How a City Close to the Ukraine-Russia Border Has Been Shaped by War

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How a City Close to the Ukraine-Russia Border Has Been Shaped by War

February 4, 2022

A tank of the 92nd separate mechanized brigade of Ukrainian Armed Forces at a base near KluginoBashkirivka village in... — A Ukrainian military base in the Kharkiv region. The threat of a new Russian invasion has set the area on edge. Photograph by Sergey Bobok / AFP / Getty

The train station in Kharkiv, in northeast Ukraine near the Russian border, is a giant building in the Stalinist Empire style, ornate and overpowering in scale. Upon arrival, you exit the building into a swarm of taxi drivers hawking their services.

Unlike cabbies in most places in the world, these men are not offering to drive you into town; instead, they promise to drive you to the border, or the full eighty kilometres (fifty miles) to Belgorod, the nearest Russian city. It’s always like this in countries at war: travel that used to be easy, fast, and cheap becomes convoluted and expensive. People used to travel between Ukraine and Russia by air or by rail, but the planes are no longer flying and the Kyiv-Moscow train is no longer running. War has turned Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, from a regional center into a way station.

“It was always a frontier town,” Denys Kobzin, the director of the Kharkiv Institute for Social Research, told me. A hundred years ago, the city was the frontier of Bolshevism, the first capital of Soviet Ukraine. Later, it was an industrial and scientific hub. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kharkiv remained a trade and university town, largely Russian-speaking and Russia-facing, back when those were geographical, economic, and cultural facts of little political import. For the last eight years, Kharkiv, a city of some 1.5 million, has represented a different frontier: between what Ukrainians call the “governed” and “ungoverned” regions of Ukraine. The Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where a Russian military incursion helped overthrow the government in 2014, are just southeast of the city, and up to half a million people displaced from those regions have settled in Kharkiv.

The “ungoverned” territories have named themselves the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Eight years ago, there was an attempt to establish a Kharkiv People’s Republic. On March 1, 2014—days after the former Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, had fled the country, and just as Russian troops were occupying Crimea—someone placed a white-blue-and-red Russian flag atop the Kharkiv regional-government building (another giant Stalinist Empire-style structure). Less than an hour later, the flag was replaced by a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag.

In Freedom Square, so named after the fall of the Soviet Union (it used to bear the name of the founder of the Soviet secret police), a large blue-and-yellow tent—about the size of a trailer home and a half—sits opposite the regional-government building. A blue-and-yellow banner flying from the tent says, “Everything for victory.” In the first years of the war, the tent served as a clearing house for volunteers and donations: clothes, blankets, tools, portable heaters, infrared night-vision binoculars, and whatever else people brought to aid the war effort and its casualties. More recently, activists who continue to staff the tent have insisted that it must remain in the square as a reminder that the war is not over.

Boris Redin, who is fifty-three, has been volunteering at the tent from the beginning. Before the war, he ran a series of small shipping businesses. A Kharkiv native, he served in the Soviet military, in the nineteen-eighties. “I took part in training exercises five times,” he told me. “Each time, they began with the statement that ‘the global layout has grown fraught’ and ended with the announcement that our tanks are in the streets of London.” Redin has no doubt that Russia maintains the same military ambitions as the Soviet Union, and that the road to London may lie through Kharkiv. In a January 20th interview with the Washington Post, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, mentioned Kharkiv as a possible target of Russian military aggression; since then, there has been a steady stream of journalists to the tent. “Today, I talked to a Slovene, a Serb, a Pole, two Estonians, and three Spaniards,” Redin said.

Many Kharkiv residents are not getting their information about the threat of war from the tent in the square, or even from the media. (I have written about Ukraine’s post-Soviet and post-colonial distrust of élites.) “Since 2014, the community has formed a mighty network of social networks, beginning with the volunteer efforts to help the military and displaced people,” Denys Kobzin said. “So I know that I don’t need to put my trust in civil defense or the draft office, but I can trust the network that surrounds me. Everyone is talking, everyone has ideas of what might happen and what they can do, whether it’s taking up arms or driving medical supplies to the front.” They have the experience. “You should have seen the way that volunteer effort functioned,” Kobzin said, describing the operation in the early years of the war. “My apartment was one of the way stations, and for three years I had a room that was always full of donated stuff. And now people are pulling at the threads that connect them to others, checking: ‘Are you ready?’ ‘I’m ready.’ I am confident in the way of a person who has been able to lean on another’s shoulder.”

Kobzin is forty-nine. He has lived in Kharkiv since he was a child, and has been studying public opinion there for more than twenty years. Eight years ago, Kharkiv was a very different city. A lot of residents had strong family, cultural, and economic ties to Russia. Since then, Kobzin said, Kharkiv has undergone a process of “patriotization”: a clear majority of the residents have come to identify with the Ukrainian state. One reason, he said, is the ever-growing lawlessness, poverty, corruption, and isolation in the “ungoverned” regions.

