Homage to Kharkiv

The day I arrived in Kharkiv, a ninety-four-year-old woman was burned alive there by a Russian glide bomb. Her daughter had to order a DNA test to confirm the identity of the charred remains. Forty-three people, including children aged one, four, and twelve, were injured in the same attack. That Sunday, September 15, 2024, was just another normal Kharkiv day.

So close is the besieged eastern Ukrainian city to the Russian frontier that an S-300 missile can reach it in thirty seconds. By the time the air-raid alarm shrieks in your phone—and it shrieks often—it’s probably too late to take shelter. Liudmyla, a university lecturer in English, told me that as she sat drinking coffee on the twelfth-floor balcony of an apartment building in the northeast of Kharkiv, she could actually see missiles being launched from the Russian city of Belgorod. For thirty-two months now the people of Kharkiv have lived like this, with a neighbor liable to knock on your door at any hour of the day or night—a neighbor called Death.

Russia is not just geographically close. Kharkiv is a historic center of Ukrainian culture, but it’s also a largely Russian-speaking city, full of people whose families came from over the border when there was no border, in the old USSR. Liudmyla’s mother and sister are in Moscow. A few days after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, when advancing Russian ground forces were threatening to take the entire city, her sister got through to her on the phone and helpfully explained, “They’re only attacking military targets.” “Then why,” Liudmyla retorted, “has a Russian missile just landed on your niece Polina’s kindergarten?”

I was in Kharkiv to repay a debt of honor. Earlier this year a Kharkiv-based publisher, Vivat, published the Ukrainian edition of my book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. It was printed at the local Factor Druk plant, which a few weeks later was hit by two S-300 missiles. Of the seventy people who worked there, twenty-one were wounded and seven were killed. They died so books like mine could live. The least I could do was to visit the printing plant, give a couple of talks based on the book, and bear witness to the besieged city.

Andriy, a production manager at the large and modern Factor Druk complex, told me that he had walked out of the production hall just twenty-five seconds before the first missile struck. Three bookbinders, Olena, Svitlana, and Tetiana, were close to the point of impact. He knew them well. “Nothing was left of two of them, the third was just ashes.” He showed me exactly where they died in the hall, which was now loud with the sound of builders’ hammers and drills since the plant is already being restored with the aid of generous donations. But, Andriy sighed, the human beings are irreplaceable.

On the way out, we bumped into another Olena, who had been injured in the attack. Shrapnel wounds were still visible on her arms, and one of her eyes would no longer open properly. I asked if she had a message for Putin. She replied, in Russian, that she wanted Russia to vanish from the face of the Earth: “No Putin. No Russia. Putin is a terrorist.”

Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine from late 1919 to 1934 and home to many Ukrainian writers until Stalin initiated a vast man-made famine—now known as the Holodomor—moved the capital to Kyiv, and executed, or drove to exile or suicide, most of those writers. Historians call that brief flowering the Executed Renaissance. To this day Kharkiv remains a leading center of Ukrainian publishing. As late as 2014, the city still had a complex and contested mix of Russian and Ukrainian culture. Partisans of the former even described it as “the capital of Russian culture in Ukraine.” But starting with the seizure of Crimea in 2014, Putin’s decade-long campaign to force Ukraine back into what he calls russkiy mir (“the Russian world”) has ended up destroying the very thing he claims to save.

Instead it’s Ukrainian culture that flourishes at this new front line of Europe. In the West we sometimes talk loosely about underground culture. Here the phrase must be taken literally. Because of the constant and unpredictable bombardment, my book presentation, like most cultural events, was held underground. The most desirable hotel, too, is not the one with gorgeous views from the eighth floor but rather the one that has windowless underground bedrooms. (It’s called, oddly enough, the Wine and Rose Boutique Hotel. I can recommend it, though not for the wine or roses.)

