Letter from Kyiv: Taking Arms to Ukraine

 Monday 24th April 2023

Room A21 of the Hotel TM in Düsseldorf.

It was by no means a given that we would be here tonight. Talk of Kassel and points further east earlier in the day, but the rush hour around Brussels did for us. No room at the inn in Cologne. Düsseldorf it is. Monday night. Quiet and closed apart from the drunks, Theo, Captain Ed, me and a demob happy Harry Dorber. Last thing, a cold stein of Warsteiner for two thirds of the crew, while Nick and the dear leader retire and plan Tuesday.

We assemble at six am for the twelve hour drive to Krakow.

There is no getting round the fact that Harry Dorber ran the London Marathon yesterday. Dire Straits on the AirPods to slow his pace, he nevertheless hit the wall at 33km and still made it to The Mall in an impressive sub two hours thirty. Lactic acid no barrier. Yet he spent most of the day in the driving seat of an imposing Izusu Bighorn called ‘Abbey’. I am forty four years old, I have a slightly tight achilles tendon from walking my dog yesterday, and I cannot drive. My chat even sent Harry and Theo to sleep as we took the train under the English Channel. Harry audibly snored as I finished giving my views on the state of UK theatre. I console myself that I have softer skills. But then Captain Ed produces a homemade box of flapjacks, the kind that make your hair stand on end. I realise that I really have to pull my finger out.

The Izusu is named ‘Abbey’ after the road in London that she was picked up from. Come Together, as we left Stockwell and headed to the Kent coast, picking up Captain Ed in the Berlingo (named ‘Dua Lipa’ for reasons I cannot quite fathom) at Folkestone. Team photos at the port. The Douglas Bader Foundation decals shining on the bonnets of the vehicles that will be our home for most of the week, before they become field ambulances at the front in the war we are heading to. Douglas Bader smiling down. Possibly. Smiling because maybe he’s listened to Andrey Stavnitser talk about the work of the Superhuman Centre in Kyiv and his report of so many soldiers desperate to be fitted with new, soft prosthetics because their dearest wish is to be patched up, not for safer civilian life but to rejoin their friends in the East to finish the job. Bader would have understood that.

We drive from Calais and the consonants harden on the road signs as we head further east. Calais, Dunkirk, Aalter, Brussels, Ghent, Leuven, Anderlecht and across the German border. We anticipate harder consonants tomorrow. Some road signs through Belgium are decorated with a single poppy as we look out across endless flat fields to the horizon. Sunset over the titanic cooling towers of the Ruhr. Tomorrow we arrive at Auschwitz by twilight. By the middle of the week we’ll be on the Maidan in Kyiv. Europe traversed in two days. Beer and levity on a Monday night as we pass through quiet, closed Dusseldorf barely disturbing the air on our way to a darker Europe. Dusseldorf nursing its quiet pint, mumbling, barely looking up.

I was at Hiroshima in the drizzle in late February, it’s been a hell of a year.

Tuesday 25th April 2023

 “When in April the sweet showers fall 

 And pierce the drought of March to the root and all

 And bathed every vein in liquor that has power

 To generate therein and sire the flower…”

Chaucer’s merry pilgrims have always cheered me up when I’ve been down, with their jolly humour. Talking, talking away, minds expanding as time melts and milestones are barely acknowledged, just another large number on a long journey. Old stories get better and better with new telling to new auditors. Conversations had that you never thought you’d have just because you’re traveling together. Time expanding and bending.

    Alarms set for five fifteen AM CET in Düsseldorf. Most of us bolt awake by four as the street cleaning wagons rattle the windows with their sirens. We assemble at five fifty am and Harry has already been striding around central Düsseldorf looking for a coffee. I half thought that he might have just returned from a cheeky five K. Either way, he’d missed the large cafe that was open next door. Captain Ed buys a round and brings us freshly baked croissants just out of the oven. We walk through the silent city at dawn, before even the most eager trouble the punch clocks.

Then to the road and ever hardening consonants. Kays and zeds. Their sounds changing landscapes and echoing some distant history. Today is when Germany becomes Poland becomes Krakow becomes nearly Ukraine. At dawn the distances are just meaninglessly huge numbers and the world is feeling normal. We wrangle with Abbey’s broken windscreen wipers on a country lane in the rain twenty minutes outside Düsseldorf. Press releases are written imagining Douglas Bader’s approval of the mission, emails composed and contact made in Lviv. But with every mile, the scenes of foreign countries, with people going about their lives - scenes that pilgrims think are composed only for their enjoyment - imperceptibly give way to something a little stranger. Normality mixed with a little strangeness. Drop by drop.

