As I entered Donbas from central Ukraine, the war gradually appeared. There were only hints, at first, of its presence. I noticed that there were fewer civilian cars, and more military hardware on the road. A tank on a transporter here, a howitzer there. An infantry platoon shifting its position, riding its armoured vehicles along the highway, raising smoke.
Then, as I came into Bakhmut, Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, there was a quiet that had nothing to do with peace. The streets here were nearly deserted. Only those too poor or too old to make the refugee journey to Dnipro and further west remained.
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Ukrainian troops and police in a briefing while under shellfire in Lysychansk
I pushed on further, coming to Seversk, and from there, on dirt roads, on through the narrow finger of territory that leads to Lysychansk and Severodonetsk. And there was the war in its fully manifest form.
Shelling, almost non-stop. Sinister noise and explosions, distant and then suddenly closer. Destroyed buildings and rubble. The military deployed at forward positions facing the river. A few destitute civilians, sheltering by a half- derelict building, cooking up a meal on a wood fire.
One hundred days in, the direction and the possible outcome of the Ukraine war remain deeply uncertain. The issue at stake in the conflict, by contrast, is constant and clear.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published in July 2021, marshalled a particular account of history to assert what he depicted as the inauthenticity of Ukrainian claims to separate nationhood.
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A bombed building in Bakhmut
Ukraine was and remains, in the Russian President’s view, “an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space”. The country had never, he asserted, had its own “authentic, sustainable statehood”.
The Russian leader has been testing this thesis of Ukraine’s artificiality since 24 February.
Putin’s approach to Ukraine took brutal form. But the thinking behind it was not, on the face of it, absurd.
Ukraine as a modern state is indeed of recent vintage. It has been independent only since 1991, and the first attempt at building a modern Ukrainian state was in 1918.
The population of the country, as Moscow well knew, is sharply divided in terms of historical traditions and in terms of language. The Ukrainian-speaking west is the home of a deep-rooted nationalist tradition, which historically has expressed itself in revolt against Poland (and in massacres of Jews) as much as in opposition to Russian encroachment. The Russian-speaking east, meanwhile, was one of the industrial heartlands of the Soviet Union, retaining many of the traditions and loyalties relevant to that.
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An Ukrainian soldier in Donbas
The Russian leader himself has a strong sense of history. Recently, he has compared himself to Peter the Great, and likened the Ukraine invasion to the Tsar’s reconquest of areas of the Baltic.
So given his own history-oriented nationalism, and the relatively recent and still riven nature of Ukrainian independence, the Russian president evidently assumed that fragile and fledgling Ukraine would prove unable to mobilise in its own defence, while its Russian-speaking citizens would presumably quickly adapt themselves to re-attachment to Moscow.
This, of course, has not taken place. Even in places most closely historically associated with Russia and the Soviet Union, such as Kharkiv in Ukraine’s far east, the resistance to the Russian invasion has been fierce and united.
Ukraine is not rallying around ancient unities, but rather around modern aspirations. This is a patriotism that is concerned, largely, with societal organisation, economy, and living standards.
Put bluntly, Ukrainians look at their neighbours. They see Poland, prosperous, western-oriented, democratic and stable, and they see Belarus, repressive, poor and aligned with Moscow, and they want the former.
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Ukrainian artillery on a transporter
To be like Poland, and not like Belarus, is the modest, sane and pragmatic national principle for which Ukrainians are currently fighting, and dying in large numbers.
The forward-looking and pragmatic nature of Ukraine’s current national moment has relevance from a Jewish point of view. Like many British-born Jews, I am partly descended from refugees from Ukraine in the early 20th century. Ukraine, if it is remembered at all, figures largely in the minds of the descendants of those Jews who left it as a place of pogroms, bigotry and oppression.
It is therefore nothing short of remarkable that Ukraine, at this moment of its testing, is led by a Ukrainian citizen of Jewish ethnicity, President Volodymyr Zelensky.
This, perhaps more than any other single factor, is evidence of the civic and forward-looking nature of the current national mood.
What is even more remarkable is that this fact has become something obvious, accepted and therefore of little note to most Ukrainians.
Interviewing locals in the country over the past two weeks, I tried in vain to induce them to express an interest in their president’s Jewishness. My efforts were met for the most part with indifferent shrugs, followed by a certain bewilderment when I tried to press the issue.
People were interested in my Israeli citizenship. Many Ukrainians told me that Israel’s model for national mobilisation and unity was the future they sought for their own country, if they were to be faced with protracted conflict. But their own president’s Jewishness? Hardly worth dwelling on.