At the Literary Museum, a local artist, Kostya Zorkin, showed me two exhibitions of his work. Outdoors there was “Proper Names.” Welded sets of four heavy rectangular metal plates, their sides painted alternately black and white, can be rotated on an axle, like a pig on a spit. The dark side is for the old Soviet and Russian street names, which are accompanied by cartoonlike drawings and quotations about Ukraine—often colonially contemptuous in tone—from the Russian notables the streets were named after. The light side is for the new Ukrainian names. Pushkin Street, so-called only since 1899, when imperial Russia renamed it to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth, actually remained without a name change in Kharkiv until early this year, when a Russian missile landed directly on it during an assault in which eleven people were killed. Now it’s been renamed for Hryhorii Skovoroda, an eighteenth-century philosopher who spent much of his life in the Kharkiv region. “What about Gogol?” I asked, referring to the Russian-language writer with Ukrainian roots and themes. Is he also now banished to the dark side? “Oh no,” cried Kostya, “we love Gogol.” We agreed that thankfully there’s still some room for a gray side.

Indoors an exhibition called “In the Name of the City” showed, in drawings and wooden sculptures, interactions among four figures: City, Love, Death, and Hope. City is a human figure with an apartment building for a head—the city as hero. I’ve rarely encountered a place with such intense local patriotism. At another event, I asked a group of students what they would consider victory for Ukraine. One replied, “When everyone in our country loves Ukraine as much as we love Kharkiv.”

Kharkiv is no stranger to war. It was the scene of some of the fiercest battles of World War II, as it was repeatedly besieged, seized, and lost again by Hitler’s Wehrmacht between 1941 and 1943. As a result it’s now the final resting place of 47,993 German soldiers. The military cemetery was carefully restored in the 1990s and inaugurated by then German president Roman Herzog, at a time when we Europeans naively believed that major wars between states were something happily consigned to our dark past. I wanted to visit this German cemetery but was not allowed to because of the danger from unexploded Russian munitions that have landed there in this latest round of violence. During the cold war the city was a center of the Soviet military-industrial complex, which is why its subway is dug deep and strongly fortified, in order to survive an American attack. This means it’s now a good place to hide when the Russians attack. Irony upon irony.

I talked to several soldiers in two crack units, both of them originally created locally after the full-scale invasion. The Kraken special forces unit, named for a legendary sea monster, now comes under the directorate of military intelligence and performs acts of derring-do somewhat reminiscent of those done by the British Special Operations Executive in World War II. One of its junior officers regaled me with thoroughly confusing late-night tales of bloody mayhem.

The Khartiia (“Charter”) Brigade was set up on the initiative of a wealthy local businessman, Vsevolod Kozhemyako, to defend the city against the Russian assault that threatened to overwhelm it in the first weeks of the war. Over a drink at the popular Kofein café, Kozhemyako recalled those heroic early days, when the state encouraged citizens to organize self-defense units. Among this brigade’s most influential members is Serhiy Zhadan, one of the finest contemporary Ukrainian writers. (“Poets buried near shopping malls make good tourist attractions,” he writes, with glorious sarcasm, in his latest volume of poems in English translation, How Fire Descends.) Zhadan makes programs for the brigade’s radio station, Radio Khartiia. In a recording van carefully hidden in someone’s garden, he and I discussed the future of Europe. His despairing contempt for the West’s inability to stand up for its own values was made doubly biting by the sense of hidden menace from the skies above. German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s failure to draw the right lessons from the history contained in that German war cemetery came in for special obloquy.

Today Khartiia is integrated into a national command structure, but like most Ukrainian units it still depends on support from the country’s vibrant civil society. Tetiana Podchernina, a personal trainer who became a volunteer in the first weeks of the war, showed me her NGO’s extensive stocks of protective gear, food, and medicine. One way she raises money is through online auctions of expended Western weapons and enemy missile fragments donated by the units she supports. She posed cheerfully for a photo beside one of the highly portable British NLAW antitank missiles that played a vital part in the desperate early days of Ukraine’s defense against the full-scale invasion.

At an underground location a group of young Khartiia officers introduced me to their high-tech operational planning headquarters. Before the war one of them was an IT product manager; another developed inflation-forecasting models for the National Bank of Ukraine. We laughed: from predicting inflation to predicting Russian lines of attack. On the wall were screens with real-time feeds from surveillance drones showing in extraordinary detail, down to individual soldiers scampering for cover, the territory occupied by Russian forces as a result of this May’s second incursion into the Kharkiv region. Occasionally a silent puff of smoke rose from the ground, indicating that one of the enemy soldiers had been targeted by a Ukrainian projectile and perhaps had joined what are now estimated to be more than 600,000 Russian dead or wounded. Before us was a low battle-planning table, with a large-scale, detailed map of a section of the front line and little Lego-like plastic pieces representing tanks or armored cars.

