A Ukraine diary
All the stories and notes from my September trip to Ukraine, that did not make it into the published articles
Sunday 10 September
The train from Krakow to the border is less stressful than last time – on time for one, and clearly marked, so there is no dithering between the two tracks of the one platform. I swap my seat with a Moroccan man who lives in Israel with his Ukrainian wife. They turn up later, in the same carriage from Przmsyl to Kyiv (incredibly, we meet again, on the train back from Kyiv).
Before leaving I downloaded the Complete Works of Shakespeare, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s diaries to spend some time with the plays, and I figured I’d start with Hamlet. I didn’t appreciate the time I had to read Shakespeare when I was a student.
It’s a hot day, and the train rolls through flat fields of summer-baked maize and heavy-headed sunflowers. Kestrels hover in the hazy sky, a buzzard swoops into a field on the hunt, and four fallow deer gather around a man-made pond for a quick drink and cool-down. On barely-there slopes, there is the occasional copse of silver birch or gathering of fir trees, the long narrow trunks topped by a sudden shock of deep green.
The journey takes me past small rural villages where the houses have traditional Polish pointed roofs; Catholic churches with red brick spires on each side of the front door, or with their single pointed tower and large cross. In the larger towns, there is still evidence of the old Soviet blocks, children playing football in the spaces between, similar to those in Warsaw.
In Przmsyl I swap details with a German guy who works in human rights, buy juice (apple and mint? So medicinal!), water, beers and snacks in Zabka, and wolf down an over-dressed halloumi salad jewelled with pomegranate seeds, before racing back to the station to join the sweating queue for passport control. I chat briefly to a woman who was studying her MA in Germany, where she has lived for five years, and was going home to visit family in Kyiv for the first time since the start of the full-scale invasion. She’s nervous, and so I try to reassure her that it is scary but that, as strange as it sounds, you get used to the almost-constant air raid alerts.
Crazy to think that, of all people, I would be doing the work of reassuring after last time! But it’s true, that whole ‘use is another nature’ principle, how quickly you get used to the sirens and know whether or not to feel panicked. It is impossible to imagine that it ever won’t be terrifying, until you are there.
Now I’m on the bumpy Soviet-era train, the one without air conditioning and a reading light that only works at certain times, looking out at the wetlands where egrets pose for photos in the shallows. Men are fishing and there’s a Christmas tree farm. Soon I’ll be at the border. Already my phone has switched to EET. It is bumpier than the return train from Kyiv last time, it’s the same as the one into Kyiv, so I will wake up tomorrow feeling horribly dizzy and seasick again. The toilet already stinks, and there’s no handtowels. Just 14 hours to go!
I get to the border at 3.30pm EET, on 10 September 2023. I imagine I’ll be here for two hours. On the platform next to ours is an identical blue and yellow sleeper train, only they are travelling from Zaporizhia to Poland. The platform has an old-fashioned three bulb lamp. On the other, ancient rusting red containers wait… for what? Are they abandoned? Are they taking anything, anywhere? At borders, everything feels frozen and yet they are hives of activity, of comings and goings, of crime and law enforcement, of armies and passengers, of nervous girls in train carriages, wanting to go home, and not yet fully able to go home.
It is so hot. My grey vest has sweat marks across by ribs and under my breasts, which I keep trying to hide with folded arms, making me even sweatier.
And we wait.
We were at the border for 90 minutes so that wasn’t so bad. At the first level crossing, a woman waves the train through, two sunflowers standing tall by her pink wooden hut. Further on, two girls with long dark hair loose over their shoulders take a walk alongside the track. In Lviv, there’s a basketball match taking place in a park. Despite this being my second trip, this is the first time I have seen Lviv and the surrounding countryside – last time it was night, both going and coming.
Despite being SO SWEATY for most of the journey, I get cold in the night and have more crazy dreams. I didn’t really sleep, except for right at the beginning and then right at the end. D’oh!
Monday 11 September
As the third train of this odyssey leaves Kyiv and crosses the Dnipro, the renovated Motherland statue glitters gold and silver in the sunlight, surrounded by the green and golden domes of the city’s churches peeking through trees. A contrast to the soviet era blocks on the other side of the tracks.
