, in the way Londoners did during the Blitz. It has been a very long two years, two years of mass slaughter and destruction, as Vladimir Putin seeks to prove that Ukraine, in his own words, “is not a real country”.
The day before Yehor’s birthday I went with Vera to what was described as “an evening of solidarity” with Ukraine, at the Palace Theatre in London, organised jointly by the Ukrainian and American embassies. The Ukrainian chargé d’affaires, Eduard Fesko, reminded the audience that, while the event marked the second anniversary of the “full-scale” invasion, it is a decade since the Russians annexed Crimea and fomented war in the eastern regions of the country, Donetsk and Luhansk, known collectively as the Donbas.
For Vera this aspect is personal. Her father, who died when she was a child, was from Luhansk. Vera has cousins — whom she, in the Ukrainian style, describes as “my brothers and sisters” — in the city of Antratsyt. We would say “anthracite”: this is somewhere named after the mineral on which its economy has depended. Although Russian is the dominant language in that region, Vera’s cousins spoke only Ukrainian. They were told to stop that nonsense after the region fell under Russian control. Their savings, which were in Ukrainian currency, became valueless. But they feel they can’t leave, because the only thing they have is their home, and if they fled, that would be expropriated too.
This perspective — of the ten-year war — was embodied at the Palace Theatre by Yuliia Paievska, who founded a volunteer all-female ambulance corps known as “Taira’s Angels”. She began this work on the Donbas front lines in 2014. It was in 2022, when working in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol, that Paievska was captured by Putin’s forces. Later she appeared in a Russian video, groggily reading out a statement prepared for her by her captors. She had been tortured. Her release was negotiated as part of some sort of exchange. There were professional actors on stage at the Palace Theatre, including Brian Cox. But none had the shattering presence of Yuliia Paievska.
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The previous week, she had addressed American and European leaders at the Munich security conference: “I pray that none of you and your children will be forced to defend your own land just because Russians would decide that they have the right to your land … To stop the war, we need to kill the war. Give us weapons to murder the war. We will manage — just help us a little bit.”
But days later the German parliament rejected a motion that would have mandated the supply to Kyiv of the Bundeswehr’s Taurus missiles. These have a range that would help Ukraine strike the Russian supply lines in Crimea: as I wrote last month, they would enable the Ukrainians “to send the 12-mile bridge beloved of Putin and his military crashing into the Kerch Strait”.
And while it is Donald Trump’s acolytes in Congress blocking a $60 billion military aid package to Ukraine, it is the US administration of President Biden that has consistently refused Kyiv’s requests for the longer-range Atacms missiles — on the grounds that this would be an “escalation” of the conflict. Only Moscow is allowed to “escalate”, it seems. The UK alone has licensed Kyiv to use missiles (Storm Shadow) to strike Crimea. It is clear why Washington and Berlin adopt this policy of “non-escalation”: they are frightened Putin would attack them.
The contrast between this and the gung-ho rhetoric of unconditional support for Ukraine’s liberation is obvious to everyone, above all the poisoner in the Kremlin. It was certainly obvious to Vera as we listened to the spokesman from the US embassy telling the audience at the Palace Theatre that Washington was determined to see “Ukraine win the war”. I also sensed her unease when the US ambassador, Jane Hartley, acclaimed the man always incorrectly described as “the leader of Russia’s opposition”: Alexei Navalny, who days earlier, in an Arctic prison camp, had met the fate Putin had determined for him.
Navalny was a man of astonishing courage and charisma. But if you talk to any Ukrainian, he or she will remind you that after Moscow annexed Crimea, Navalny declared that whatever happened afterwards, it would “remain part of Russia” and “never become part of Ukraine in the foreseeable future”. Navalny had also vehemently supported Russia’s invasion in 2008 of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, describing the Georgians as “rodents”. As the Ukrainian author Anton Shekhovtsov observed, Navalny “saw the Russian people as victims of injustice under Putin’s regime, not the Ukrainians” — although by last year Navalny had added his powerful voice to those calling for a full restoration of Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders.
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As Vera pointed out to me after we left the Palace Theatre, the Russian opposition figure who spoke out for them from the moment of the annexation of Crimea and the associated war in the Donbas was Boris Nemtsov. At a rally in Moscow in 2014 Nemtsov thundered: “We should say no to war! We should say enough of idiocy! We should say Russia and Ukraine without Putin!” Months later, in 2015, the day before he was due to lead another march against the war in Ukraine, Nemtsov was assassinated on the Moskvoretsky bridge, under the gaze of the Kremlin.
Since then the sea of blood has become an ocean. And it is to protect Yehor that Vera has come to England; otherwise she would have remained with her husband, Vitaliy. When I visited their Kyiv apartment in December, I was entranced to see the cricket ball that Yehor had won as “most improved young player” at our local club — he had never even heard of the game before coming here — right underneath a Ukrainian religious icon.
Somehow it summed up the very personal links made between this country and Ukraine in the two years since Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv. But, as Vera never fails to remind me, the war began long before.
