Walking down towards Maidan Square in Kyiv, I passed the house where Golda Meir lived at 5 Basseyna Street. Outside the fading pale green exterior above the cracking and flaking cladding on the street-level brickwork is a brass plaque, another one in a city of plaques.

Alongside a relief of the great woman this one says, in Ukrainian of course, “The prominent Israeli figure Golda Meir lived here until 1903.” The plaque was unveiled on 23 November 1998, 20 years after her death, and seven years after Ukraine re-established its independence from the disintegrating Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Fittingly, behind me at that moment was a group of noisy young women, chatting, shrieking, and laughing away, just as any gaggle of 20-somethings anywhere on a Friday night.

Kyiv is alive and well and living, despite the war, or perhaps because of it.

As you turn right into Khreshchatyk Street, the central and main street of Kyiv, leading past the mayoral offices to Maidan Square is the National Union of Journalists. And there is a plaque, this declaring: “On this spot on November 5, 1968, Ukrainian patriot Vasyl Makukh committed self-immolation as a sign of protest against the communist totalitarian regime and the aggression of the USSR against Czechoslovakia.”

Two window openings away on the ornate, pink Stalinist building is another plaque, this modernist, mirrored version commemorating the life of Georgiy Gongadze, the founder of the newspaper Ukrainiska Pravda. He was kidnapped and murdered by persons unknown in 2000, his beheaded body discovered in a forest. His murder sparked a protest movement against Leonid Kuchma, the ageing authoritarian serving as Ukraine’s president from independence. As a consequence of this civil action, the country went through two revolutions in less than a decade, and established a democracy. Little wonder that some describe Ukraine as a country of anarchists, fiercely independent, stoic and argumentative, at a personal and national level.

Good people, then, to have in a scrap.

Dangers

Since February 2022, with Russia’s deadly invasion, the dangers facing Ukrainian reporters have never been greater. At least 152 media workers have been killed. This total includes more than 120 journalists mobilised into the armed forces and media workers who died as civilian casualties. Of this total, at least 16 media professionals were killed while reporting.

It has been a heavy past month in a heavy six months, with Kyiv suffering drone and missile strikes, which killed many of the city’s innocents. The raid on the morning of 6 July killed 19 people, including a 12-year-old boy, and injured another 61, among them seven children. Russia launched 68 missiles and 351 drones of various types on this occasion, one of a multitude of recent attacks on civilian targets. With a shortage of air-defence missiles, specifically Patriots, 29 ballistic missiles and 18 attack drones got through to strike 34 locations.

Even before this raid, since the start of the year Moscow had the Kyiv region alone with 5 700 drones, 280 ballistic missiles, 340 cruise missiles, 36 Zircon hypersonic missiles, five Kinzhal missiles, and one Oreshnik mid-range ballistic missile.

A few nights ago, on 30 July, was the first time the explosions woke me before the siren. Perhaps it was the speed of the ballistic missiles being used against civilian targets, or perhaps I was simply becoming a blasé Kyivite.

Citizens live with air raid alerts on their phones. Its voice sternly reminds you: “Attention. Air Raid Alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter. Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.” The next day is a sea of bleary faces after a night in the shelter, although many simply turn their phones off or ignore the messages.

Longer Than World War I

Such is the effect of a war that has gone on longer than the First World War and the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets referred to the Second World War, only entering it in June 1941 with the Nazi’s Operation Barbarossa. Outside the Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, the one topped by the towering 62-metre stainless steel Mother Ukraine statue holding a sword in her right hand and a shield in her left, a series of posters hints at the cost of the Second World War.

Of the six million Jews killed, they state one quarter were Ukrainian, with 367 Nazi camps established countrywide. The country suffered 9.5 million casualties, of which 5.5 million were civilians, with 700 settlements either partially or completely destroyed, 10 million being left homeless. Ukraine suffered 42% of the total economic losses of the USSR with just 20% of its population, with more than 550 industries destroyed never to return.

Vladimir Putin and his coterie would not consider Ukrainians to be innocent, of course, but complicit somehow in his war. He has conjured up a rationale reaching back into Russian mythology, linking his destiny with a version of history not shared by the majority of Ukrainians.

There is no nation more aware of the costs of war than Ukrainians, even though Russia has somehow privatised the suffering and victory of the Second World War, as much as it has made the support to Africa and other liberation movements its own – despite the leading role played by Ukraine in this regard.

