Beneath a lowering sky, the mood on the mound above the ravine where the Nazis shot dead 33,000 Jews at Babyn Yar in September 1941 was even grimmer than usual.
Wearing his trademark military-style clothes, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, surrounded by a security detachment, laid a candle at the shrine. The same day, the dread news came from Vadym Skibitsky, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence, that the threat of Russian Army using tactical nuclear weapons was “very high”.
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Zelensky bears a candle to the memorial
Later, towards dusk, Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, Chief Rabbi at Kyiv’s Central Synagogue, addressed a small crowd in his deep baritone, then laid a candle at the shrine along with leaders of other faiths. He broke off to have a quick word with the JC.
“We are here at the anniversary of this terrible massacre by the Nazis,” he said. “There are not many people because we are again at war. Now we see that Russia is murdering people here in Ukraine.”
He referred to the time we met in Bucha in early April, when bodies of dead Ukrainian civilians, butchered by the Kremlin’s killing machine, were left unburied by the retreating Russian Army.
Rabbi Azman continued: “I thank the free world for standing by Ukraine. We are fighting against darkness. We pray that God will stop all the wars in the world.”
The Kyiv Synagogue comes alive again
At the start of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, the Central Synagogue was packed to the gunnels with human misery, women and children grim-faced as they prepared to flee to Israel, leaving their menfolk to stay behind and fight.
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Jewish refugees taking shelter in Kyiv's synagogue after the invasion
Today, the synagogue is near-normal, as Kyiv bustles almost as busily as before the war started.
Jacob Konoplev, a spokesman for the rabbi, said he estimated that roughly half the Jews who had fled the fighting had returned home, as the Ukrainian army turns the tide of the war.
The synagogue is still running humanitarian aid missions to towns and cities in the war zone, helping Jews, people of other faiths and those of no faith at all, Mr Konoplev added.
Spot the Nazi
l Since 24 February, the war has changed shape time and again. The Russians tried to take Kyiv but failed, beating a swift retreat, moving their heavy armour to the east.
Vladimir Putin changed his war goals to the more modest objective of “de-Nazifying” the two Donbas oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk. Zelensky is Jewish; the notion that Putin is “de-Nazifying” anything is absurd.
At the frontline, Jewish Ukrainian soldiers were photographed celebrating Rosh Hashanah before going back to deal with the Russian invaders.
During the course of the war, the Russian army has repeatedly committed war crimes, targeting refugee columns, murdering civilians wholesale, raping women, castrating captured Ukrainian soldiers.
Nazi is as Nazi does.
The tide has turned
l After a long, grim summer when the best of Ukraine was fed into Putin’s meat grinder in the Donbas in the east, the Russian army managed to roll forward but slowly, taking a village here, a town there. In August, the picture changed.
The Ukrainians had long signalled an offensive in the southern city of Kherson. Putin fell for the elephant trap, ordering 20,000 of his best troops to Kherson which is on the western side of the mighty Dnipro River.
Then the Ukrainians used HIMARS rocket artillery, donated by the Americans, to blow up all the bridges across the Dnipro, effectively bottling up a vast Russian army on the wrong side of the river. Those soldiers cannot be resupplied effectively and, some time this winter, many believe that the Ukrainians will get Kherson back.
At the start of September, the Ukrainians pulled off their master stroke. They attacked in force, not in the south but in the east, hitting the Russian frontline exactly where it had been denuded of the 20,000 soldiers moved to reinforce Kherson.
In boxing terms, the Ukrainians had been jabbing with the right hand, then socked their opponent with a knock-out punch from the left.
They have taken something like 6,000 square kilometres of territory back, capturing a treasure trove of abandoned Russian armour and ammunition and, the word goes, two Russian generals.
The gossip from the Kremlin is that Putin has placed himself directly in charge of the war.
Just as with Hitler, this is not good news for his army. He appears to have ordered his generals not to retreat. That makes agile fighting impossible and Russian defeat all the more likely.
Will success breed disaster
But it’s Ukraine’s very success on the frontline that is causing people in Kyiv to worry. In the last few days, the city has been surrounded by a fog of gloom.
One Ukrainian intelligence official told the JC: “It’s highly likely that Putin will use tactical nuclear weapons against us. He’s got nothing else left.”
So did a second source, reinforcing the warnings from Ukraine’s deputy military intelligence chief, which reached President Zelensky on the day he paid his respects at Babyn Yar.
To be fair, the “highly likely” line comes with an immediate request for the very best Western air defence systems. So it is possible that the Ukrainians are overselling their plight deliberately. That said, the anxiety that Putin might use a small tactical nuclear weapon cannot be lightly dismissed.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that is going to happen in the immediate future. One analyst in Kyiv said that the longer the war goes on, and the more it goes Ukraine’s way, the more likely the nuclear threat becomes real.
Putin did his university thesis on international trade law and he likes some legalistic cover for his adventures. Four sham referenda in occupied oblasts, calling on Russia for protection from Ukraine, could justify him pushing the nuclear button (in his eyes alone).
The risks of him doing such a thing are unimaginable.
The counter-arguments are that if Putin does cross the nuclear Rubicon, the West’s reaction will be ferocious. Russia’s effective allies — China, India and, to a lesser extent, Turkey — have been happy to trade with Moscow while ignoring the blood on its hands.
A tactical nuclear strike will make them think again. At home, such a strike may push Russia’s masses, uneasy but broadly passive in the face of Putin’s hyper-aggression, out onto the streets.
The bad news is that in an address to the nation on 30 September Putin told a series of extraordinary lies, turning his aggression into Russia’s victimhood, doubling down on his topsy-turvy view of the world, threatening not just Ukraine but also the West.
As the master of the Kremlin faces a humiliating defeat in conventional warfare, it would be entirely in character for him to change the frame of reference by killing millions and irradiating Ukraine for many centuries to come.
I have studied this man for 22 years and written a book about him and, on balance, I do not believe that he will fire a nuke. The risks are too high. But good, smart intelligence officials in Kyiv are saying that he probably will.
One can only hope that the rabbi’s prayers for peace work. But the mood in the Ukrainian capital is bleak, bleaker than the saying of it.
John Sweeney’s new book, Killer In The Kremlin, is published by Bantam Press