The landscape changes and widens. Thick forests, thick with mistletoe concealing the lost and the hidden and the fairy tales, give way to eternal plains in flat white light that give you a perspective of death. And yet it’s still normal. Just. The silver birches bounce back the wide awesome light on to the greasy road. Plastic malls become wooden villages become oast houses and grain stores, as we head in to Poland. And with every mile you feel the normality and little by little every fourth car has a Ukrainian number plate. All the veins of all the roads have stopped flowing to all points of the compass and now the flow is eastwards.

Mile by mile.

Trucks with timber, gravel and aggregate. Trucks covered with massive tarpaulins concealing mysterious cargo. Heading east. Transit vans stuffed tight with brown paper packages and brown tape. Long neat timber. Mile by mile. Heading east. My stomach tightens as we pull up along side a convoy of thirty combat vehicles. Nick - our security expert, ex SAS - notices straight away that this fleet of battle green Mercedes are brand new. Not a speck of mud. Heading east. Brand new tractors, ancient coaches with dusty windows full of tired people in hoodies, heading east. Somewhere. Everything is normal, but now mile by mile we are on the main arterial route towards the border. Today, Ukraine is the third largest arms importer in the world and these roads are watched. Mile by mile. Normality. But beneath the surface, creeping strangeness. How much of anything we saw would ever head west again?

Then to Auschwitz as late afternoon becomes early evening. The compulsory headlights of the Polish cars start to bite. We leave the motorway and drive narrow roads along lanes of silver birches and red tree trunks in a strange twilight that gives everything the feel of a folk tale. On the road to Auschwitz. I’m amazed at how many people live here in the neat houses, with their rubbish sorted in to recycling and burnable and dogs and trampolines and a clipped Japanese ash tree. Did they live here then? Billboards advertise the squalid Marshall Plan of a new offer from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Others sell biker’s leather. On the road to Auschwitz. Suddenly railway lines. And the neat lines of trees half a mile away. And the vastness. And the trees. And the song of a solitary bird. A yellow bus and a watchtower and the barbed wire and the hooded bulbs whose light starts to bite as twilight hits. And a spot in the car park opposite the gate. The silence of a stopped engine. And stillness.

Deserted Auschwitz. A few school groups leaving as the sun set. And all I could think about was a white empty page and an impulse to begin. The precise symmetry of the watchtowers. Their perfect proximity to the dormitories. Their height calculated to give the perfect angle for an average height marksman. The trains that came from the east and came through the brick arch with the clock and had the gates locked behind them. The blank page. The clock. A ruler, a sharp pencil and the impulse to begin. A mind teeming with questions. What if we… The precision. The proportions and the proximity. I took a photograph of the railway points and the lever where a man once stood to pull the lever and switch the track.

It was just us as the sun set in the west behind the poplars and some bare branches. Nothing to say. Only silence. A board told us that that seventy five percent of each transport were sent straight to be “destroyed”. A couple roller blade down the road, hand in hand on the other side of the barbed wire. And the bird sang solo until it was dark, and in the place where it is the twentieth century forever, April was cruel again.

To Krakow and its Main Square. Like something out of Disney’s Beauty And The Beast. Pristine. Preserved by a German officer who wanted its beauty for himself. White horses pull carriages and lovers round the perimeter. At the hostelry, the pilgrims eat Polish food, pork, goose, cabbage, caraway and dill. We drink beer and laugh sweetly. Harry is going to head back to London after hours of heroic driving at four am. On three hours sleep. He made Abbey glide between the blue trams like Ginger effing Rogers. He’s a lovely lad. We’ll miss him.

Tomorrow morning the pilgrims head east over the border.

 “…The folk do long to go on pilgrimage

 And Palmers to go seeking out strange strands

 To distant shrines well known in distant lands…”

Wednesday April 26th 2023

 “Sound the flute

 Now it’s mute

 Bird’s delight

 Day and night. 

 Nightingale

 In the dale

 Lark in sky

 Merrily, merrily to welcome in the new year...

Blake, rhapsodic in the spring. 

The pilgrims approach the border on a wide four lane highway with not another car to be seen. We join the queue of anxious coaches and Ukrainian licence plates retuning home. And we wait to cross the border.

