Jennes de Mol from Eindhoven is ambassador to Ukraine. He lives and works there under the threat of war. On Saturday night, 14 cruise missiles were fired at Kiev, circumstances to which he is not used to. He talks about it in the Omroep Brabant TV program KRAAK.
“It’s very painful,” he says. But what the people here in Kiev are experiencing is just the tip of the iceberg. In the East they have been at war for years. It’s bizarre that the entire Russian-speaking part of Ukraine is gone. It just isn’t there anymore.”
Working in Ukraine is not really safe at the moment. An assessment has been made of what the work yields and what the risks are. De Mol: “It means that we have contact on a political, economic, humanitarian and economic level with local authorities, with the local community, international organizations and with Dutch people who are still there. There is work to be done.”
“You hear an alarm that isn’t there, bizarre.”
“But there is also a threat,” he continues. “In that balance, we have decided that it is safe to work under certain circumstances. In the beginning the air raid sirens sometimes went off eight times a day. In the beginning it was exciting, but it quickly becomes very annoying. The funny thing is that it gets so under your skin that sometimes you hear an alarm that isn’t there. That makes it very bizarre.”
He feels a connection with the country, where a third of the population has moved, on its way to something new. “I have often been to those cities, as has happened in Donetsk. I have spoken with people there, had contacts and then you see that those cities are bombed away.”
In 2019 he became ambassador to Ukraine. He set himself the goal of going to the war zone in the east. “I went there to see what projects there were, such as demining, security projects, humanitarian projects, legal projects. There had already been a war going on for five years and I traveled a lot. At the time, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stef Blok, came to Ukraine. I wanted to tell from personal experience what the latest news was.” These cities have now been completely destroyed by all the bombings.
“I try to connect people.”
Remarkably, the core of his work in Ukraine remains somewhat the same: “My profession is building bridges between people, making connections. I try to get things done for the Netherlands. I speak Russian and Ukrainian, I try to connect people, this don’t sit in your cold clothes.”
De Mol continues his work. He will return next week. “We have political assignments. There are visits that need to be prepared. We maintain contacts with the UN family, aid organizations, people who come to provide humanitarian aid. Companies ask what to do with investments. What do you do with staff they have ? What about financial arrangements? People also come with questions about documents and we try to solve that as well.”