What is the anniversary of the Russian war in Ukraine? From Kiev to Odessa, from Lviv to Kharkiv, there is no one who cannot tell the story of waking up a little after 5 a.m. on February 24, 2022. The din of the first bombs or, for those asleep, the beatings panicked phone calls: “Can’t you hear we’re being bombed? The Russians are coming!” In the four corners of the country, there is no one who does not remember in detail, a year later, this precise moment when a man, only one, frustrated by his thwarted dreams of imperialist greatness, decided to launch an armed invasion against them on a large scale, causing hundreds of thousands of victims, the displacement of 14 million Ukrainians, the first major war of the 21st century in Europe. The date is on everyone’s mind. At the heart of power, from the intelligence management center to President Zelensky’s office, scenarios are being constructed about the turn this solitary man, Vladimir Putin, might want to give to this symbolic day and the following ones. Will he lead the “great offensive” announced in retaliation for the disaster of his “special operation” and the failed objectives one after the other, from the capture of the capital to that of Donbass?
In their small apartment in Kiev, on the 13th floor of a gray building with a rickety elevator, on the left bank of the Dnieper, Irina Berliand and Anatoliy Ahkutin are well placed to know that the war did not start on February 24, 2022 , but at least eight years earlier – if not twenty. This couple of Russian intellectuals, she a researcher in psychology, he a chemist and professor of philosophy, have followed in Moscow, since 2000, the rise of the former KGB officer promoted to head of the Kremlin and his mafia methodology. “When you have the Communists and the KGB in power, you have half the problem. When you find yourself with the KGB alone in power, you have the whole problem”, analyzes Anatoliy as a good scientist. He describes the Putin years as “a long infusion that ran through our veins, drop by drop. People didn’t realize what was happening to them. And one day, boom, there was Maidan and the year 2014 .” The pro-European demonstrations in the main square of Kiev, the annexation of Crimea by force before a puppet referendum, the insurrection of the pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass, supported by the Kremlin.
The Ukrainian war began on February 28, 2014, when Russian troops entered Crimea, precisely eight years before February 24, 2022, which is only its continuity. In the days that followed, Irina wrote on her Facebook page: “Russia is at war with Ukraine and in this war I want to be on the right side. Not on the side of the strongest, but of the one who is right. C So it’s in Ukraine that I want to be, even if Ukraine loses.” In August 2014, Irina and Anatoliy sold their house in Moscow, took their dog and cat on board and took the train to kyiv. They are now 65 and 82 years old, their old dog is still there.
Every day for a year, Irina has been going to a shopping center by the river. A hangar has been set up there for an association of hundreds of volunteers who, like her, spend the time they can to complete the equipment of Ukrainian soldiers on the front, in the Donbass and in the south of the country. Since 2014, space has become a veritable artisanal factory where huge anti-drone camouflage nets are woven in silence, where periscopes are made, containers for Molotov cocktails, mine detectors “made of a secret metal” which don’t blow them or paraffin candles to heat up guys in the trenches. Companies provide their share of equipment. Even the children drop by after school to lend a hand, twisting pieces of khaki and brown fabric on the camouflage net, or white ones for the snowy areas. On the wall hang a cannon that shot down a Russian helicopter and flags autographed by grateful generals. “Helping them is my only therapy,” says one of the crying green-eyed weavers, who left her father and brother behind in the Donbass.
“What can I do ?” This is the question that everyone is asking in the capital. And everyone responds by getting involved in the war in their own way. Leonid Finberg, who runs the publishing house Duh i Litera (The Spirit and the Letter), has decided to provide the soldiers with the only weapon he knows how to handle: books. From Kobzar, the famous collection of the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, he made a book in pocket format and with a “camouflage” color cover, which he printed in 5,000 copies and distributed to wounded combatants. His doctor wife, Olena, treats war trauma and writes fairy tales on a site for children, such as this story of a cat from Boutcha who accompanies a soldier to the front, with the help of dogs and mice . Further in the city, Yevgenia Sizontova and her husband, retired physicists, make freeze-dried meals for the soldiers. They bought a machine, converted their kitchen into a factory and their small apartment into a warehouse for ready-to-depart packages.
“What can I do ?” Even the old leaders are getting into it. Former President Petro Poroshenko, leader of the European Solidarity party, Zelensky’s rival in the 2019 election, founded the Poroshenko Battalion, with around 800 men, including around 20 politicians. Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister and former muse of the Orange revolution who became an opposition MP, still has her braid around her head to tell about this February 24 when she found herself with her colleagues around President Zelensky, agreeing to forget the political battles to form “one single Ukrainian team”. Like part of the population, the members of Parliament received submachine guns to defend their city. “In a few weeks, Ukrainian society has been transformed, she says. The divisions between the pro-Russian east and the pro-Ukrainian west are no longer even visible. The whole country has become a united team that works voluntarily when she does not take up arms. In Kiev, the first days, we saw people ready to stop the tanks with their Molotov cocktails. They will start again if necessary.