We say goodbye to Harry and collect Nate Macabuag from the airport at Krakow. Here is the best of British. An engineer, a pioneer in ‘soft’ prosthetics who started out wanting to build an Iron Man suit at Imperial College London. He’s twenty eight years old. He started his company Koalaa after asking simple questions to Alex, his friend and quadruple amputee. He has developed a prosthetic that can be applied just forty eight hours after an amputation. Something that fits like a Nike training shoe, works as well and is just as cool. Nate speaks like a visionary on behalf of the people he has listened to, to whom he has given functionality. No more waiting for something that looks like a hand. He’s given Alex a cool Swiss Army Knife. Alex wants to hold a glass of wine at a party. Alex wants to windsurf. Nate’s kit has an attachment for that. It doesn’t look like hand, it doesn’t pretend to be what it isn’t, but it works. Nate is charismatic and has answers and talks of subcultures and the popularity of bionic arms in video games for the able bodied kids. And if glasses are a cool piece of medical equipment, why not prosthetic limbs? I drop Andreas Kronthaler at Vivienne Westwood a line. The chains and the metal and the fuck you display of difference. Punk has a new toy.

The leader of the Kyiv government estimates that if the war stopped tomorrow there would be a hundred thousand people physically brutalised by this war. Not to mention the PTSD time- bomb. There are bionic hands from the UK, Andrey Stavnitser and the new Superhuman Centre in Lviv to are talking to cutting edge reconstructive surgeons in Japan, to bring their skills to Ukraine. The response to this crisis is international. People like Andrey understand that to rebuild Ukraine after their victory, they must first rebuild Ukrainians. Physically and psychologically. Those that see a Ukrainian future understand that it will be led by those that were made amputees in the cause of a free Ukraine. They will be central and visible. Andrey and many like minded people want to turn Ukraine in to a world leading centre for trauma recovery and prosthesis.

While eighty percent of Ukrainian soldiers who have suffered amputation simply want to get back to their comrades at the front - the comrades who rescued them from rubble and ditches in the east - there are visionaries focussing their efforts here, who are writing the first draft of the Ukrainian future. God knows that the UK has been an enthusiastic proponent of wars and God knows that it has reaped the whirlwind by giving scant thought to what happens next.

The only question that matters to these soldiers now, is not the functionality of a bionic arm, whether it looks good, but ‘will the index finger work to pull the trigger’ when I’m back among my comrades?

  And we cross the border.

In to Ukraine.

We move from the EU to ‘not the EU’. Two kilometres of lorries waiting to get in on pot holed roads, patiently waiting to get to smoother EU roads. Here is the photographic negative of Europe’s western border at Dover. Young people in Ukraine have given lives and more for their future as part of Europe. They took a beating at the Maidan at the hands of the Berkut for their future in the bosom of Europe. They waited in the cold for their beating in January, in the freezing cold, from the hands of the Berkut. They ousted Yanukovich. Said ‘fuck you’ to Putin. They elected Zelensky and they are fighting and dying in the east - in the mud and the filth - for their place in the bosom of Europe and freedom. And on the roads to Lviv the storks nest defiantly on the tips of telegraph poles among the high golden domes.

April is the cruellest month. The devastated haul themselves through the winter, but then the spring comes and the nights lighten and nothing changes. More people kill themselves in April than any other month. Ukraine waited through the wet winter of twenty twenty two / twenty twenty three for the spring. This spring’s innocent green is an augury not of new life, but a new offensive. Right now the ground in the east is so wet that a sixty five tonne Russian T-34 tank won’t get through the mud, so there’s a window of stalemate in which to do good. Now the trees are green and the days are cold. But when the days become warm and the ground becomes firm, the innocent watercolour green of trees that line the roads to Lviv will herald an offensive and a counter offensive and maybe another year of war and death.

O, and the hospitals need to be cleared, to make way for the newly wounded.

Over the border, the roads are lined with vast working cemeteries, freshly dug graves and warm soil. Blue and yellow flags flap in the breeze near fields with cows grazing freely and empty playgrounds. Faded posters advertise children’s films from before the invasion, their childhood put on hold. Primary colour to washed out pastel. Nineteen year old Theodore Mellor - named after the youngest president of the United States - leads the convoy over the border in Dua Lipa. His proud father trying not to drop his phone as he takes photographs out of the window of Abbey.