Compared to Donetsk and Luhansk, Kharkiv is thriving. It has absorbed upwards of three hundred and fifty thousand displaced people from the “ungoverned” regions. “The city soaked them up like a sponge,” Kobzin said. “We now have more teachers, more doctors.” But Alexandra Naryzhna, an urban planner who ran an unsuccessful campaign for mayor two years ago, told me that a sense of contingency had set in since the war began. “Yes, we’ve built all this new housing, but it’s cheap construction, as though it’s meant to be temporary,” she said. Even capital projects, such as a seventy-million-dollar reconstruction of the city zoo—the oldest in Ukraine—have an air of shoddy impermanence to them, she said. “It’s like we are living temporary lives.”

Naryzhna, who is thirty-seven, lives in a house built by her great-great-grandfather. Before 2014, her professional and intellectual life was tied to Russia: Moscow has urban-studies and contemporary-art centers that publish a lot of books in Russian translation. “We used to go there for all the architecture exhibitions and buy books,” Naryzhna said. “Now you might order one and have to wait for it for months.” It’s not hard to get to Moscow: there are two dozen men milling around the railroad station who could drive you to Russia at any moment. “It’s that, emotionally, I’ve had to cut myself off. You can be spending time with a relative and they might just say, ‘It’s a good thing we took Crimea.’ ” That is exactly what happened several years ago, when Naryzhna met up with a family member in occupied Crimea. “I realize that they are under the influence of propaganda,” she said. “They are being told that we eat babies for breakfast, or that the Russian Army has to come in to defend us against fascism.” She has limited her contact with family members in both Russia and Germany, where Russian speakers also watch Russian state television.

There is a certain reductive picture of Ukraine that is promoted by Kremlin propagandists and often uncritically picked up by Western media. It holds that Ukraine is divided into two parts, the Ukrainian-speaking west and the Russian-speaking east, and that the west is therefore “pro-Western” while the east is “pro-Russian.” It is true that most western Ukrainians grew up speaking Ukrainian at home and at school, and most eastern Ukrainians grew up speaking Russian at home and, until fairly recently, at school. Most Ukrainians can fluidly switch between the two languages; a couple of years ago, one would switch on Ukrainian television and hear a mix of Ukrainian and Russian, spoken by Ukrainians to one another. (The languages are related but not mutually intelligible: a Russian speaker from Russia wouldn’t understand Ukrainian, but Ukrainians generally understand both.) But Ukrainians’ language identities are decoupled from their national identities, Kobzin said, and their national identity as Ukrainians has been fortified over the last eight years, both by the threat of war and the solidarity that Ukrainians have forged and observed in the face of it.

Another trope successfully promoted by the Kremlin is “Russian-backed separatists,” a phrase suggesting that a secessionist movement in eastern Ukraine pre-dates Russian military intervention. There is no evidence of this. Indeed, even the man who put the Russian flag on the government building in Kharkiv turned out to be a young Muscovite, one among many who came into the city from the other side of the border that day. Kobzin’s research shows that, on both sides of the boundary between “governed” and “ungoverned” territory, a majority of people want an end to the war and a significant number people favor reintegrating those territories into Ukraine. Even in the distant west of the country, people overwhelmingly favor amnesty for those who have collaborated with the occupation, with the exception of those who work for its authorities, police or courts.

I did meet one man who feels that his national identity is bound with the language he speaks. Slava Rodionov grew up in Tula, a city in Russia, a few hours from Moscow. He came to Kharkiv in 1981, at the age of seventeen, to study engineering. He stayed after graduation and married a woman from Kharkiv, a Russian speaker. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he started his own business, building rigid inflatable boats. The business has made him a wealthy man; before the pandemic, he was constantly travelling the world. During the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity, Rodionov went to the Maidan in Kyiv (though he slept in an upscale hotel rather than the square itself, where the protesters maintained a camp for months). Sometime after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, Rodionov, his wife, and two colleagues were having dinner at a restaurant in Dusseldorf, Germany. Several diners in close proximity to them were speaking Russian. “And it was this very strange feeling,” Rodionov told me, in English. “We didn’t know if they were enemy or friend. One of my colleagues said, ‘Let’s speak Ukrainian.’ ” From that point on, Rodionov and his wife resolved to speak Ukrainian. It was hard at first. “If you speak the first fifty years of your life one language and then switch, it’s not easy.” During the first year, Rodionov allowed himself to rest by speaking Russian every other day. But in the last seven years, he has almost never spoken his native language.

Rodionov also stopped consuming Russian-language media. “Language is a kind of weapon,” he said. “You protect yourself from their influence.” His mother, who lives in Kharkiv, continues to imbibe Russian propaganda, and this makes the relationship difficult (Rodionov allows himself to speak Russian to her when she doesn’t understand his Ukrainian). Rodionov has severed relations with all his other relatives, back in Russia, “because they are Russian. I’m not.”

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