Each Sunday after church, chilblains smarting in the winter months, we would march two by two into the Library – austere with its high wood paneled walls and no table for its lack of heating – and then settle down to write letters home. It’s hardly a secret that letter writing is the Betamax of the writing world now with the immediacy of the modern life. Just as I remember waiting patiently for the postman to arrive to see if I had received some correspondence, so I enjoyed composing. The last straps of a connection I had to this form of communication were with my adoptive family in Kiev, Ukraine where I spent three formative months as a young Turk recently out of school and with a desire for some adventure.
Aged 18, I headed to a newly independent Ukraine to teach English. So for weeks now, the world has been gripped by the crisis in Ukraine – where a president has been ousted, ethnic and cultural divisions are more apparent than ever before, and the United States and Russia are engaging in games of rhetorical brinksmanship seldom seen since the Cold War. But beyond the fascinating headlines, is it possible that events in Ukraine could impact you directly? It’s entirely possible that the butterfly effect rippling out from the economic, security and political developments in Ukraine will affect all of us. However, I am affected in an altogether different fashion and I find myself reflecting on my experiences in Kiev from 1995.
As the situation has begun to recede into the background of geopolitical events a larger, more fundamental question takes shape: Having lost some degree of its strategic defensive depth in Ukraine, how – and where else – might Russia push back against the West?
Moscow’s options are varied, but the most likely strategy is three-pronged: bring pressure to bear on eastern Ukraine with limited military incursions; create unrest in the Baltics – now part of NATO and the European Union – and the Caucasus, and prevent anti-Russian movements from coalescing in Eastern Europe.
Back in 1995 I was comfortably installed in the district of Svertoshin with my host family Olga and her nephew Vladimir and on trips to downtown I can recall the tensions between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians visibly manifested. Ukraine’s history and indeed that of Kiev is peppered with references to freedom fighters and pro-independence martyrs and nowhere was this better represented than in the square in front of the St Sofia cathedral with the imposing monument to the Cossack fighter from the 17th century Bogdan Khmelnitsky. Beyond this there was a makeshift grave built into the pavement for the Ukrainian Orthodox Patriarch
Volodymyr Romaniuk who was refused burial in the grounds of the cathedral by pro-Russian demonstrators. In the skirmishes between riot police and mourners – infiltrated by ultra-nationalists – there were arrests, injuries and worse yet loss of life.
On a daily basis pilgrims would leave flowers atop the patriarch in the pavement and freshly written slogans would be daubed on the walls. The real significance and the profundity that this all represented was clearly lost on me at 18. It is now, as we watch the peculiarities of a modern age Risk, broadcast on the morning international news on our televisions, in the Crimea that I have only just begun to fathom the importance of the lines drawn between Russia and the Ukraine.
It almost seems unreal. At one stage I was teaching Olga and Vladimir how to make baked potatoes with grated cheese in the kitchen of our apartment on the seventh floor of the soviet era block and the next listening to my students speak of the horrors inflicted by Stalin on the Ukrainian people in his premeditated famine of 1932-33, collectivization, deportations and the Great Terror.
Ukraine and Russia are uneasy bedfellows but they need one another. Historically, the region is divided by fault lines – between Slav and non-Slav peoples, between western Christendom and Orthodoxy, and between the region’s former empires – Russia, Germany, Turkey and Austria- Hungary. In fact, the only time that we can possibly argue that there was unity in the region was under communism…but we’d better not make reference to this.
Europe’s position now becomes critical. Fractured and burdened by its ongoing financial crisis and lacking unity on military issues, the European Union could find it difficult to counter Russian moves – whether they appear as financial incentives to the struggling states of central and Eastern Europe or threats of armed conflict along the periphery.
As the saga in the Crimea continues, I prefer to remember jovial times enjoying obolon beers in the Maidan Square – recently barricaded by protestors exploring the parks along the River Dnieper and afternoons communicating with Olga, passing a Russian to English dictionary across a table to one another to construct conversations. Olga was my Ukrainian mother, and for a while longer after my return home I would write her. This trickled away when I would receive no reply. I assume now that she has passed away and Vladimir has probably returned to the Carpathians. My links to Ukraine are slim, but, they leave me philosophical when I reflect on current events. The crisis gripping Ukraine today did not emerge abruptly. It was born from geography and history.
