A spring journey from Kyiv to Kherson on the eve of the counteroffensive

At the very end of April, the bus crosses the Ukrainian border, passing fields of muddy furrows, fawn corn stubble and standing water. Suddenly it’s clear why the spring offensive has been delayed. A sweeping wind greets us every time passengers disembark.

I’m sitting next to 20-year-old Nastia, who took the chance to escape Kyiv last April with her boyfriend to study in Austria. While she travels back and forth to see her parents in Kyiv, her boyfriend of military age can’t take the risk in case he isn’t allowed to leave. It strikes me that there are millions of these forced émigrés who can never return.

It’s seven months since I was last in Ukraine and the bus takes a new route into Kyiv past a column of burnt-out Russian tanks sitting in a lay-by. It’s odd to see remnants of last year’s battle at the edge of a main road. However, there are signs of confidence. The number of checkpoints has reduced and in Kyiv, where the weather is brighter, the parks are full of red tulips and the outdoor bars and cafes are busier than ever. “A little party never killed nobody” proclaims a mural on the pub opposite my hotel. The upright stalks on the chestnut trees are transforming from green to white.

World War III is here. People just don’t know it yet

—  "Owen", a soldier fighting for Ukraine in a unit made up of foreigners

I visit the aid hub Heaven to see the manager Pasha and it’s virtually empty now. My friend Yasha Golovko, who once worked there, is now employed as an assistant director, working flat out on a film about an evacuation volunteer in the early days of war. On the phone she relays the good news that her father has made a full recovery from having been injured on the front line. I tell her I’m planning to go to Kherson and ask if she thinks it’s dangerous.

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‘Obviously there is bombing,’ she says, weighing it up, ‘but, in my opinion, it’s not super-dangerous.’

At 4am on my first night in Kyiv, the hotel tannoy emits an air-raid warning. I briefly contemplate heading down to the shelter but, exhausted from my journey, I go straight back to sleep. When I wake up again, I discover that missile attacks across Ukrainian cities have killed at least 20 people in Uman. Putin is still exerting his psychological terror on civilians. While it’s barbarous, it has to be remembered that George Orwell wrote a controversial article, As I Please, in 1944, advocating the bombing of German civilians as a morally legitimate way of winning the second World War.

I walk to the Memory Wall at St Michael’s Monastery to look at the new photos of fallen soldiers. A woman next to me is crying, ribbons quivering on the ornamental trees. It seems fitting that Ukrainian wreaths are shaped like a teardrop. A new series of photos have been erected next to the display of bombed-out vehicles. They are graphically shocking: one is of a dead woman in Bucha with yellow-blistered skin and charred clothes, her face scorched.

That night, I head to the train station to take the sleeper to Kherson. It’s a frontline city, but a train goes there every two days. At our packed platform, the tannoy plays rousing Ukrainian folk songs to send us on our way.

I share a second-class compartment with three others. I sleep most of the 11 hours, aware of one passenger departing in the middle of the night. Later, I wake up to a teenage soldier and his girlfriend taking final selfies as the train pulls into Mykolaiv and I’m left with the poignant impression that these photos might end up in memoriam. Only a handful of passengers go all the way with me to Kherson.

The main Ushakova Avenue must have had boulevardesque majesty before the war but is now full of plyboarded-up shops. Huge branches are lying by the pavement which has fallen into divoted disrepair. Etiolated dogs own the streets and, while the vast majority of buildings are standing, many windows are broken from bomb blasts. Joy Travel Agency is spattered with dark mud from where a missile unearthed the nearby grass. The occasional Saturday-morning shopper passes by without dallying. The city has a dystopian, desolate edge.

I’m hyperaware of the rattle of my suitcase wheels down the deserted side streets. It sounds ludicrous, like I’m the cavalry arriving with artillery. I’m probably viewed by the Khersonians as a war tourist, but that would be wrong. As Susan Sontag said, ‘I belong to that tradition of writers who believe that to be a writer is to pay attention to the world and to champion the cause of justice, to be in a position of opposition.’

In the room behind the restaurant, two children play, hidden away, pale-skinned, deprived of sunlight. They’re the only children I see during my trip to Kherson

Early this year, David McWilliams wrote an article in The Irish Times imagining the bright postwar future of Ukraine, but while it’s possible to envision a national rebirth from the comparative safety of Kyiv, the south and east feel trapped in limbo. The Ukrainians I talk to are unsure how long this war will last. Five years? Even 30, like the Troubles?

