Outside the Brodsky Synagogue in downtown Kyiv, two brothers stand guard. Zev hangs out with a Kalashnikov on a sling and a smile on his lips, while his bro Chaim watches the street and everything that moves on it.
Inside the lobby, most of the security people know me now, the not-that-kosher bloke from the JC in the silly orange hat, so I spot only three sub-machine guns wave in my general direction. Be it noted, I’m on their side.
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Synagogue Soldiers: Chaim and Zev with a rifle
The synagogue’s Chief Rabbi, Moshe Azman, is unfashionably not packing heat but he spits out words as if from a Tommy gun. His English is rough and ready but a million times better than my Russian.
Thickset and with a long, straggly beard, he neither looks nor talks like a wimp. Far from it. I try to poke him with a stick by asking him when the Russian army comes to his synagogue, will they be welcomed with chicken soup?
The rabbi all but bites my head off: “What a provocative question! First of all, they will not come here. It’s impossible for the Russian army to come here. Ukraine is winning. I was born in Russia, in Leningrad. From what we see here, the Russian Army is committing war crimes. They kill civilians, we welcome hundreds of refugees, not just Jews but everybody.”
He lists the cities from where the refugees have fled to the east of the capital, citing evidence of heinous acts. He tells me they are doing their best to help people get out.
I ask: “The Kremlin says the government here is neo-Nazi. What do you make of that, rabbi?” He pulls a sour face: “I have seen this on Russian television. They are making a zombie picture. It’s a lie. First of all, no Jewish people here have asked to be saved by the Russians. Jewish people live a very good life here in democratic Ukraine.”
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Rabbi Moshe Azman in Kyiv (Pic by John Sweeney)
I ask him who is the real Nazi, Ukraine’s president Zelensky or Putin? He sets out that Zelensky was elected by more than 70 per cent of Ukrainians, that the idea that a Jew could be the head of a Nazi government is absurd: “No normal person believes this drivel.”
He goes on to add that he studied fascism in what was then Leningrad as a student and that what Putin was doing was definitely fascist. The rabbi is on the rouble.
The Church of Putinology is a kind of death cult. There are, according to the great expert on cults, Professor Robert Lifton, three key definers of such a movement. First, it needs a messiah; second, it engages in brainwashing; third, it does harm. The harm? The Russians bombing a maternity hospital in Mariupol would be proof of that. But there is plenty more.
The messiah was on full view at the Moscow stadium last week, wrapped in his £10,500 Italian coat. The brainwashing was clear: talk of the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, a narrative of hate flowing from Putin’s fascistic reverence for a Greater Russia of true Christian Orthodoxy and repression of anyone who dares to argue. At his Moscow Nuremberg, Putin characterised his butchery as his duty “to relieve these people of suffering”, then cited the Bible: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
I am a lapsed Catholic and not a good one, but even I know that this is an abomination unto God. Has Putin gone nuts? Will he nuke us all?
Semyon Gluzman, the President of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, told me before the war that Putin is not mad but bad. That makes nuclear war unlikely, very. I also think that Putin would not dare use chemical weapons because the blow-back for him, inside the Kremlin, would make his grip on power even more rickety.
I agree with Semyon that Putin is not mad but bad, but qualify it, that Putin is a rational actor inside a dark room. He does not get modernity. The Ukrainians are winning because they embrace the 21st century and are fighting from within it, with drones and tractors and funny and emotionally powerful videos.
The Russians are losing because their leader is trapped inside the 20th century, fighting a war with tanks and armoured columns, hating those in the West who “cannot make do without foie gras, oysters or gender freedom, as they call it”. As soon as I get back to London, I am going to have foie gras, oysters and go for a pint in the Vauxhall Tavern.
Back at the Brodsky Synagogue, I ask the rabbi who is going to win this war. “Ukraine just won,” he replies.
You might say that the rabbi is being premature but that’s not what I am hearing in Kyiv from my string-bag of sources stretched hither and yon.
For the past month, the Russian Army has been a big crab, trying to squeeze Kyiv into submission by squeezing with two pincers. The bigger claw came down through Belarus, through Chernobyl, down the west bank of the River Dnieper and ended up in the north-west suburbs of Kyiv.
First it took Gostomel airport, then the town of Bucha, then broke into the town of Irpin. From there, its big guns can target the north-west of Kyiv, which is why most nights the air-raid defence sirens have wailed and people have been killed in their flats.
The smaller claw has come from the east, all the way down towards the town of Brovary. The eastern pincer movement stalled further out and is not in sufficient artillery range of the capital to do major damage.
In the last few days there are signs that the crab, not the city, is beginning to crack. I got the first whispers that things were not going well for the eastern claw last week when a taxi driver on the edge of Brovary told me what the villagers, living in occupied Russian territory, were saying: “The Russian soldiers are starving, so hungry that they are begging for food.
“The villagers say the soldiers aren’t aggressive. Their commanders want them to be hostile but they are not. They just want to eat.”
Vladimir Putin has created a ziggurat dictatorship where he and his cronies live in gilded luxury and the rest of Russia, brainwashed by zombie movies, shivers in the cold. What a fantastic irony it is that Putin’s ziggurat may be brought crashing down by its own cruel logic. If you don’t feed your army, it stops fighting. And that is what is happening.
The latest word from Ukrainian forces is that they have succeeded in pushing back the Russians in the east. Kyiv has been under lockdown for the past 37 hours so it’s impossible for me in the centre of the city to verify that with my own eyes.
But my driver, Vlad — his drabby Skoda sails through the checkpoints while the Ukrainian army stops everyone in a posh car — lives on the east bank of the Dnieper. A week ago, he, his wife and kids could not sleep because of the artillery duel being played out on the frontline beyond Brovary. Now, it is quiet. Vlad slept well last night.
And what about the western, stronger, more terrifying claw? On Tuesday, something amazing happened. Reports popped up on social media that the Ukrainian army had not just stopped its advance, it had cut off its supply chain and encircled it, trapping many Russian soldiers in a pocket. Running low on ammunition, food and fuel, and with communications foxed, the Russian soldiers are surrendering in such numbers that the Ukrainian army is worrying about how to look after so many prisoners of war. Nice.
American spies got one thing right and one thing wrong about the war. The thing they got right was to blast Putin’s plan to invade in big neon signs all over Times Square. Decades of Cold War habit, of keeping what they know in the dark, in the shadows, was brushed aside.
What the CIA and all got wrong, however, was to predict that, once the invasion started, Ukraine would buckle, fold and die in a matter of days.
One whole month into the war and on Khreshchatyk, the main street in Kyiv, and across most of the city the electricity is still on; the internet is still on; there are fresh oranges and lemons in the shops; people are not starving. (The one problem is that the authorities have banned the sale of alcohol. But even this victory for Vladimir Putin is not total. When the police found someone I know walking down Khreshchatyk with a Waitrose bag clinking full of bottles of red wine, Jameson Irish whiskey and Cuban rum, they threatened to smash the bottles – but next time.)
As I leave the synagogue, Chaim and Zev watch me closely.
The spirit inside reminded me of Norry Gilroy, whose obituary I read a decade ago. He was a famous navigator in the RAF’s Bomber Command in the Second World War. Every time he flew over Berlin on a bombing sortie, he would wrap a copy of the Jewish Chronicle around a brick and drop it out of the window of his Lancaster bomber.
With that kind of spirit, I think the rabbi is right. Ukraine has already won.