The train arrives in Kharkiv with an announcement telling us how the railways have continued working throughout the full-scale invasion; that they have rescued millions of children. It tells us how many rail workers have been killed and how one day soon, the trains will run to the occupied cities once again.
Anna and I get a taxi to the hotel, where I have a shower, deal with emails, and then sleep for an hour. It’s much more central than last time and has less of a ‘brothel’ vibe, so that’s good. The sweetshop next door has boarded up windows, there is shelling damage all around. It is situated on the corner of a main road, at the bottom of the long drag to the central square, which then leads to Shevchenko Gardens and the square with the Government building, which was attacked in March 2022. The shelling that day killed 48 people.
An air raid alert just before I leave to meet Anna means Google Maps is scrambled, telling me I am six miles away from Pakufuda café, as opposed to 2 kilometres. It takes me three attempts to get the map working, and I am still not 100% sure it is telling me the truth.
On the main road, the damage to buildings is everywhere I look: the blue and gold façade of a 19th century block is smashed up, windows empty or squared with plywood.
It’s not long, however, before I start to recognise and respond to where I am. There’s the closed down theatre, where last time we posed like the actors in the old movie posters. There’s the karaoke bar, the Red Cat pub… soon the road opens up to the museum square, close to Nikas restaurant and that utterly miserable lunch where I tried not to cry into my lukewarm pizza, and then it’s past the brutalist and closed ballet and opera theatre, where skaters rattle up and down the concrete stairs, and into Shevchenko Garden with its 18th century trees, its fairground, the couples promenading, the friends catching up over ice cream, the kids running from the playpark that has a climbing frame, to the playpark with slides, to the playpark that is more like a miniature fair ground, similar to the one in Kyiv’s Victory Park.
Pakufuda became our base on the last trip, but I didn’t know its history. The café baked and delivered bread during the worst parts of the big war, before the oblast was liberated. But the founder, who organised the efforts, then signed up and was killed on the front last autumn.
I like this café because it reminds me of home – the board games, the mismatched pottery crockery, the early-10s soundtrack of Beach House and Arcade Fire.
Anna lays out the plan for this week: interviews with street artists, human rights activists, art curators, a bereaved mother, the chief of police… as well as a trip to Izium where we will meet victims of war crimes and the deputy mayor, and a trip to Saltivka to see the shelling damage, and to a formerly-occupied village in the suburbs where private homes were shelled. This differs from Saltivka, which was mainly apartment blocks. The village is a suburb, but it is more of an autonomous community of small houses. In Saltivka, there is a huge tower that was badly bombed, and people climb up to the roof, because it has become a sort of memorial to those killed. But the people who visit, Anna explains, are not those affected, they are just visitors bringing their kids and taking photos. I guess this makes sense in a way, because everyone is impacted and there is a need to say: this happened here.
It is almost a year to the day since Izium was liberated, and Anna explains how afterwards, the residents wanted everything to be sorted very quickly: electricity, water and internet. But interestingly – and worryingly – not everyone was happy about the liberation (I kind of knew this from the Charlotte Higgins article about the buried diary). Russia instigated a media blackout during the occupation, and so no one had access to international or national news. For some, the propaganda did its trick, it managed to change people’s minds and opinions about the full-scale invasion. What’s interesting too is that previous to the occupation, while Izium was a strategic target, it was not that close to Russia culturally or even physically, compared to Kharkiv itself or some of the other occupied cities. I think this will be interesting to look into more – what was Russia saying about Izium.
Torture chambers were found in the city, and mass graves of around 400 people.
She then talks about Kharkiv and its experience of the big war. She’s keen for me to get into the heart of the city, to have a deeper understanding of how the city is. While some places like Pakufuda are open and the thriving hipster clientele makes it seem like every other European city, on any other day, in the world, the majority of places are still shut. Some will never reopen, destroyed by shelling.
Kharkiv was Ukraine’s second biggest city, of 1.5 million people – now, despite some coming home, the population is only about half of that. When you walk into the city centre, so many buildings are shuttered with plywood, their fronts sooty with scorch marks, glass shattered, wires hanging out, rendering patchy if it has survived at all. There is a reluctance to rebuild and re-open… but also young people taking hold of opportunities to open businesses and create a new city, a new culture, a new place.