I check in to the only guest house open in Kherson. The manager Valentyna explains that breakfast isn’t available as there are no eggs to be had, but I’m just relieved to have a functioning roof and glass in the windows. Not long after, the bombs begin. They reverberate deeply from a Ukrainian attack on the Russian-occupied side of the Dnieper. I feel nervous at first, but the strength of the people here is inspiring. Besides, I don’t find the sound of bombs intrinsically frightening as I grew up in seventies Belfast hearing their shudder as I played in the garden. At the age of 11 I moved to Dundrum where explosions and gunfire from Ballykinler army base drifted across the bay. I know what it is to have war as a backdrop.

During a lull I head out and am surprised to find a shop/bar and a fast-food restaurant, Big Ben, just round the corner. The Russians recently bombed the Kherson market place, killing one and injuring others, convincing me not to visit any supermarkets, but these small shops are comforting. In Big Ben, the proprietor tells me her sister fled the war for Donegal and we laugh about the terrible Irish rain (though I can’t help thinking it’s preferable to raining bombs). In the room behind the restaurant, two children play, hidden away, pale-skinned, deprived of sunlight. They’re the only children I see during my trip to Kherson.

The bar is doing a roaring trade, the bartender Roman pouring beer into carry-out plastic bottles. By four o’clock, though, it closes, what little life there is ebbing away from the streets. That night, the Russians fire shells at us. I wake up to air-cracking explosions not far from my room. Here in the maelstrom of war there are no Tannoys, no warnings – war is abrupt and intrusive. The pounding from across the river makes me feel as if I’m in a medieval fort surrounded by a moat, bringing home just how close the war is.

I’m on the train back to Kyiv when a soldier overhears me say thank you in my ropy Ukrainian and introduces himself. His name’s Owen (I’ve changed it for his protection) and he was born in Strabane to a republican-leaning family, although he grew up in Tottenham and is a Londoner through and through. In his mid-thirties, he has candid brown eyes and gapped teeth that seem small in comparison to his face, a little like a child’s. He lost the lower portion of his left arm to an IED in Afghanistan, but it hasn’t stopped him fighting with a “heavy-hitting” American Special Operations Unit called Grey Wolf – he wears the emblem on his camouflage jacket. He’s on his way to the frontline in Zaporizhia, and suspects his next mission will be to liberate the nuclear plant from Russian occupation.

When I tell him I’m a writer, he quotes Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” He recounts the Russian atrocities he’s witnessed; he’s entered cities where teenagers have been strung by the neck from bridges as a warning not to approach. He shows me the bullet mark on his helmet and a cigarette case of bullets, some of which were taken from dead Russians on the battlefield. It’s as if he feels he’ll only be believed if he gives me documentary evidence.

He proves that he’s well-known for his Ukrainian war service by showing me a Russian website called Track a Nazi Merc which is emblazoned with images of him and even his wife. He’s also on the Wagner and FSB wanted list. Ironically, the safest place for him right now is the front line.

“The best place to hide,” he asserts, “is in plain sight.”

When in Kyiv, he takes the precaution of only drinking in bars that he knows. A soldier comrade received serious organ damage after having his drink spiked in a bar in Poland. He tries to keep a low profile, but was once asked by a journalist if he had a message for Putin and answered, “Run.” He regrets that now, as it’s endangered him.

“The BBC is always hitting me up, wanting me to be the face of British soldiers here, but I keep asking them, ‘What anonymity can you guarantee me?’ The answer is, ‘None.’”

He paints a complex and chaotic picture of life on the front line where it’s impossible to tell whose drone is whose. A lack of inter-battalion communication, he reveals, has led to unfortunate losses. Another huge problem is Russian collaborators and he talks of Cossack “hunter killer factions” who use intelligence to hunt them down. He knew the aid workers Chris Parry and Andrew Bagshaw and claims they were set up by saboteurs because the co-ordinates they were given for their evacuation mission was a Russian artillery site. He admits that quite a few British and American soldiers are also unreliable, entering the war only to reinvent themselves. Some foreign soldiers are interested in what he calls “stolen valour”, although he accepts that “anyone going to a battle zone has balls of steel”. Trust is in short supply in this war.

To a large degree, he’s reinventing himself too. Back in 2007 when he lost his lower arm, he was invalided out of the British army and denied a desk job. His subsequent embitterment meant that he plunged into “the bottom of every bottle, every bag of drugs”. There is a sense of making up now for lost time.

He isn’t fully confident that the counteroffensive will work since the Russians are still going forward at a rate of a hundred metres a day. However, he’s convinced that the Americans and Nato will join the war if the Ukrainians don’t make large gains this year.

“World War III is here,” he shrugs. “People just don’t know it yet.”

