How Ukraine reckons with its reality

From Kyiv's coffee shops to the front line.

Mark Meynell

Mark Meynell is the author and minister.

A woman squats and touches a war memorial

War memorial in Bucha.

How on earth it came up I have no idea, but I vividly remember chatting with my grandmother about the ‘Phoney War’ of 1939. I can’t have been much older than 10. It’s not that I was especially inquisitive about history, nor that I had the presence of mind to ask for stories from her extraordinary life. How I wish I’d done that with all four of my grandparents. But my hunch is that it was prompted by sitting in the garden on a glorious summer’s day. We were probably shelling peas or peeling potatoes or something—she always got people staying to do jobs.

She was reminiscing about how weird those months in mid-1939 were, in particular remembering how lovely the summer had been, far brighter and drier than normal. Even after the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1st September (thus triggering Britain and France to declare war two days later), the weather remained good. A sense of war’s inevitability had hovered throughout 1939, so even after Chamberlain’s famous ‘final note’ was rejected, nothing much changed. At least, not for ordinary Britons. Life went on. It would take many months before the conflict came all too close to home.

I couldn’t help but think about this during my visit to Kyiv and Lviv earlier this month. The difference, of course, is that there was nothing phoney about Russia’s 2022 invasion or the horrors inflicted on eastern Ukraine since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. But for the majority, routines continued uninterrupted. As they must.

For example, assuming the worst, I had contacted several Ukrainian friends offering to bring any scarce or unavailable items from Britain. No one took me up on it; it was unnecessary, they all said. After wandering through both cities, it was obvious why. Although trade will undoubtedly have been slower than before the war, shops seemed well stocked with all the necessities and not a few luxuries.

Then on my final morning, I was quietly sipping a cappuccino in Lviv’s historic Rynok Square when the air-raid sirens suddenly cranked up into their now familiar whine. Being kept awake by Kyiv’s sirens had been a new experience for me (a mark of our Western privilege that we have avoided all-out war on our soil for decades). But this was my first daytime alert. It was even accompanied by booming Ukrainian announcements, although the advice was inevitably lost on me. As it was on all around me, who seemed assiduously to ignore it. The few mid-morning pedestrians—few tourists come here— maintained their ambling pace unchanged; the taciturn waiter patiently took orders at the next table; a middle-aged businessman on the square continued his negotiations on the phone while gesticulating with his briefcase. So naturally, I kept sipping.

This was not because the sirens cried wolf. Just 10 days before my visit, Lviv had suffered one of the worst air attacks of the war, with 7 killed, over 60 injured, as well as the destruction of schools and historic buildings. Moreover, I met a friend for lunch an hour later who told me that some man-sized drones had attacked his side of Lviv and he saw one or two shot down. So it was all real enough. What was everyone thinking?

Those who keep going amid a siren’s whine are not perhaps ignoring it but taking calculated risks in their perseverance.

Ignoring reality

T. S. Eliot famously observed that "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." So perhaps that was what was going on here. After two and a half years of war, I can quite imagine exhaustion and resignation to what was going on. So it just gets ignored. Ordinary life must go on. After all, only a small proportion of the population is actively engaged in the war; the rest, if they haven’t already left, must try to keep calm and carry on. In fact, men aged between 18-60 are unable to leave at all without the necessary papers and these are hard to come by. Perhaps the only way, then, is to avoid thinking altogether. On a beautiful day, once autumn has begun to temper Ukraine’s oppressive summer heat, sustaining the illusion is simple. Life carries on.

Of course, it can’t last. Every single person I spoke to had family or friends at the front; some had already been killed. The destruction caused by air raids brought a distant conflict onto people’s doorsteps. However, it was driving through the pleasant Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, both of which I had previously visited several times, that reinforced the impossibility of ignoring reality. Bucha is now emblematic of the invasions very worst atrocities, from when Russian forces had Kyiv almost entirely surrounded before being pushed east. Locals were rounded up and slaughtered, with the bodies of several hundred civilians later found to have died from bullet wounds rather than shrapnel. But as we drove through, it was impossible to conceive of those horrors. Apart from anything, the weather was so lovely. Atrocities don’t occur on beautiful days… or in lovely places… surely?

Persevering amid reality

What impressed me most in those areas was the speed of the rebuilding work. Entire shopping malls and neighbourhoods had been razed. But after only twelve months or so, a memorial to Bucha’s 500 dead had already been erected. As we drove through, major construction projects were underway, with multiple cranes towering over rapidly rising apartment blocks and retail parks.

These are not signs of reality ignored but faced. These are signs of gritted hope. So it struck me that those who keep going amid a siren’s whine are not perhaps ignoring it but taking calculated risks in their perseverance. Just as it is unwise, if not impossible, to live on a permanent adrenaline rush, so one cannot always exist in flight or fight mode indefinitely. It is simply that in wartime, risk thresholds change. Human beings are resilient and adaptable. They endure the most extraordinary setbacks and conditions.

So, to be with Ukrainian friends in my limited, deficient expression of solidarity, has been inspiring. No one I met had any illusions about the realities of Ukraine’s current plight (especially with a harsh winter looming as Russia systematically destroys power stations). But still they persevere.

Seeking deeper perspectives of reality

However, Eliot did not primarily refer to bearing the reality of the mundane. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson explained, Eliot was identifying how little twentieth century society (that of his Waste Land in particular) could bear of spiritual reality. He meant the phenomenon of resistance to a journey towards God or of facing themselves as they stand before God.