When we walk back to the hotel, she takes me down some of the quieter streets, where the damage from shelling is even more visible. We go past the buildings where rockets landed in July – after I had left, I was in Warsaw by that point. Beautiful 19th century and early 20th century apartments that were once rented out or sold for high prices are now empty, the windows smashed, the iron railings on the Juliet balconies twisted into ugliness.
There’s a rainbow in the sky.
Anna points out the Protagonist café, one of two to stay open almost throughout the full-scale invasion, and a hub for journalists, activists and volunteers. Their borsht is a must-have.
In the evening I retrace my steps from earlier to go to the Georgian restaurant in Shevchenko Gardens, where last time we accidentally ordered an unfeasible amount of cheese dishes. Walking the long bustling main street towards the museum square and then the opera house, Kharkiv is definitely busier than in July. There are so many young people: skater kids lounging on the steps outside empty shopfronts, women in tight dresses and strong eye make-up drinking beers in red plastic cups outside bars, friends catching up over cocktails in burger joints. There are more signs of more traditional human suffering too: the seemingly mentally-ill guy who meanders across the road; earlier a disabled man struggled to walk down the pavement, his shoes in his hands. At a complicated crossing a babushka is selling flowers, three exhausted and rather flea-bitten dogs passed out on the pavement next to her, a contrast to some of the overly groomed miniature pups on the ends of jewelled leads that you see a lot of around here.
The museum square glows in pinks and reds as the sun, a giant tangerine, sets, the massive Ukrainian flag flickering against the lit-up clouds. Boyfriends and girlfriends are taking selfies in the square, making hearts out of their hands while trying to capture the sun in the space between. Everyone is taking photos of the sunset, the city stretched out ahead of them, like the future. I’m sure that, at Nikas, girls in posh frocks are pouring prosecco.
Tuesday 12 September
Sergii picks us up in his cab. It is decorated with icons. When he realises I am reporter from the UK, he is keen to talk to us about his experiences of war.
The war started for him as a soldier for two years in the Donbas region, following the 2014 invasion. When the full-scale invasion began, he volunteered but was told he was too old. Not too old, however, to help people.
Sergii used his taxi to rescue people from the badly shelled district of Saltivka, helping them to evacuate. He described how on the first days, when Russia opened up a humanitarian corridor, the queues to leave Kharkiv were 15 km long. The wealthy people left first, but those who were too poor could not get away, so he gave them lifts to the train station.
And you? I asked him. How did you survive?
He crosses himself, and tells me to believe in God. He then describes how a rocket hit his building. What I understood is that he was coming home from work and realised he had left his phone. He turned to get it and then the rocket hit his building, destroying everything.
Sergii also talks about the battle of the school - later in the week I’ll meet a soldier who fought in that battle. He was helping people to escape the battle which has achieved legendary status in Kharkiv. The shell of the school, on the road out to Saltivka, is still there – walls cracked and burnt, classrooms crushed.
Sergii drops us off at a newly opened café called Makers. The founder is only 27, and it sells delicious coffee, cakes – the walls are stylish bare brick with a sort of smashed tile effect on the floor. Every hipster café in Kharkiv is seemingly obsessed with early 2010s music, this time it’s Lana Del Rey. Anna bumps into her friend Kate who is a champion free diver and has just won another competition.
Later in the week, we will come back to Makers, and then hide by the stylishly black tiled toilets as Russia sends missiles to the city.
Wednesday 13 September
We take the road from Kharkiv to Izium in Vitalii’s bright yellow car. I have bought packets of crisps and chocolates and nuts and grapes and coca-cola, as if we are going for weeks, not a day. Most of the food comes back to the UK with me in the end!
The road is straight and long, taking you through four checkpoints and acre after acre of ‘black earth’, the dark rich soil that makes Ukraine the bread basket of the world. Buzzards sit on the trees that line the fields of unharvested sunflowers. Rivers and lakes glisten in the sunlight. To the east, as you drive out of Kharkiv, are the villages and regions occupied by Russians up until the liberation last autumn.
