A morning in Ukraine: Ruined apartment blocks, rubble in the streets

I’m walking through Sighetu, the small town on the Romanian side of the border with the Ukraine. 

It’s early evening and the air is cold, but not unpleasantly so. The town is grubby, worn, run-down, but interesting. It may be a bit of a shit hole, but it’s an old shit hole. An interesting shit hole. Decaying 19^th century buildings. Church towers against a harsh sky. One of them is besieged by an enormous, very loud swarm of crows. More crows than I have ever seen in one place. 

There is a gorgeous melancholy to Eastern European towns like this. Cold. Shabby. Worn around the edges by the passing of time, like a coin passed from hand to hand for centuries. The past is constantly present here. Not lovingly restored like in Western Europe. Here it broods, standing quietly next to muddy parks, down alleys and overlooking town squares. Here, history never says goodbye. Melancholy ghosts are everywhere, reminding one of the transitory nature of life, and the questionable importance of everything. 

A few hundred metres further on I see what is the nicest building in Sighetu. It is a synagogue. A synagogue here? Oh dear. I suddenly feel sad, because I realise what I am about to realise. 

Google confirms it. More than 20 000 Jews lived in Sighetu during the 1930s. It was a majority Jewish town, which was unusual. It’s incredible. 20 000 Jews lived here. And then they didn’t. 

Under the leadership of a new leader appointed by the Germans, Hungary occupied this area. The Jewish community was removed and murdered. 

This is, in some ways, a ghost town. Filled with the ghosts of Mittel European Jewry. The lost world of Yiddish, a language spoken by 13 million people in the 1930s. The lost world of the shletl, the shikse, schmaltz. The bubbe and the baleboste. Of Buda and Pest. Before they were Budapest. The mediaeval synagogues of Bohemia, Moravia and Olomouc. The Haskalah. Luria. The Kabbalah. The unownable Ein Sof. When Krakow was known for its ancient university, not later events. An antique world, culture and language thousands of years old, swept away in three or four by a spasm of hatred and insanity. A horror in which the Ukrainians themselves were by no means innocent. 

And the destruction is back again. Not the same, but it is back. 

I spent the morning in the Ukraine. At the border my passport was stamped by a female Ukrainian soldier with impressive false eyelashes. Oddly, people who have been sitting stationary in their cars for six hours tend to be quite chatty, despite the fact that they have just lost their homes, lives and futures. They come from towns all over the east of the country. Cherhiv. Poltrava. Kryvyi. Cherkasy. The stories are all different, but a specific theme emerges. 

Russian tactics are changing. Initially they seemed to be adopting a blitzkrieg approach aimed at swiftly taking control of the Ukraine in days. But resistance has been vastly fiercer than they were expecting. This is not Crimea — a fact which should have been obvious to the Kremlin given that Crimea is 90% Russian-speaking. As a result, the assault is becoming more brutal. 

Military experts are now starting to lean towards the view that the Russian military is not as skilled as we had been led to believe. Troops seem to be unmotivated and poorly led. Which is not necessarily a good thing for Ukrainians, because it means that Russian forces are starting to revert to tactics that they know work. The tactics used in Chechnya and Syria. This tactic involves reducing casualties by reducing the amount of contact between one’s own troops and the enemy, instead having them stand-off any town or city that one might struggle to take, and then pounding it to rubble with artillery and air power. 

This is why current images from Kharkiv look identical to those we have seen in Aleppo in Syria and Grozny in Chechnya. Skeletal, ruined apartment blocks. Rubble in the streets. Residents cowering in basements until their luck runs out, just as surely as their supplies of food and water will. 

In the Chechen language “Grozny” (while also the name of their capital city) means fearful or terrible. 

Additionally, people here in the border area are saying that Russia is recruiting brutally hardened fighters from Syria (Russia’s military BFF) to bolster their flagging effort. I have no idea if this is true and the internet also seems to be unsure. 

It is the tactic of a force that is both incompetent and powerful.