The commander talked me through an operational planning procedure modeled on the latest NATO practice the Khartiia officers had learned during training in Britain and Germany. Then he click-started a video that showed an actual operation to recover a bite of occupied territory. The video began with high-tech surveillance drone footage of the gathering Ukrainian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles (“unfortunately not Bradleys,” the commander commented). As the shells and mortar rounds flew, the troops advanced along the precise route mapped out on the table. The full-color footage was accompanied by pounding, heart-pumping music that made it seem like something from a video game. But then we saw the Ukrainian soldiers dismount and run through autumnal woods as shots whizzed around them, until one of them primed his hand grenade and hurled it into a Russian trench. So what started as an almost sci-fi taste of 2024 warfare, transformed by drones and other new technology, ended up back in 1914, with some poor bloody infantryman risking his life in close combat to capture one muddy trench.

As I heaved myself into an upper bunk on the rattling old overnight sleeper train back to Kyiv, I thought of a remark made by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz at a moment when another Kremlin-commanded army seemed poised to invade his country back in 1981: “One leaves Poland today with the impression that the most beautiful flowers sometimes bloom on the edge of the abyss.”

What I saw on my brief visit to Kharkiv was inspiring, humbling, full of the “terrible beauty” that Yeats found in Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising. It’s an expression of the spirit of a very unusual city and, more broadly, of that Ukrainian spirit summed up in the word volia, which means both freedom and the will to fight for it. It’s also the latest chapter in the long history of the decline, but not yet complete fall, of the Russian empire—a process that first became manifest with the Solidarity revolution in Poland more than forty years ago and will be troubling us for many years to come.

For let’s be clear: that volia is being pounded and hammered by the crude, remorseless scale of Putin’s Russia. The cost is painfully visible in the besieged city. I have never seen a human being so utterly exhausted as the white-haired mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov. He could barely speak for weariness. His next commitment was to visit the apartment building where those forty-three people had been wounded and that ninety-four-year-old woman had been killed the day before. “Yet again,” he sighed. How often has he paid these visits of attempted consolation. He told me that, amazingly, the population of the city is holding up at over one million (it used to be 1.4 million), although perhaps 300,000 of those are refugees from the territories to the east that are either occupied by the Russians or close to the front line. How do they know the overall number? Terekhov gave the ghost of a smile. It’s a very old method, he said: we count the loaves of bread sold. But to cross-check, they also monitor how many mobile phones are in use.

He and the region’s governor, Oleh Syniehubov, a forceful presidential appointee, described how the physical infrastructure of the city is being pulverized. Half the city’s schools have been damaged, and virtually all education is now online. One of the few exceptions is a specially built underground school. Seventy percent of the region’s businesses have been lost, roughly half of them physically damaged and half relocated to safer parts of the country. Don’t be fooled by the number of cafés and restaurants, they admonished me; that’s the only sort of business still thriving. When I asked how much of the city’s energy infrastructure had been destroyed by Russia’s targeted bombardment, both mayor and governor gave the same reply: “One hundred percent.” Some local capacity has been restored, decentralized generators have been brought in with the help of the European Union, and other regions share some of their power. But nationwide something close to half the generating capacity Ukraine needs for peak winter demand has been lost. Many of the apartment towers in Kharkiv have only one shared central heating system. Winters here are cruel, with temperatures in January and February dropping as low as -20 degrees Celsius (-5 degrees Fahrenheit). “It will be the toughest winter yet,” said the governor, “tougher than 2022 or 2023.” How long can people endure it?

