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It’s not what you think. A warzone doesn’t announce itself with the crackle of small arms fire or the crump of heavy artillery. It creeps up on you insidiously like a psychological condition.
For some, approaching the frontline – especially in Eastern Ukraine – is like a journey towards Mordor in Lord of the Rings, black smoke on the horizon and the looming threat of a watchful evil eye. Others have compared it to approaching a swamp where something rotten and old makes you wrinkle your nose and feel sick at heart.
But what I sensed during my brief trip to the ‘zero line’ city of Kherson was neither menace nor disgust nor anxiety – but something unexpected and, in some ways, more disturbing.
Before this summer, the closest I’d been to a frontline was Sarajevo a few years after the siege. Signs of the three-year-long battering of the Bosnian capital were everywhere; bombed-out buildings, dragon’s claw marks of mortar shells on the pavements, but the carnage was over. Only memories of the dead remained. (For some reason I kept dreaming they were swimming in the air around my hotel window).
Other than that, my frontline experience has all been vicarious – through literature or film – the more memorable of which is George Orwell’s description of the “squalid misery” of the Spanish Civil War Aragon front in Homage to Catalonia “turds, glass, toilet paper… and decaying food”.
You won’t find any of that squalor in Ukraine, at least on their side of the conflict. As you cross the border, an obsessive emphasis on order and correctness would be a more likely impression.
War first manifests itself as a bureaucratic delay rather than a miasma, though no doubt the constant queues and checkpoints take their toll on impatient drivers. The first casualty I saw in Ukraine was a road accident.
So where does the war zone begin?
The Russian World
On a hot summer day in Odesa, your eyes always turn to the Black Sea for relief, but then war stares you in the face like a jagged tooth. The tallest building in the port, above a cruise hub and exhibition centre, is the Hotel Odesa – its blue colours now burnt black and the windows gaping after it was hit by Kalibr and Onyx missiles late last year.
Odesa, built by Italian architects in the late 18th Century for the Russian Empress Catherine II, was always an outward-looking city. By the first half of the 20th Century, it had a majority Jewish population and remained a byword for multiculturalism under the Russian and Soviet empires.
At first glance, it may seem Putin has poked out its eyes, with many of the historic museums, mansions and department stores boarded up. But most of the time you can sit in the cafes, browse the opulent shops, visit the opera, dance in the nightclubs and forget the war.
Until the air raid sirens wail.
If there’s a metric of destruction – which there shouldn’t be – about one in 30 buildings show signs of bomb damage which is much less than London in the Blitz. But it’s hard to tell because Ukrainians are so damn good at cleaning up.
Unbelievably, despite the war, cranes are erecting new skyscrapers and housing complexes on its western shore.
Much of the destruction has already been swept away. An empty lot opposite where one of Byline’s journalists was staying turned out to have been a large nineteenth-century building before last autumn’s missiles.
I thought the marble fascia of his apartment block had been removed for safety, but it had actually been blown away in the explosion and his nice new airy refurbished apartment had been strewn with rubble only weeks before.
Of course, the physical damage and repair of the city is only the outward appearance of a deeper social rift and reconstruction underway in Ukraine after – what we must remember – has been a decade at war.
The culture of the city itself, mainly Russian speaking, has been fractured by Putin’s ambitions to expand his territory back to Soviet or Tsarist times.
For understandable reasons, Odesan artists, musicians and thinkers are re-evaluating how many Ukrainian-born artists have been appropriated by Russia and how many of their myths and legends co-opted by the Kremlin’s imperial imperatives.
Should Ukraine give up on the Russian language, or preserve and cherish it and not let Putin tarnish it?
Though these kinds of conversations in Odesan bars and cafes can get passionate – heated even – there’s something deeply democratic about the debates, and a capacity for ‘civil’ engagement (in both meanings of the word) unimaginable these days in Russia.
In the end, the shift away from the Russian language to Ukrainian is being won in the streets and trenches rather than intellectual dinner table discussions about ‘decolonisation’.
As we headed to Kherson it felt as though the connotations of the Russian language, the association of Russky Mir – the ‘Russian world’ – with death, torture, terror and chaos, and the ‘Z’ militarist symbol of Putin’s “special military operation” may condemn it to death.
Facing the Grenade
My guide through Odesan culture and heritage, novelist and journalist Zarina Zabrisky, was also the one who managed to navigate me through the tricky checkpoints and accreditation issues to get to Kherson.
Driving us was Paul Conroy, whose debate with journalist John Sweeney about what constitutes the front line is worth watching.
The front line is “not a red line on a map” Paul says, but “varies and fluctuates” and can be many miles back from the grey zone of no man’s land. “How far do you have to go to die?” is the crucial question. And the answer to that – the range of heavy artillery.
Paul would know. He spent years in the Royal Artillery as a target locator and is intimately aware of all the munitions that could come at you – at some personal cost.
Retrained as a photojournalist and documentary maker, Paul covered war zones all over the world and was one of the first journalists to enter Libya when the uprising there began in 2011. He teamed up with the Sunday Times’ Marie Colvin and stayed on to report from the besieged city of Misrata for two months.
The following year, he and Colvin went to Syria to cover the atrocities there and were deliberately targeted by a rocket attack in Homs in February 2012. She was killed, and Paul was badly injured when grad shrapnel tore through his left leg.
It has taken Paul years of surgery and physiotherapy to get back to full mobility. Ukraine is the first war zone he has returned to since the horror at Homs.