He describes the war as a strange fusion of the first World War and modern drones – trenches and technology uniting past and present. It’s true that this 21st-century war has some sort of steampunk, retro-futuristic vibe to it. Last winter, he fought in Bakhmut, getting frostbite in his toes in the trenches.

“Bakhmut is gone,” he says. “It’s already in Russian hands, but the media won’t admit it.”

On one QRF (Quick Reaction Force) mission, he fought at the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, subsisting on a diet of buckwheat, which he ruefully says he’ll never eat again. He does night watch, firing tracer rounds at Russian offensive teams in the trenches, hoping to detect their muzzle flashes. Sometimes he’s able to grab a couple of hours’ sleep in a trench, albeit in sheets that are often bloodstained. The front line is heavily mined and he marks them with paint or even sticks. Everything is makeshift in the grey zone.

He may be perceived as a mercenary by the Russians but he’s employed on a freelance civilian contract and invested his own money in his military kit, admitting with a sheepish smile that he used his “wedding money”. His wife, who is ex-military herself, accepted the postponement.

“Luckily she puts up with my sh*t,” he grins.

The war has exacted its toll and his particular form of PTSD is survivor’s guilt.

“Anyone can pull a trigger,” he maintains. “It’s dealing with the aftermath that’s hard.”

He mourns the loss of soldiers he knows but never goes to their funerals, as he feels blamed somehow by their family. Whilst no one in his Grey Wolf unit of 25 men has died, he’s been injured three times. He’s known on the front line as “the Brit” and revered for overcoming his disability, which he wishes wasn’t the case.

“I can do anything with this arm – except for wiping my ar*e,” he says. “No, my real talent is being able to read a situation, to see what happens before it happens. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like I have a sixth sense.”

As the train approaches Kyiv on a sunny Monday evening, he broaches the prospect of not coming back from Zaporizhia.

“I’ve had a lot of luck and it’s running out – a bullet has no name on it. If I do die, I don’t want to be no hero. I’ve no interest in it. I’m a hero to my kids and that’s good enough for me.”

He puts on his full battle gear to exit the train. On the station stairs, he’s an imposing figure and some Ukrainians stop to shake his hand and wish him luck. It’s almost as if I’m with a celebrity and, no matter how he protests against his apotheosis into hero, he’s already reached that status.

[ Irish troops start training Ukrainian forces in Cyprus ]

“I suppose this is where we say goodbye,” he says, shaking my hand. As I walk away, I think of him in relation to George Orwell’s words: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

On my last day in Kyiv, a tank on a trailer is being transported along the congested Shevchenko Boulevard. The warm spring air seems to be bringing us ever closer to the counteroffensive. The sandbags that surround the city’s statues have split, making them look like huge sandcastles on a summer beach.

On the bus back to Warsaw, I meet an accountant Natalya on her way to Riga to visit her student daughter. Natalya is 45, the exact same age as Zelensky, and she describes him as “my president, youthful-minded like me”.

”Where does he get his strength from?” she wonders.

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Like Zelensky, Natalya insists that Ukraine will never relinquish one kilometre of land to Russia. She cites the mistake the Ukrainians made in 2014 in signing the Minsk agreements and failing to resist the initial Russian invasion in the Donbas. She points out the double-standards whereby Russia can attack Ukrainian territory but western allies deny Ukraine permission to attack Russia. The early days of the war in Kyiv affected her deeply. When she first travelled to Riga with her daughter in April 2022 and saw people relaxing in the park, she was so overcome by the normality that she cried.

In April in Northern Ireland, we marked the 25h anniversary of the Belfast Agreement. After all our celebrations for peace, it’s sobering to see Ukraine’s reality. As Natalya says, ”We are paying in blood for our land.” It seems that Putin is equally paying for what he views as his ancestral lands in blood. The chance of any rapprochement is zero and yet Europe needs peace. On an apartment block in the New Lodge in Belfast I recently saw this graffiti: ”Sanctions Hurt Ordinary People.”

I travel all the way with Natalya to Modlin Airport. White hawthorn blossom is waving gently in the hedgerows. In the airport canteen, she takes out her laptop and gets to work on tax returns. Because of the war she can’t even take a day off when she gets to Riga. It’s all part of the war effort to aid the ailing economy. Every civilian plays their part.

Before I go, she expresses a cautious optimism about the new offensive, but even as she does so, she says sirens are sounding in Kyiv. I leave her tapping on her laptop and promise to phone her when I’m next in Ukraine. As I walk through the sliding doors, the May air is soft and hopeful.

Rosemary Jenkinson’s latest story collection, Love in the Time of Chaos, is published by Arlen House