On the edge of Kharkiv is a supermarket that was shelled last year and re-opened earlier this summer. There are lots of places like this in Kharkiv, places that were shelled and have reopened recently, or opened as something new. Anna had pointed out a Vietnamese restaurant on museum square that used to be some kind of fast-food chain. People are making it new.
Why shell a supermarket? Or a cafe or a school? The innocuous spaces shelled and shattered shows over and over again the cruelty of the full-scale invasion. These attacks are designed to terrorise.
We stop at the “last good place to get a coffee” - a petrol station crowded with army men, NGO workers and journalists grabbing coffees and using the loo before striking out towards the formerly occupied territories. And then we are on the road.
We drive through one city that escaped occupation if not shelling.
As soon as we drive through the military checkpoint into Izium, it’s a left-hand turn down a dirt track into an alien landscape of trenches and mounds. It feels ancient, even though these Russian dugouts were only abandoned a year ago, it is like going to Flanders fields. We walk past the trenches that lie between tall, splindly fir trees, dappled with sunlight that falls down in waves, keeping to the path to avoid mines. The area has been cleared of the mines which the Russians left as parting gift, that clearing is evidenced by the white tape strung between trees, but there are people here who still support the Russians, who could have laid traps. I remember my HET and place my feet carefully where there are already footprints. There’s a pet cemetery, and the normal cemetery, and then we are in the mass graves.
You can still smell it, Anna says.
There’s that smell which in all honesty I have never encountered before and which I can only describe as if it is in a book: the sweet, acrid smell of death. These are borrowed words but I don’t know what other words to use. Sometimes we have to rely on cliché. They exist to allow us to express the horror of realising how, more than a year on, you can still smell the killing and the killed.
The graves are empty pits with crosses at the head. Some of the crosses have names and dates on. The dead are from a variety of ages, men born in the 1930s who would have remembered the German occupation, the Soviet occupation, and died in Izium under Russian occupation. While many of the dead are those killed by Russians as a result of torture or extra-judicial killings, others were killed in the shelling, or because there was no medicine, no gas, no food, no electricity, under occupation. How do you survive that, when you are old and sick and frail? What happens to the patients, and the cold, and the hungry? They die.
Other crosses just have a number on them. All the bodies have been exhumed but not all have been claimed, nor identified.
Row after row after row of empty graves with these simple wooden crosses signifying what happened here. It is the ugliest site/sight I have ever seen. It is hard not to want to vomit. The horror turns the trees and the blue sky and the dappled sunlight obscene in their simple beauty. The light is so beautiful and the scene is so ugly.
There is no birdsong.
A few miles down the road, and we stop at two buildings that were destroyed by an air strike on the 9 March 2022. On the way up to the first building, there is a memorial for the families who were killed – photos and flowers, and a sob-wrenching yellow teddy bear sat apart, alone. The playpark is mangled, the see-saw warped, the slide set twisted. You can still smell the scorching of the concrete and melting of the metal, as well as the dull rotting of clothes and fabrics. The smell catches in your throat and nose, as if the fire had only recently stopped burning.
Vitalii says he was last here when they had not even had time to collect the bodies of the families who were killed.
The building is cut in two, two sections half standing, the middle section flattened into a crater. People died because they were hiding in the basement, but the rocket hit the basement. The front of the buildings is sheared away and you can look straight in to the lives of the people who once lived there. It is like looking into one of those dollhouses that you open up to reveal the life inside. Except here, there is no life, only death and destruction and the lost belongings of families who had everything taken from them. A shelf that still has books on it. A jug ready to pour milk, waiting on the kitchen counter. A TV on a wooden TV stand, the chair in front, empty of a viewer. People’s whole lives were here – people in Izium don’t move, they grow up in these blocks, they have a community, they have built homes for themselves. Those homes are now wrenched open for me to gawp at, horrified with tears in my eyes. I keep thinking about my home, about the world I have built around me, and how it would feel to have that destroyed for nothing.
The human detritus around the building: rugs, towels, boots, coats, and children’s lego building blocks, scattered green and yellow, on the grass by my feet.