As we reach Lviv, there are shells of buildings licking their charcoal wounds inflicted by missile strikes from a year ago. Wide soviet era boulevards of high, high rise flats, targeted by Russian Kinzhal missiles less than a year ago, stand nervously, rest uneasily in their beds, in the sky overlooking the park. We head to the old centre of Lviv as the sun sets. There are mainly women walking down the lanes. We encounter a man every two hundred yards or so. There are boarded up travel companies on the border of the real Lviv and the historical one.

And we are here.

We are in Ukraine.

  We have our security briefing from Nick. What to do if we are bombed out. Find two walls between us and the bomb and don’t look up. What to do in the event of a short range nuclear blast. Within forty eight hours, return to the place where we last stayed. I take everyone’s number in my mobile. In the lobby of our hotel in Lviv, Nick hands us all a business card for the hotel with its address and phone number just in case and we head out in to a pre curfew Lviv. The streets are thronging with illuminated balloons and the defiant young.

Normal but not normal. A beautiful city in the twilight. Its buildings sandbagged and its statues modestly nailed behind wooden screens, shielding their ancient eyes from the shrapnel and the barbarity.

We’re taken to a Ukrainian restaurant, which has been repurposed as a bomb shelter. But now it seems to camply memorialise ‘The Great Patrioic War’, a time where Russians and Ukrainians fought side by side to repel the fascist German hordes. Forties jazz and waitresses in period costume. We’re served half metres of baked sausage called ‘Russian Boys’ and encouraged to smother them in mustard and eat greedily. Ksenia, our waitress, asks if we want to ‘kill Putin’ in a game they’ve got in another room. I had to ask myself if I wasn’t hallucinating.

We’re greeted by the waiters and countless strangers with the words ‘Slavia Ukraine’. We respond in kind, at first as if we were replying ‘and how do you do’, but then we remember that that this is real. This forties-styled bomb shelter themed restaurant is actually a bomb shelter and Ukraine needs to be victorious. The label of my beer has a naked Putin sat on a throne with a naked Medvedev wearing only a T-Shirt sat on his naked lap like ventriloquists dummy.

Our air raid apps are set to Lviv region and the sound is on.

Then Vyacheslav arrives. It is to him that we will deliver the two vehicles that will become field ambulances. Broad shouldered, hirsute and tall, dressed in military fatigues and green military T-shirt, his name embroidered in to his chest. He has to duck to enter our bit of the shelter. He is a successful architect and businessman and has dedicated his now to a charity that rescues soldiers from the mud at the front and brings them back west to be fixed. The vehicles that have been our home for the last 48 hours will be given to Vyacheslav to increase his capacity. Dua Lipa, with a mechanical rear lift for a wheelchair user, belonged to the late mother of Captain Ed, who speaks movingly of her tonight.

Nicholas makes a stirring speech in the bunker, pledging our service for as long as we are in Ukraine and introduces everyone to Vyacheslav with pride. Theo is still and beams with pride in his father. I offer one of my books of essays on Shakespeare and a signed programme of my Comedy of Errors as a present for Vyacheslav’s assistant Alla. It was as much as I could fit in my rucksack. Alla can’t be with us tonight because she was bombed out of her home in Kyiv and Vyacheslav has found a home for her in the Carpathian mountains. Her great love is Shakespeare. She assists Vyacheslav from afar.

            He and Nate talk capacity for the Nike Air prosthetics.

Vyacheslav’s interpreter Ulia is an actor and her husband is learning Japanese. She responds warmly when she realises that I also work in the theatre, but she’s astonished when I ask her what she is working on. Her now has stopped because of the war, now she’s proud to interpret for Vyacheslav.

            We walk back past the sandbags. The statues in purdah. The women heading home.

Tomorrow marks the destination of our pilgrimage for our tired bodies and minds. We will arrive not at a phantom of Christ’s nails or a stigmata, nor a child seeing a vision, nor the lapis lazuli of a Roman icon of the virgin Mary, nor the majesty of Canterbury Catherdral. But the brutalised arms and legs of boys in tracksuit pants and trainers and their weeping mothers from hundreds of miles away. Their future will be Ukraine’s future. But in their now, they crave the dignity of being able to hold a pen. In our collective now we beg the question… Why them? Why now? Why them? How did this happen in Europe on our watch?

 Little lamb

 Here I am 

 Come and lick

 My white neck

 Let me pull

 Your soft wool

 Let me kiss your soft face

 Merrily, merrily we welcome in the year.

Thursday 27th April 2023

 “In life you probably don’t know me

 As you walk down the street - you pass me by.

