Lilia and Anton Kodach had planned the wedding months ago. So the speech by Russian President Putin Monday evening who denied their country’s sovereignty and ordered his military to revoke the two self-proclaimed people’s republics in the far east, Donetsk and Luhansk? It will give them something. “Today is our day. Are we concerned? Oh, a little.”
Lilia pulls her wedding dress above her ankles and kisses her new husband’s lips. The photographer encourages them. “Good, one more.”
In Kiev’s Independence Square, Majdan, two realities coexist today. Behind the newly married couple, reporters from Al Arabiya, Portuguese, Spanish, German and Japanese television voices report with urgency Putin’s speech and the possible consequences for Ukraine. The invasion of the 190,000 Russian soldiers who have surrounded Ukraine, according to US sources, would begin any moment, according to their reports. Earlier, video footage of green Russian army trucks driving across Donetsk’s border with Russia has been circulated.
Behind their backs, tourists take selfies in the mild winter sun. A street vendor tries to sell pink balloons. The announcer invites on a field trip to the home of the 2014 president, who resigned in 2014, Viktor Yanukovych, who now lives in exile in Russia. Here on Majdan began the revolution against him, the corruption of his government and his desire for closer ties with Moscow.
Putin is like Hitler and Stalin
The Russian invasion that the reporters are talking about started eight years ago with the invasion of Crimea and Russian support for separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, Veronika Didusenko said. “Here in Kiev everything may look calm and quiet, but in the east it has been at war for eight years,” she says, draping the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine around her shoulders and smiling at the camera.
In 2018 she was elected Miss Ukraine. Now is the time for the West to protect Ukraine from Russian aggression, she believes. “This is not just our war. This is a war against the West. If Putin takes Ukraine today, why wouldn’t he want to take a piece of Europe later? He is like Hitler and Stalin.” The German government’s decision to temporarily halt the commissioning of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline is encouraging them. “Now the Netherlands.”
On Tuesday evening, Putin rewrote the history of Ukraine, independent since 1991. He called Ukraine an integral part of Russian history and “the old Russian land,” a claim he also made in a TV documentary and essay last year. In his view, Russian history began in 988, when Prince Vladimir of the Kievan Rus was baptized a Christian in the Dnieper River that cuts through present-day Kiev and Ukraine.
According to Ukrainians, this history proves the sovereignty of their country. But Putin’s thinking also raises fears that the Dnieper could become the new frontline and split Ukraine in two. “I asked my niece today to move to the area west of the river. I’m worried,” says Vladislav Bratoen. He is a former officer for the Ukrainian Air Force. Earlier in the day, a long line of men lined his street to sign up for the Ukrainian army. There is great enthusiasm among young men to defend their country, says Bratoen. “No one has called me up yet. But if they call me I’ll be there. We are in a terrible situation now. Putin’s speech is not the end. This is just the beginning.”
Several hundred Ukrainian protesters march to the Russian embassy in Kiev late Tuesday afternoon to protest Russian aggression. The shutters of the embassy are closed. “Perhaps the diplomats can take our message to Moscow that Russians and Ukrainians are no longer brothers,” Lyudmila Vereshchagina said at the embassy gate. “Today history is being made and I am part of it. We will fight for our independence. The war is not only raging in the east. This is a hybrid war that affects everyone.”
Also read: The West threatens more sanctions
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 23, 2022
#war #affects #hear #Kiev