The question is what the result of such an approach will be? It will certainly destroy any idea that Russia is liberating Ukraine, or that Ukrainians are in the grip of a criminal dictatorship. It will mean that Russia loses the information war. But it does not mean they will lose the actual war. 

A three-legged dog trots past. The ground is hard and cold. So is the sky. More refugees with wheelie bags rattle past. I chat to an apparently adolescent Ukrainian soldier, whose gun seems slightly too large for him. Perhaps he will grow into it. Virtually all the shops are still closed.

The low, unscenic mountains in the distance are covered in snow today. More will come tomorrow I’m told. 

A taxi driver took me up towards the Velykyi area. I was stopped by yet another group of policemen.

This time they were less friendly. Apparently I still look like a Russian Army forward scout. Last night I read a story about private military contractors/mercenaries being hired to help people leave the Ukraine. This seems like utter nonsense to me. If a nerd with glasses and a laptop is constantly stopped on suspicion of being a member of Russian special forces, it seems highly unlikely that groups of armed foreign men would be able to travel more than 10km without a firefight or being arrested.

A brand new and very shiny Orthodox church that looks like a Mumbai casino. 

A graveyard full of tombstones bearing head and shoulder photographs of the deceased. Some new, some from the 1960s. They all seem to be staring at me. Disturbing. 

My taxi driver chats away cheerfully even though he knows I have no idea what he is saying. I reply in a language he understands similarly. We are enjoying ourselves. His Lada has a bedspread of some kind on the back seat and a picture of a buxom saint on the dashboard. I think we are talking about his grandchildren, but it’s hard to be sure. 

The trees are grey and brittle. 

There is snow on the roadside shrines. 

Even here, where they don’t expect any fighting for a week or so, there are soldiers everywhere. All very committed to what they are doing. 

Invading a country like this seems like a questionable idea. Almost every single man I’ve met here has huge forearms, close-cropped hair and a face made out of concrete. 

Ukraine has a long history of insurgency. These are people with a deep history of violence and warfare. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought almost every nearby power during the mid 20^th century. Who knew that this organisation fought a guerrilla war against the Polish and Soviet armies until 1952? Double checking this shows that Soviet casualties in the Carpathian Mountains and Galicea during this time exceeded those of the Soviets in Afghanistan during the war there. 

Unlike most guerrilla movements, this one has a flag entirely different from that of the country it spawned. The flag is composed of simple red and black stripes. The red to symbolise the blood spilled for the black Ukrainian soil. Good luck to any army fighting a country that has a culture of resistance and guerrilla warfare so established that it has its own flag.

The media is full of stories of the heroism unfolding as Ukraine flings itself at the metal juggernaut nearing Kyiv. 

Vitaly Skakun Volodymyrovych was a military engineer serving on the western border of the Ukraine who blew up a bridge (and himself) to slow down the Russian advance into the Ukraine by just a few hours. This is the kind of resistance that the Russian army can expect in the Ukraine. A nation that has posted a recipe for Molotov cocktails on official government websites. This is a nation of suffering, acquainted with grief, not to be trifled with. Perhaps the Afghans of Europe.

Google has reported a huge spike in search for the term “how to make a Molotov cocktail” during the past week. Social media is full of videos demonstrating how it’s done. Celebrities are flocking to the front line. The Klitschko brothers have joined up. 

A mother in a min-van is especially keen to chat to another adult. The teenage girls in the backseat have clearly been behaving like teenagers all the way from Kyiv. 

“It’s been a long drive,” she says, rolling her eyes.

We speak about the fierce resistance that Russian troops are encountering on the outskirts of Kyiv. I ask the girls what they think about this. They tell me that their mother wouldn’t let them stay behind, but they have many friends there, with whom they were learning how to make petrol bombs that they could throw at the tanks. But then they complain that the electricity went out. They laugh and tell me that the worst thing about that was that their hairdryers didn’t work anymore, which is a huge problem for teenage girls apparently. 

“You need to be able to look cute and fight at the same time,” says one of them. 

I find a small patch of winter sunshine, and sit there for a while watching the cars.