 I bow down and you don’t notice

 Not even nodding your head,

 Though you know, know, know well

 How I love you without understanding…

The concierge of the Hotel Saint Feder in Lviv is a student of the Ukrainian language and her particular love is the poet Ivan Franko. She rhapsodises at the thought of his brilliance in the turn of every word. One of the universities in Lviv is named after him, its one of the many Austro Hungarian buildings still inscribed with Polish. Lviv is where east meets west and nothing stays around for very long. She waited for our return and recited the entirety of “Why Do You Appear In Dreams?” in Ukrainian for us on our return from dinner.

            She brought us our breakfast at seven thirty this morning in the breakfast room on the top floor that looks out over the whole city, our breakfast arriving in silver cloches from the lift. She gave us a black look as someone asked her for a cup of coffee that she had to descend nine floors to make. But tonight we returned near eleven pm to hear her poem. I wasn’t really concentrating because I’d just said to Vyacheslav that I’d email Boris Johnson.

Well you try denying Vyacheslav something…

I had forgotten to pack my bag before I went to sleep last night - just in case - and Nick firmly reminded me that this might be a good idea in future. We need to be ready at all times. Life is an hour by hour business in Ukraine.

We are met shortly after eight AM by a convoy of right hand drive English four by fours and head to a hospital in the mountains a couple of hours south of the city. We drive out past Lviv’s wide Soviet Boulevards lined with tall blocks of flats, some still suffering damage from Russian Cruise Missiles sent to destroy people’s homes merely to send a message. The message being that they can. Like the storks who sit watchfully in their vertiginous nests at the top of telegraph poles, living high up in a Ukrainian city is a pretty risky business. We drive past the storks and out towards the mountains and more endless plains. The Land Rover engine is gentler than Abbey’s, there is quiet for a moment and I look to the sky. I realise that there hasn’t been a single thing flying above us since we arrived in Ukraine, not a solitary plane. Barely a bird.   

Today we deliver the soft prosthetics to the soldiers and deliver the training to some of Vyacheslav’s people so they can fix the soft prosthetics to the soldier’s arms when we have left.

Being on the side of veterans and not quite allied with the government is the pragmatic place to be in the new Ukraine, politically speaking. I am struck by how few times I’ve heard the word ‘Zelensky’ since we crossed the border. Tellingly his signature appears on a Ukrainian flag framed and hung over the entrance to the most expensive tourist trap restaurant in the city, to drum up trade from the NGOs.

Vyacheslav is sat in the front of the Land Rover, his two phones buzzing and ringing in tandem. ‘Da. Da. Da. Da’. He doesn’t waste words. He is a big man, tall and broad like a Klitchsko brother. He modestly hides his eyes under the peak of his cap, but when he looks at you and speaks in low decisive monosyllables you listen and you can almost believe you understand Ukrainian. He clutches his phones tightly and he chews his fingers like a boy between giving his staccato orders.

A volunteer interpreter, Michael, joins us. Michael, me and Nicholas sit cheek by jowl in the back of the Land Rover with Natalia, a counsellor working with the shattered minds of the veterans. Like Vyacheslav, Michael has been a volunteer, shuttling back and forth to the front, bringing soldiers home, organising twenty thousand pairs of boots here, a helicopter there. ‘There is no government’ he says. ‘We are the resistance’. As we pass another missile crater an hour out of town, he quite seriously says that he wishes more bombs would fall on Lviv to shake the people from their torpor, as they’ve almost forgotten there’s a war at all. Michael tells me that in the east, mortar shells from mother Russia, Uncle Sam, John Bull, cousin Ayatollah and the nieces and nephews from the EU pound back and forward every five seconds round the clock. Michael says there is no reliable reporting because there are so few journalists out there. Instead he listens to his boys who are doing the fighting. He doesn’t trust the government or the media. I ask him what he did before the war. ‘Travel’, he says. He walked most of Asia barefoot, but he can’t walk barefoot at home because of the broken glass and the filthy streets. He looks down to his new pair of New Balance trainers and for the first time wonders whether that the askew ’N’,  might look more like a Russian ‘Z’.

Michael and Vyacheslav have been improvising from the beginning. Like so many Ukrainians who mobilised without means and in a mass ensemble improvisation, kept Russian tank divisions at bay, fifteen minutes from central Kyiv with anything they had. I ask Michael what he thinks will happen. He likens the war to a game of chess. “Slow progress. But one bad move and the whole game is lost. Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst… I can’t travel, I can’t leave the country now, anyway. So I wear my shoes. And practice at the rifle range once a week. Because you never know…”

There have been many unintended dark jokes on this trip, but I notice that the hospital in the mountains is near a village called ‘Chop’. I try not to laugh. I’m keen on not to have to explain myself to Vyacheslav.