If I thought the devastation caused by shelling in Kharkiv was bad, nothing prepares you for Izium. There is not one building that is not damaged, if not wholly destroyed. Churches with smashes and cracks in the domed roofs. Schools flattened behind a shattered façade, every window blown out. The old hospital building is now just empty brickwork with empty windows. People are living in houses where their windows are blocked with plywood, one window is even covered with the green painted wood retrieved from an ammunition box. Others are just smashed with jagged holes taped up, or flapping with plastic. There are scorch marks on the buildings, windows framed with black soot. But you can see people are living in them. Their clothes are hanging up, life bustles away behind the cracks.
In Kharkiv in July, the city felt empty, but Izium is a ghost town. There are some people, congregating around a street where there are cafes, a few shops. Babushkas sitting on their doorsteps, the braziers where they cooked over open fires during the occupation now cold. But more than anyone, you see are soldiers. The most traffic you see is military traffic, trucks driving tanks out of Izium and down the long road to the Donbas.
I am worried about the ownerless dogs.
We drive out of the city centre and onto the road that leads to Donbas, stopping at what was once a luxury hotel with spectacular views of the Ukrainian countryside. It is now destroyed. Opposite is the war memorial to World War Two (1941-1945).
During our interview, the Deputy Mayor of Izium told us about this hill. After the Russians occupied Izium, they cut off all telecommunications and instead flooded the city with pro-Russian propaganda, including telling people that Kharkiv had been occupied, that Zelensky had fled… but on this hill, it was still possible to get phone and internet signal. People would risk their lives to come up the hill to contact the world beyond Izium. Risk their lives, because the hill was guarded by snipers.
The memorial is an ugly brutalist structure with jagged rusty metal soldiers emerging from the front. There’s a stencil of a crying child on the adjacent concrete block - assumed to be by Banksy.
Inside the memorial, a soldier has climbed to the top to fly a Ukraine flag. His friend is photographing him. He asks me if I want a photo of me posing with his gun, I say no, but suggest we have a photo together. He is from the West of Ukraine, but ‘we come from the west to protect the East, because we must defend our whole country.’ He had been fighting in Bakhmut.
From there, we drive back into town, taking a left by the shelled police station to see one of the confirmed torture cells. We don’t know if it was where Yakiv – the police officer I interviewed who was tortured – was held. We don’t think so. It’s the only street I have seen where most of the houses are intact.
Because the Russians were staying there.
Thursday 14 September
The further north you drive in the Saltivka district, the worse the shelling damage becomes, until you hit the apartment block that is right on the edge of the city. Facing out to fields and countryside, this one block took the fullest impact of Russian shelling, as they fired rockets from the border just 30 km away. The back of the block is black with fire damage, but it is the front, with its entire wall blown away into a dangerous pile of rubble, that lets you realise the fire power of these weapons and the brutality of those who fire them.
People stop here to take photos. It is not clear why. The best explanation is that it allows people to remember, to mark what happened here. Is it an act of remembrance? Or is it the compulsion that forces people to slow down and stare at traffic incidents?
I am not sure.
This estate was once a busy and bustling neighbourhood, with children playing in the municipal parks, families strolling around the gardens with a stream occupied by a dozen ducks, and people shopping or getting food in the cafes and shops on the main road. Now it feels like a ghost town. Most of the buildings are empty of all but a few households.
The only sound is the hammering and drilling, of the workmen who have started repairing the blocks that can be salvaged. Walls are being rebuilt and painted bright orange.
It’s a start, and it is vital for the one or two households who remain in the crumbling blocks.
Friday 15 September
I spent the whole day interviewing a bereaved mother and then crashed out in the hotel room, watching Modern Family
Saturday 16 September
I described the shelling in this SubStack post.
Sunday 17 September and Monday 18 September
The hotel receptionist couldn’t help me with a taxi so I walked to the station at 6.15am, panicking because google maps took me a different way and I was like, fuck, what if I have walked to the wrong station, arriving round the back.
I slept a bit on the train, then walked through Kyiv to the Intercontinental, the nicest hotel in the whole world, and slept on the massive bed and generally chilled. In a few hours I’ll go to Kyiv station and get on the sleeper and then this trip will be at an end.
What I wrote
Izium for the I Paper
Kharkiv for the I Paper
Shelling for SubStack
My final report from Kharkiv will be published in the Ferret this week.
Thank you
Sian