Whether Russia attacks or not, Sasha’s life has already been irreversibly changed. Reports of an impending escalation made the 23-year-old student so afraid of being sent to the trenches that he made a difficult decision two months ago: he kissed his parents goodbye in Donetsk, the capital of separatist territory, and went out with a friend and three bags of clothes in a car that would take him to Ukraine via Russia.
‘At the border I was interrogated by the Donetsk security service’, says Sasha. “I said I was just going to visit relatives.”
His flight turned out to be just in time. A day after his arrival in Ukraine, his mother’s telephone in Donetsk rang: whether Sasha could report to the separatist army recruitment office.
Now he is sitting in a bar with three refugee contemporaries in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. For the first time in their lives, the young people in their twenties are introduced to going out: a curfew has been in place in separatist areas for eight years. They hope to have saved enough money by the spring to go on their first trip abroad, to Vienna.
threat of war
The boys are not freed from the threat of war. Kharkiv is located 30 kilometers from the border with Russia. Behind it, the Russian army has gathered tanks and soldiers, according to satellite images. Ukrainian President Zelensky said this month that Kharkov is the most likely target of a Russian attack, though the Kremlin denies having any plans to invade.
“We try to run from the war, but the war is chasing us,” says Max, another fugitive in his twenties from Donetsk, in the bar. He misses his brother and his friends who are still in Donetsk, but he is not going back. “The Army Recruiting Office is looking for me, I’m not going to take the risk.”
Ukrainian flags flutter in the snow outside the bar. A beamer projects a large yellow-blue bicolor onto the headquarters of the SBOE, the Ukrainian security service. European Union flags hang on street corners in Kharkiv.
“People want to show that they don’t want protection from Mr. Putin,” said Julia Bidenko, a political scientist at Karazin National University in Kharkiv. She thinks President Putin wants to cite historical ties between Kharkov and Russia as justification for a possible attack on the city.
Ties to Russia
The ties between Kharkov and Russia go way back. Kharkov was founded in the 17th century as a military defense post of the Russian Empire. A clock tower and war memorials commemorate the joint victories over Napoleon and Hitler respectively. Russian is still the most spoken language in the city.
Russia disguised previous raids on neighboring countries as ‘rescue operations’. President Putin legitimized the capture of the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea in 2014 by saying that “Russians” should be protected there. “Russian civilians” in eastern Ukraine also deserve defense against “a civil war” in Ukraine, Putin says — denying evidence that Russia started the war itself by sending troops and directing the separatist leadership.
Putin does not know who the Russians to be saved in Ukraine are. The Kremlin has been distributing Russian passports en masse to Ukrainians in separatist territory in recent years. But Putin also suggests that actually all Ukrainians deserve his rescue. After all, Ukrainians and Russians are ‘one and the same people’, Putin wrote in an essay on Ukraine last year.
Graphic designer Yekaterina Pereverzeva belongs to the inhabitants of Kharkov with a Russian background. She was born in Russia, speaks Russian and has a Russian passport. But she doesn’t want to be saved, she says. “The only threat we have here comes from Russia itself.”
Speculation in the city about a possible attack is a déjà vu for her. In 2014, when she lived with her mother in Donetsk, there were also months of rumors of war. ‘I didn’t believe for a long time that war would really break out,’ says Pereverzeva. Until the airport was taken. I was in a cafe and the waitress said: we’re closing, it’s war now.’
She says that experience has made her calmer than most people in Kharkov. ‘For them the war can start now, but for me the war started eight years ago. I’ve already been through this phase.’
Pro-Russian
Pro-Russian activists have tried to tear Kharkov free from Ukraine before. In 2014, they took the City Hall and proclaimed the Kharkiv People’s Republic. But the security services in Kharkov, unlike the services in Donetsk, remained loyal to Kiev and recaptured the city hall. Now there is a tent in front of the entrance, where people can sign up for the Ukrainian army.
Support for rapprochement with Russia does exist in Kharkov, a September poll by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a Ukrainian think tank, showed. A quarter of the inhabitants of Kharkov are in favor of Ukrainian joining the Eurasian Economic Union, an alliance of Russia and Belarus, among others.
The pro-Russian opinion is also represented in local politics. One of the largest opposition parties was founded by Viktor Medvedchuk, an oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin. The party’s national candidate finished second in Kharkov in the 2019 presidential election, behind pro-Western President Zelensky.
“Part of the population longs to return to the Soviet Union,” says political scientist Bidenko. She points out that Kharkov had considerable status as the temporary capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and as an important industrial center. The first nuclear fission in the Soviet Union took place in Kharkov.
But support for a western course is greater and has grown since the annexation and war in the east. More than 36 percent of the population of Kharkov wants to join the EU; in 2014 this was still 20 percent. The shift is also taking place in other parts of the Russian-speaking eastern part of Ukraine.
Kharkov’s Ukrainian identity is becoming increasingly visible. Residents more often speak Ukrainian. Museums and cultural institutions draw attention to their own culture and history. Even the Pushkin Theatre, Russian-language and named after the founder of the modern Russian language, has recently put on some performances in Ukrainian.
Shift
The shift to Ukrainian is partly imposed by the Kiev government. A language law obliges radio and TV stations to broadcast most of their broadcasts in Ukrainian. Newspapers and news sites are allowed to report in Russian, as long as they also distribute a Ukrainian version.
“Actually, we should be grateful to Putin,” said Aleksandr Nikolaychuk, a retired Kharkov resident. ‘Because thanks to Putin, our society is now uniting.’ He and a group of activists make camouflage nets for tanks and bunkers of the Ukrainian army.
At the same time, the aversion to Russia puts the people of Ukraine in danger. The Russian package of demands on NATO leaves no room for doubt that Ukraine must remain within the Russian sphere of influence.
The fear of a Russian ‘rescue’ can be felt at a commemoration for Ukrainian nationalists, who in 1918 took up arms against the Bolsheviks in vain. The small gathering in a park in Kharkov is watched by groups of police officers. Due to recent bomb threats at schools, the police are extra vigilant.
“Conflict is never far away in Ukraine,” said Olga Volkova, one of those present. “This commemoration is yet another reminder that we must be ready to fight.”