Natalia is a volunteer, a trained psychologist, that spends her days counselling these boys. “What do they talk about?” I ask her. She tells me a story of a pair of bothers, one has died, one is an amputee. “So this boy wants to talk about his brother’. New amputees talk about a lack of information, because the doctors have no time, its psychologically distressing for them to know nothing about their immediate future. And they ask simple things”, [Michael translates], “How do I shower? How do I go to the toilet?”.  Many men talk about the anxiety of seeing their children for the first time after the amputation and other disfigurements. “They’re often scared of seeing their children. And they don’t want to frighten their kids”. Today is a day about the soldier’s physical bodies, which seems to make Natalia speak with more and more conviction about the need to fix their wounded minds. She wears camouflage trousers with a flash of mauve socks embroidered with cartoon unicorns. She’s another member of this improvised volunteer army.

I’m nervous about being up high as the lift slowly grinds up seven floors and we get out at a silent, dimly lit hospital corridor straight out of Soviet central casting. Sad, dusty crucifixions nailed to the wall every ten yards or so. Nate, who’s bought a few packs of his revolutionary ‘soft prosthetic’, explains the idea to some doctors while Michael translates and I prep Nick for a slot on Radio 5 Breakfast tomorrow morning. Vyacheslav looks on, sharply hurrying proceedings along. You feel he instinctively distrusts smiles and chat. Theres no time to waste for Vyacheslav.

We walk to a room along a corridor, where a dusty unopened calendar for 2020 hangs on the wall. Some old, hard, unattached prosthetics with neatly laced shoes, stand around as if they were waiting at a bus stop.

And we wait…

A one legged man on crutches swings past the door frame and along and out of sight. The thud and squeak of the crutches and the sole of his training shoe on the linoleum. Then silently our guys arrive. Four of them.

I notice Roman first. A man of about twenty seven, who has lost his right arm and a few fingers on his left hand. His face is tattooed with the blue lines of shrapnel scars from the shell that ripped away his limb. He moves slowly and diffidently toward the bench on which the new prosthetic is laid out. He looks at the equipment as if a pathologist has just pulled back a white sheet and asked him to identify a body. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches us watch him and he keeps his head down trying not to be seen. He’s weary. He’s been here before. He’s been told to come here. ’What it is this time?’ his body seems to convey… Vyacheslav walks over to him and stands really close and says something very soft to him. Roman barely nods. They trust Vyacheslav, and they know he really loves them. Nate, equally, speaks softly and asks Roman some questions about what he wants from the prosthetic. Roman looks blankly at Nate and after a pause, says: “to hold an instrument… uh… a spanner”. Roman’s a mechanic. He wants to work. To be useful. Nate selects an attachment for Roman and starts to demonstrate to Alexander who is being trained to do fittings when we leave. The prosthetic hugs Roman’s arm. He moves it a little to see if it works. Roman looks tentatively to Vyacheslav, who looks him in the eye and nods. Roman nods. The attachment is added. A tool is placed in the attachment. And slow and crumbling as an arctic ice shelf, a smile. A thin bare smile.

You have to see it, don’t you? You have to be here.

In the quiet, Captain Edward Hall, a bear of the British army, broad and strong, wipes away a silent tear from his cheek. Captain Hall won the ‘Sword Of Honour’ at Sandhurst but soon after graduation he was accidentally run over by an American tank. His legs were miraculously saved and he eventually walked again. His military career was shorter than it might have been. It’s Captain Hall watching Roman’s smile that makes my eyes swim and I head to furthest point of the room to look out of the window at the little row of shops below.

Nate has done it. It works. It will work here. For the old sort of prosthetic, a patient would have to wait for up to four months to be fitted, wait for the swelling to subside and have many fittings, and all the time the person waits. This limb fits like a Nike shoe, is loosened and tightened with velcro, it can mould around the swelled stump, it can be easily adjusted, and most importantly fitted within 48 hours of surgery.

