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Ukraine was trying to build a path to freedom, and Russia was building a path back to the Soviet Union with Kremlin TV and petrodollars. Ten years ago Ukrainians could drink beer with Russians after the European Championship soccer matches, but we didn’t realize then that Ukraine was moving forward and Russia was moving in the opposite direction. Putin has been more or less in charge for more than 20 years and elections are basically meaningless, where badly maintained roads crisscross the country - except when they just end - and where a person can be sentenced to prison for merely expressing an opinion, like Aleksei Gorinov, a member of a local council who was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for speaking out against the war in Ukraine. We still have a long list of work that needs to be completed.īut these problems are not the same as those in Russia, where Mr. Before the war, large numbers of Ukrainians left to work in Poland and other countries every year. We cannot say that we are satisfied with our justice system: Our courts are not independent. Of course, Ukraine still has its problems. And when Volodymyr Zelensky, a political outsider, was elected president in 2019 on an anticorruption, pro-European platform, the incumbent president, Petro O.
Ukrainians have been able to travel to the European Union without a visa since 2017.
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Ukraine has learned how to build roads, schools and hospitals.
But this spring, when I left Kyiv to head back east to Avdiivka and the front line, I drove about 460 miles of perfect roads in less than 10 hours. The roads I left on were covered with deep holes that nobody had ever come to fix, so people filled them with the remnants of the coal they burned on their stoves at home. I left Avdiivka in 2014 when Russian-backed separatists declared east of my city to be the Donetsk People’s Republic. Numberless chickens ran all over the yard. When the business didn’t have cash, it gave them a salary of chickens. And I remember our neighbors, who worked at a chicken factory. People had to bring their own cotton wool. I remember that hospital, with its floor covered in tattered and bristling Soviet linoleum. When it didn’t arrive, we called again, and they told us they did not have enough gas to reach us. When I fell ill as a child and had a high temperature, my grandmother called an ambulance. I grew up in Avdiivka, in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine. Foreigners would often think Ukraine was part of Russia, and even Ukrainians did not always understand the fundamental differences between Russians and us. When Ukraine and Russia left the Soviet Union about 30 years ago, we had the same resource-based economies, the same endemic corruption and poverty. The war has brought that reality home to me, too.
Now the invaders have seen the reality: The Ukrainians live better than they do. Before this war, these men were encouraged to believe that Ukrainians lived in poverty and were culturally, economically and politically inferior. Putin’s soldiers are from some of the poorest and most rural regions of Russia. Not because of economic sanctions and not because of the huge losses of troops and tanks but because Mr. This war is Vladimir Putin’s fatal mistake. But, the locals said, they seemed perplexed by the robotic vacuum cleaners, and they always left those.
They took money, cheap electronics, alcohol, clothes and watches. Then they looted the local houses thoroughly. The people there told us that when the first Russian convoy entered the town, the troops asked if they were in Kyiv they could not believe that such idyllic parks and cottages could exist outside a capital. The locals told us something else the Russians had done: One day they took mopeds and bicycles out of some of the yards and rode around on them in the street like children, filming one another with their phones and laughing with delight, as if they’d gotten some long-awaited birthday present.Ī few days earlier we were in Bucha, a suburb northwest of Kyiv that was subjected to an infamously brutal occupation. The Russians killed civilians in Andriivka, and they ransacked and looted houses. In one of the yards we passed there was an abandoned burned-out tank sitting on the grass. Shell casings and boxes of ammunition were scattered everywhere, and the houses were in various states of ruin. We were among the first Ukrainian troops to enter the village after a Russian occupation that had lasted about a month. In early April I walked into Andriivka, a village about 40 miles from Kyiv, with my battalion in the Ukrainian territorial defense forces.
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