In 2005, after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Putin deemed Viktor Yushchenko’s presidential win a Western conspiracy. In response, Moscow invented a narrative to contain Ukraine’s pro-European aspirations, especially one that would remind Russians and others of who was responsible for the defeat of Nazi fascism. This was part of the rematch for which the Kremlin was preparing itself over Ukraine.

Ukrainians are critical about much in their state. There is much to be critical about, not least governance, oligarchs, and corruption. And criticism is good, because it shows that citizens are not prepared to settle unquestioningly for their lot. A messy democracy is better than no democracy.

But this should not be confused as hankering back for the Soviet era. Ukrainians have moved on, this movement towards Western standards and via European integration firmly accelerated by Russia’s war.

Ironies

That is one of many ironies coming to the surface. The dismissive notion of Ukrainians as pig farmers in the face of Russian greatness has suffered a bit of a setback. Turns out that they are pretty competent, and don’t want to be Russian. In fact, their success against Russia and the turn the war has taken has turned Western aid into partnership.

Surveys now show that over 90% of Ukrainians are proud of their nationality. In 2015, the number was 68%, 62% in 2010, and 62% in 2000. Some 95% of residents of the western region, 93% in the central region, 92% in the southern region, and 83% in the eastern region take pride in their Ukrainian citizenship.

Soviet and Russian colonial revanchism is dead and busy being buried in Ukraine, whatever its health in Russia and Belarus. Ironically, Putin only ascended to lead Russia because of the demise of the very Empire that he is attempting to reinstate, and has become fabulously wealthy because of a rampant Russian variant of capitalism, not the communist system to which he once dedicated his life as a young KGB officer.

Ukrainians have little desire to go backwards. It’s been so for a long while. This explains why the 1991 All-Ukrainian Independence Referendum resulted in an overwhelming 90.3% of voters supporting the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine across every single one of the country's 27 administrative regions in an 84% turnout.

Fortunate Son

As we walked back, a car passed, blaring out Credence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son.

“And when the band plays Hail to the Chief, Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord.” The timeless protest song from the Vietnam era resonates. Ukrainians had, by the time of the Orange Revolution, grown tired of giving without fighting back.

And now, the cost, most agree, is too great to turn back. The more Ukrainians are killed in Putin’s bloody war, the greater the investment in an independent Ukraine.

There are other reminders of what they have left behind. The nuclear disaster on 26 April 1986 at Chernobyl, just 135km to Kyiv’s north, occurred precisely because of a system of unquestioning loyalty riven by fear, and consideration of people as a commodity over community. Together this produced the worst nuclear accident in history, and helped to bring down the Soviet system.

Some 50 million curies of radiation were released by the Chernobyl explosion, the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs. “The accident marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union: a little more than five years later, the world superpower would fall apart, doomed not only by the albatross of its communist ideology but also by its dysfunctional managerial and economic systems,” writes Serhii Plokhy. As one worker at the plant put it: “The directive remained the same: ‘Don’t panic! The government commission will be here soon. It will investigate, and then measures will be taken!’” Plokhy reminds one that the crisis happened because “Soviet managers and bureaucrats tended to do what years of party rule had trained them to do – avoid responsibility. Everyone was afraid of being accused of spreading panic, and everyone was glad to defer to the higher authorities to make a decision. They were company men, the ‘company’ being the Soviet system.”

Inside Kyiv’s National Museum are black and white images that brought to life the horrors of the Great Patriotic War and the 30 million or so casualties suffered by the Soviets. People stricken with horror, children behind barbed wire in striped uniforms, unaware of the fate that awaited, women grieving over bodies in the snow, bemused victims of the murder of nearly 34 000 Jews at the ravine of Babyn Yar in September 1941 awaiting their fate stripped naked, and swathes of the nearly six million Soviet prisoners taken by the Nazis marching in great, snaking lines near Kharkiv, of which fewer than half returned from the war to end all wars. Grainy they may have been, but they were vividly brought to life by current realities.

Putin, perhaps because he is a beneficiary of the post-war generation, has mythologised conflict as a tool just as he has notions of Russian empire and greatness.

But the empire strikes back, as it’s turned out.

Greg Mills is with the Platform for African Democrats, and is in Kyiv writing a new book.

All images by Greg Mills.