The next man has a plectrum fitted to his attachment, a guitar is fetched and we can hear music. Alexander, another volunteer - who revealed at dinner that he was an interior designer, pre-war - starts to fit a man on his own. Vyacheslav, applying his architects’ mind to the problem picks up the kit and he starts to help Nate fit Vasil, to accelerate proceedings and a plan forms in his mind. The packs are torn open like it’s Christmas morning. Because Vasil’s operation was on April third, he has to use a slighter softer soft prosthetic while the wound does its final healing. Vasil is slightly bemused and half attempts to suggest that the date he mentioned was a mistake in the translation, while he watches one of his newly fitted mates do some press ups. Vasil won’t be able to do that just yet, but he will soon.

Halina comes in after the fittings, an imperious woman, who thanks us on behalf of the soldiers and their mothers. She says that four men fitted with old prosthetics have left this hospital in the last few months and returned to the front. And that’s all these men want. She hugs Nate and teaches him how to say “I will come again to Ukraine” in Ukrainian. She laughs and tells him that he speaks like a native. I ask Halina what her role is in the hospital, I expect her to tell me she is the chief executive, but she tells me that she is also a volunteer. ‘A regular person’ and a refugee from Donbass. Her softness disappears and she looks straight at me, with eyes of molten metal poured on snow. ‘The Russians are animals. Worse than animals. I hate’.

In the car on the way to next hospital Nicholas and Vyacheslav start to work out a realistic plan. ‘Next time we’ll come out with a hundred soft prosthetics’, in the face of what appeared to be a miraculous afternoon, this target seems remarkably modest to me, but both men are wily campaigners. The only reason there isn’t a lorry heading to Ukraine with a soft prosthetic pack for all ten thousand amputees is money. The Ukrainian government can’t prioritise the cost if there’s a tank to buy.

 Life is lived hour by hour in Ukraine.

Your bag is always packed. All the pieces must stay on the board. Hour by hour.

           All the pieces must stay on the board.

            Hour by hour.

At the more modern rehabilitation hospital an hour closer to Lviv, two dogs sleep on the grass in the spring sun. Natalia sees one of her counselling clients, a man in his twenties in a wheelchair with no legs and one arm, being pushed by either his girlfriend or his sister. Natalia embraces him warmly. An Orthodox priest sings the liturgy to an audience of a single soldier in a wheelchair and a woman stood stilly, alone with her head bowed. You can see the EU flags flutter on flagpoles on the lawn from the airy glass foyer and a medical helicopter flying low over a silver and gold domed church. Down these curved corridors, there are large daylit rooms with modern equipment. In one room a recent leg amputee learns a ball game with his father and the colourful ball bounces out of the door and in to our path. I meet an officer in full fatigues on crutches, he notices my T-shirt (a souvenir from the Sumo wrestling in Tokyo) and says ‘Konnichiwa’. I reply the same without missing a beat. I notice that his call sign, embroidered to his uniform, is ‘Sensei’.

            In the room that we have been allocated to fit the prosthetics, two confident men wait for us, tall and athletic. Victor is missing his right arm, he wants to use a power drill and by God he’s desperate to scratch his left arm. Nate gives him a very satisfying velcro attachment for that. Within no time Victor has his arm fitted by Alexander with no help from Nate. After a few press ups, Victor slings his canvas bag over his shoulder and marches out with his new arm. He shakes my hand on the way out and says ‘Good luck’ and I say ‘good luck’.

Vadim and Igor enter, who have had their soft prosthetics for four months, they come and tell us their experience and share their ideas for improvements. Nate is always pleased to hear ideas and especially pleased when people ‘break things’ in a sort of corporate Californian way. It’s only then that he learns new lessons. I don’t quite catch their names at first, so I ask them to write them in my book. Igor takes the pencil in his left hand. He was clearly right handed before the war, and over the course of about a minute and a half, shakily writes his nickname -‘Viking’ - and the pencil barely kisses the paper. He wants to do it. He wants to practice. His concentration is total. 

On on. Vyacheslav is back on his phones. Endless ‘Da, Da, Da, Da, Da’ organising the  transportation of Nate to Krakow for his flight home tomorrow. A man who works near the border in a carwash, another volunteer, will drive him there. Vyacheslav advises us not to arrive in Kyiv after dark and gives us a departure time after we visit the Unbroken centre tomorrow. On on. Life is lived hour by hour in Ukraine.

On the way back to Lviv, I ask ex SAS officer Nick for his tactical take on the Russian mistakes in the field. Whether the colossal losses on the Russian side will eventually mean Putin simply runs out of men. And - like in the last moments of their wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan - Russian mothers wail so loudly that it is stopped. After a pause, Nick says ‘maybe’. He says there are mobile crematoria at the front. The badly injured Russian soldiers are going to Belarus and Crimea. They won’t make the same mistake as Afghanistan. There will be very few injured Russians sat on the Metro, terrifying the Russian people in to civil disobedience. And you can’t pile up body bags if the bodies are ash. TV takes care of the rest. The Associated Press estimates that fifty thousand Russian troops have been killed and a further 180,000 have been seriously injured since the start of the invasion.