This was my sixth visit to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, and by far the grimmest. On the eastern front, Ukrainian innovation and courage are slowly being ground down by Russian numbers and ruthlessness. If this is David against Goliath, then Goliath is currently winning. My notes on conversations with senior figures in Kyiv record assessments that range from sober to frankly pessimistic. “It’s all about the numbers,” General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of military intelligence, told me. “We wait for a miracle,” joked Oleksandr Lytvynenko, the country’s national security secretary, with an eloquent shrug. Frontline soldiers and the best-informed journalists and military experts fill in a picture that for all its bright spots, such as brilliant drone innovations and the comprehensive humiliation of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, is generally dark—and likely to get worse this winter. There was an urgency tinged almost with desperation in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s personal appeal to President Joe Biden this September to support his “victory plan.” Victory has quietly been redefined as getting to a position where the Ukrainians can negotiate peace from strength, rather than the previously long-upheld goal of recovering the country’s entire territory in its 1991 borders.

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia teaches political writers who follow in his footsteps that you must be honest about the failings of your own side. There are certainly some on the Ukrainian side. One of the most critical is recruitment for military service. Ukraine has mobilized far fewer soldiers than Russia has. Officials claim they are recruiting some 30,000 a month, but according to well-informed Western sources the real figures over the summer were significantly lower.

Why this shortfall? Unlike Putin, Ukrainian leaders really care about the lives of their own people. The country is still a democracy, albeit one semi-suspended in wartime, which means that the recent conscription law took many months to wind through parliament. Zelensky and his overmighty adviser Andriy Yermak worry obsessively about their approval ratings and feared the loss of popularity that might come with a harsher mobilization regime. There have been some shocking cases of corruption in recruiting offices and medical facilities, where officials have collected bribes running into the millions of dollars in return for enabling people to dodge the draft. But it’s also because many young Ukrainians really don’t want to fight, especially when military service has no time limit and they know that many of the regular army brigades—unlike Khartiia—are badly equipped, inadequately trained, poorly led, and liable to get you killed in short order. That leaves old soldiers who have been fighting since the beginning of the full-scale war—average age at least forty—to battle on with no relief or end in sight.

The strategic wisdom of this summer’s lightning incursion into Russia’s Kursk region must also be doubted. It was a brilliant stroke of political theater, revealed the weakness of Russian frontier defenses, and gave a much-needed boost to Ukrainian morale. But it has taken some of the best units away from the rest of the Ukrainian army. So far it doesn’t seem to have diverted significant Russian military resources from the eastern front, where Ukrainian troops are slowly but steadily being pushed back by the Russian meat grinder. It will take a lot for Ukrainians to hold the Kursk exclave for many months, if their government wants to use it as a bargaining chip in any eventual peace negotiation. (We return your territory; you return some of ours.) I called one battalion commander of my acquaintance, who turned out to be in the Kursk region. How was it there? Tough, he replied. And he memorably described his troops as “mostly old men and tired.”

These are things Ukraine itself is responsible for. But at least as much depends on us. More than half the country’s budget comes from the West. It’s the West that pays the country’s pensioners and civil servants, sustains its hospitals and schools, and keeps the lights on. With something like a million men and women under arms and relentless demand for munitions, virtually all the state’s much-reduced domestic revenue goes to defense spending. But its military cannot hold the line, let alone prevail, without our arms (or contracts for Ukraine’s own rapidly growing defense industry), ammunition, intelligence, and training.

When I say “us,” this should by rights mean, above all, us Europeans. For this is a European war, existentially threatening other Central and Eastern European countries that were until quite recently part of the declining Russian empire. What is more, how this war ends will shape an entire new period of European history that began on February 24, 2022. But eight decades after 1945, and shamingly for us Europeans, when it comes to European security, this “us” still means first and foremost the US.

American voters will choose a new president on November 5 for reasons that have little or nothing to do with Ukraine. But the election of Donald Trump could have consequences even more immediately disastrous for Ukraine than those likely to follow for the United States. If Americans elect Kamala Harris, she will soon face a challenging choice. Simply to continue the Biden administration’s policy of cautious support for Kyiv will not be enough to achieve a sustainable peace, which requires the security that only NATO can provide.

The region around Kharkiv is known as Sloboda Ukraine or Slobozhanshchyna, “the land of the free,” because Cossacks and others were encouraged to settle there free of taxes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today it is, in a deeper sense, the land of the free—and the home of the brave. But bravery alone does not win wars. Ukrainians cannot prevail over the Russian Goliath unless they have farsighted, strong allies to support them.

—October 24, 2024