They were 3 million inhabitants before February 24 and they are about as many, estimate the local authorities, between those who left for the west and those who arrived to flee the front lines. Those who have decided to stay are not about to be dislodged. It is enough to listen to the Ukrainians to measure the lightness of the remarks that have sometimes been made in the allied coalition on the possibility of a “negotiation” with Vladimir Putin “to allow peace”. What is “negotiating” with an aggressor who takes part of a neighbor by force and denies him the right to exist? The people of kyiv, like elsewhere, know that their victory is the only condition for future peace on the European continent, and they will go all the way. “If the Russians come back, I will never leave Kiev. I will live in a parking lot if necessary”, warns Kateryna Mutchenko, executive in a real estate investment company “which has not invested anything for a year”, but created a fund for its thirty employees who went to fight on the front lines. Each employee contributes to it by paying 10% of his salary each month, and works while waiting for victory, since nothing else is now conceivable in their eyes.
What if Putin proposed a ceasefire? “But it’s his dream!” sweeps Mikhaïlo Podolyak, one of President Zelensky’s main advisers, in his office where his helmet and his bulletproof vest lie next to a collection of sports shoes. “Putin’s dream is to freeze a line of confrontation which would allow him to present himself as a winner having conquered some territories and which would give him time to renew his arsenal of armaments, while infiltrating Ukraine with terrorists , by trying to disunite the allies and the Europeans among themselves, and the war will continue in other dimensions. The usual Russian strategy. We will go all the way because it is the existence of our nation that is at stake. “
kyiv lives with war. With its ministries protected by sandbags and “Czech hedgehogs”, these anti-tank obstacles made of steel cross beams. With its few buildings holed by bombs over the waves of attacks, in the suburbs or in the city center. With its anti-aircraft sirens, which sound during the day or in the middle of the night, sometimes at short intervals, sometimes not at all, on average once a week since the first days of war. Friday, February 10, the day after Zelensky’s visit to the European Parliament, Putin translated his annoyance into a new massive air attack: 71 cruise missiles, 31 surface-to-surface missiles and seven suicide drones targeted the territory, according to the state- Ukrainian major. Alerts fall in real time on mobiles, via ad hoc applications or Telegram messaging: “Go take shelter immediately!” Each time, some take refuge in the metro or in the shelters indicated by signs everywhere. But most continue to go about their business, out of fatalism or a desire not to let the Russians dictate their schedule. “The only time I think about it, laughingly notes Stella Beniaminova, a bubbly dentist and art collector, is when I’m in my shower. If a missile falls, I’d be bothered to find myself naked in the bathroom. Street !”
This February 10 around 6 p.m., Olena Finberg, the doctor who writes stories to children, was heading to the national theater to see The resistible rise of Arturo Ui, by Brecht. The anti-raid sirens sounded, the theater closed its doors but the streets did not empty out. “It was moving to see a whole crowd of spectators continue to walk towards the theater ignoring the sirens,” says Olena. That same day, cities and energy sites were hit, but most of the missiles were destroyed in flight by anti-aircraft defense, including ten over Kiev, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
At Mohyla University in kyiv, rector and former education minister Serhiy Kvit counts Ukraine’s wars and revolutions since the fall of the USSR. He did them all, and the university has always been a key player. In 1991, the struggle for an independent state. In 2004, with the thousand students and teachers who demonstrated in the streets of the capital, every day, during the Orange revolution. In 2013 and 2014, for the Dignity Revolution on Maidan Square, against the abandonment of an association agreement with the EU. “Our three revolutions were European, he underlines. It is to belong to Europe that Ukraine fought. For freedom of expression, for the level of education, for a rule of law rid of oligarchs and corruption. In 2023, becoming a member of the EU and NATO has become our goal.” On February 24, Serhiy Kvit moved into the university office to defend her. He returned home every three days, on the southwestern border of the city. “I found my neighbors installed with their submachine guns. They had erected barricades and they were quietly waiting for the enemy. It was incredible.”
A military doctor, engaged since 2014 in the national guard, returns home on February 17, after a day of emergency surgery on the front, in Bakhmout. Deaths, serial amputations. Vsevolod Stebliuk has however seen others, but the war of position in the trenches succeeds in shaking him. “I had never experienced two regular armies face to face, equally powerful and equipped. It’s very, very violent,” he says calmly.
On the same day, at the Munich security conference, its president called on his allies to be more “speedy” in their support. His adviser Mikhaïlo Podolyak, on the other hand, carries the message of confidence: “You overestimate Russia’s capabilities. Their resources are already exhausted. They are using their reserves and equipment from the Soviet period. They cannot maintain such an intensity. more than six months. The war may be shorter than you think.” Self-persuasion method? If China, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has worried, “is planning to provide lethal support to Russia”, then we enter a different story.
