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Larry Towell/Magnum Photos Luhansk, East Ukraine, November 28, 2014

Some Ukrainians have been angry about my recent report in this space, especially about the title, Ukraine: Divided and Bitter. It is wrong to say that Ukrainians are divided, someone curtly retorted on Twitter, because in fact they have never been as united as they are now. In general terms, most Ukrainians are more united than ever and many say that Vladimir Putin and the war have done more to strengthen Ukrainian patriotism than anything since independence in 1991. But it is impossible to ignore that the conflict is by now not only a matter of aggression by Russia but also a civil war in the east. It is no good citing old opinion polls of what Ukrainians thought before the war and assuming that their views havent changed.

Take the poets Olena and Anna. Before Ukraines recent upheavals, Olena Maksymenko, a tall twenty-nine-year-old from Kiev, loved to write and visit other countries. I traveled a lot, in the Caucasus, Georgia, Mongolia, Baikal. I was also interested in ancient history, archaeology and mythology. Not many Ukrainians are travel journalists and poets, but Olena was carving out a nice career and name for herself as both.

But something changed for Olena with the Maidan revolution, which began in November 2013. Like so many other middle-class and educated Ukrainians, all she wanted was for Ukraine to be a normal European country. Since 1991, it had continued to linger in the twilight zone between Russia and the rest of Europe, all the while crushed under a culture of economic and political corruption that had impoverished a country that should be rich. So when president Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign long-negotiated agreements with the EU, Olena joined the protests. Her poems became political and she read them from the stage on the Maidan in Kiev.

Then, in March, 2014, soon after the fall of Yanukovych, she went to Crimea, which one week later would hold a referendum on joining Russia. Close to the border between Crimea and the mainland of Ukraine she was detained by men she described as just guys with guns. They were, she said, Cossacks, Berkut (the name of the former Ukrainian riot police, many of whom had been called up from regions loyal to Yanukovych to try to control the protesters at the Maidan), and Russian soldiers. They threatened to kill her. They pointed a gun at her and pulled the trigger, though it was not loaded, hit her, and chopped some of her hair off. They said I was an agent of the USA and they tried to get information from me about other journalists. Three days later, I was released, she told me.

When she came back from Crimea she discovered that one of her best friends, also closely involved in the Maidan, had committed suicide. By chance this moment in her life coincided with a writers residency she had won, organized before the revolution, in Latvia. While she was there, a whole novel about her friend and about the Maidan events just poured out. Then she trained to use a gun and fight but discovered that only women with the right connections were being allowed to go into combat on the Ukrainian side. If there is a choice between a woman who has military training and a man who doesnt they will choose the man, she said. Women like her, she complained, were being shunted into cooking or paper-shuffling jobs. This made her an angry woman, she told me.

We travelled together to the Pervomaiske, a small government-held town cum suburb of Donetsk, close to its airport. (This is not the same place as the rebel-held Pervomaysk I described in my last piece here.) She was attached to a group of volunteer medics who have set up a first aid center for Ukrainian soldiers injured on the front in a former hotel. Standing behind the hotel reception desk was Oleksiy Reznikov, aged twenty-two, who had a shelf of small bottles of different colored inks behind him and above his Kalashnikov. He was the frontline tattooist. This is a war we need to fight and everyone needs to find their niche, he told me. Soldiers and medics were having him tattoo them with their blood groups and nicknames, and some with patriotic Ukrainian themes and symbols. It raises morale, he said.

We could hear fighting, but for the time being hostilities have significantly tapered off as a result of the February 15 ceasefire. Bored, Olena was filing stories and collecting more that might appear in another novel. From her childhood she told me she had thought that it would be amazing to be a war correspondent and go cover conflicts in other countries. But unfortunately the war came to me.

A few days later, in Donetsk, I met Anna Iureva, another poet, aged eighty-seven, whose now abandoned house was only a few minutes walk from the hotel-cum-field hospital in Pervomaiske. Donetsk is the capital of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic, and together with neighboring Lugansk, makes up the would-be state of Novorossiya, or New Russia. Without support from Russia, which many people here look to as a savior, the region would almost certainly be retaken by Ukrainian forces.

Anna is a tiny, sprightly grey-haired lady. She told me that as a schoolgirl she had written poems, but that because she had been the youngest of eleven, her parents could not afford to give her much of an education. For the last eight months she and her family have lived in a dingy nuclear bomb shelter. Since the ceasefire, most of the people who stayed here have gone home but some, like Anna and her family, have not.

See original here:
Ukraine: Two Poets in the War