However, the horrors of invasion and the nightly anxieties of air raids have put paid to all that. One friend I was glad to see again is Andriy, previously a fairly well-known Ukrainian journalist and now a church pastor. He regularly goes to the frontline as an unofficial chaplain, visiting troops in their camps and the injured in hospital. He was unequivocal. Before the war they would undoubtedly have been shrugged off. But now, he has not met a single soldier who is uninterested in the things of God and eternity. War has forced them to face their mortality and Andriy has found that most are desperate to talk about little else. These things matter. Even on a beautiful, bright, early autumnal day.

Article

Culture

War & peace

21 March 2024

4 min read

Letter from the Balkans

An audience with a crown prince tells the story of troubled lands and resilient inhabitants.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

An orthodox cathedral, with prominent roof domes.

St Sava Cathedral, Belgrade.

Ben Asyö on Unsplash.

It’s only halfway through our supper by Stone Gate, the most ancient entrance to the old citadel of Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, that we realise votive candles are burning in the archway outside. Closer inspection reveals three or four simple pews before a niche shrine to Our Lady and the stone walls covered with inscriptions to the local deceased.

Families, young and old but mostly young, gather in the gloaming for their dear departed. This is a profoundly Catholic site and the little restaurant, brightly lit and jolly, nevertheless feels reverential and on holy ground. Some 80 per cent of the population of Croatia is Roman Catholic, while just 3.3 per cent are Serbian Orthodox.

A five-and-a-half-hour bus ride east and we’re in Belgrade, capital of Serbia. Here, the proportions of the faithful are almost exactly reversed – 81 per cent are Orthodox and a little under four per cent Catholic.

These statistics serve as a grim reminder of the phrase that entered our political lexicon in the first half of the 1990s: Ethnic cleansing. In that civil war, as the former Yugoslavia broke up into its constituent republics, Croatian Serbs and Serbian Catholics – those who survived, that is – were displaced.

So we’re less likely to see the kind of Marian devotion that we witnessed in Zagreb being honoured in Belgrade. This is essentially a technical, creedal difference between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, in how the incarnation of the Son proceeds from the Holy Spirit. It’s no big deal theologically and shouldn’t detain us. But it quietly points to the fragility of peace, not to say democracy, in the Balkans.

A fresco of the Christ in its dome has a bullet hole through the forehead, not so much crucified as assassinated.

A mural depicts an icon of Christ with a bullet hole in his forehead.

HRH Crown Prince Alexander, head of the Royal family Karadjorjdevic, which ruled the kingdoms of Serbia and (later) Yugoslavia until the Second World War, carefully refers to it as “democracy at midnight” over coffee in the Blue Room of Belgrade’s Royal Palace. He returned to his ancestral home when Slobodan Milosevic was deposed at the millennium.

The Crown Prince helped his country return to democracy by uniting the opposition which defeated Milosevic in the elections of 2000. Even today, he calmly states that western democratic leaders often fail to understand how the mindset of eastern autocracy works and agrees that it is “work in progress”. Eternal vigilance is key.

In this context, the Serbian Orthodox Church is doing well, but it’s also still work in progress. Under communism, a substantial number of Serbian bishops were appointed by the Soviet regime, for purposes of control and information gathering. That culture wasn’t cleansed overnight, nor has the communist legacy been entirely expunged from the Church.

“You’ll see what I mean when you visit our family chapel in a moment,” the Crown Prince tells me. Sure enough, a fresco of the Christ in its dome has a bullet hole through the forehead, not so much crucified as assassinated. Prince Alexander will not restore it, so its serves as a constant reminder of what can be. His guiding principle is that “only dictators alter history.”

Elsewhere, our guide points to desecrated icons and the ghostly shadows of Soviet insignia on marble pillars. Alexander is an unassuming and modest man, referring to the 18 Serbian parties he convened at a conference in 2000 as “the democracy by email”.

When we’re joined by his wife, Crown Princess Katherine, she corrects this, proudly stating that her husband returned democracy to the region. There is probably some truth in both their versions of events. The consequence of that could be a restoration of a constitutional parliamentary monarchy in Serbia – we’ll see, or perhaps our successors will.

From the Palace, we visit St Sava, called a temple but really the Serbian Orthodox cathedral consecrated to the memory of the founder of the national Church. This, again, is work in progress. Started in 1935 and only now approaching completion, it’s a paradigm of the troubled contemporary history of Serbia. Communists have razed it and Nazis have parked their trucks and tanks in it.

It is unashamedly modern, though it honours ancient Byzantine mural and fresco methodologies. Its biblical stories in gold leaf use the traditional crafts, linking Belgrade to its ancient past, whatever despots may have done to interrupt its devotional history. We’re linked to the palace we’ve just left by enormous doors, inscribed with multi-lingual prayers of welcome, donated by the royal family.

Perhaps the allegory it offers is best illustrated by the image of Christ – no bullet hole now – in the dome, which was built and raised, centimetre by centimetre, from the ground. All 4,000 tonnes of it. The metaphor of rising from the ashes of war writes itself.

And that’s the takeaway from Belgrade. Serbia – and the wider Balkans – suffered a 20th-century of unfathomable bleakness. Its people have endured and their spirit isn’t broken, a moral exemplar for western Europe. Belgrade resonates to its folk music and young laughter over broken bread and wine outpoured (gosh, do they eat and drink – for who knows what tomorrow holds?).

The phoenix, which naturally shares Greek roots with Serbian royalty, would be the go-to cliché for the cyclical regeneration of Belgrade. But as this city approaches Easter, there is of course something else more fundamental going on.

Belgrade has faith in itself, as well as the God who has delivered it. It’s a resurrection story really.