Dinner tonight at a barbecue restaurant where the ribs are served whole and the waiters chop down hard and loud on to wooden boards with cleavers kept in their leather aprons… We were all thinking it… If the worst did come to the worst and the cleaver slipped, there are worse tables for it to happen at.

Out of nowhere, Vyacheslav asked me what weight I thought he was when he was fat. Taken aback, I guessed a number, a hundred and eighty kilos (I don’t really understand kilos), he looked at me and said I was exactly right. That’s twenty eight stone in old money. He showed me a picture of himself in his pomp. He was a big lad. He then revealed to me that he went to China to have a fat reduction operation and showed me pictures of himself naked immediately pre-op, as if he were showing me a picture of his new top of the range Audi. It’s been a day for the corporeal, all told. It explains a lot about how Vyacheslav holds himself and why he bites the skin on his fingers. He’s starving, the poor bastard.

  It slowly dawned on me that Vyacheslav might have been sharing his experience with me for a reason… I querulously ask Vyacheslav if he thinks I should go to China for the fat reduction surgery. He stops still for a moment, gets out his phone and asks me for my weight and height. He said he had to know these facts before he could answer my question. I told him I was satisfied with his bare instinct, failing that, a resounding ‘no’ would do. Vyacheslav is too focussed on process to worry about my vanity.

I left the restaurant agreeing to email Boris Johnson on his behalf. One of his men, who’s lost both his hands as well as losing his eyesight, daily, bit by bit, needs to be treated urgently in the UK or America. If he’s not seen to, worries Vyacheslav, he might take his own life. The saddest days and the happiest days. The successes and the failures, The tears and the laughs. Hour by hour.

Hour by hour.

…How I suffer the long nights

And like the years upon years

My pain, my sorrow, the songs

In my heart choke me daily”

From ‘Why Do You Appear In Dreams’

by Ivan Franko

Friday April 28th 2023

 Attention 

 Air raid alert

 Proceed to the nearest shelter

 Don’t be careless

 Your overconfidence is your weakness

   Mark Hamill on the ‘Air Alert App’.      

I emailed the last of yesterday’s diary entry and fell in to my bed at about three am. My mind skimmed the surface of sleep for an hour and just as my mind finally went blank, I heard the slow cranking up of the low throaty moan of an air raid siren. Long and low. It’s keening almost a comfort. My phone pings awake, it makes the same sound only five times louder and less pleasant. I sit up bolt awake in bed. The voice is the actor Mark Hamill who plays Luke Skywalker warning me that my over confidence is my weakness. How did he know? It takes me a moment to realise who I am and what country I am in.

In the past few weeks, in preparation for coming here, I installed the Ukrainian Government endorsed ‘Air Alert’ app and put the alert on silent. From time to time, my phone would flash up “Critical: air alert” my heart would flutter a little and I’d instantly look at the app’s map of Ukraine and see which regions were being bombed, denoted by that region on the map turning red. I’d then check Twitter to see what the news on the ground was. There were usually a few “fuk u ptin’s” and a region or two lit up red. In short, a lot of digital shoulder shrugging. But when I looked at my phone this morning, the whole of Ukraine was red. Every region. The phone flashed “Critical: air alert”. I hurriedly turn the phone to silent and listen for any noise in the hotel. My bags are packed and ready by the door, I only need to put on my clothes and leave. But there is silence.

I open my curtains in the strange nearly dawn, open the window and lean out on the sill. Just a nonchalant cat and not a soul around. The curfew will be lifted for the morning in forty five minutes. I lean on the sill and listen in the cool air. I’m now that guy I’ve seen on Twitter, leaning out of his window and listening to the air raid sirens in Ukraine. I always imagined that I’d take a little video of my tired, puffy face listening to the air raid sirens and saying things like “yeh, it’s four fifteen am and air raid sirens have just started here…”. But I’m leaning on the window sill, the air is agreeably cool, I’m coming round and the siren sounds quite lovely. And the street is at pre-dawn peace. I’ve left my phone on my bed and can’t quite be bothered to go and get it. Before I drift off again at a quarter to five I glance at the digital map of Ukraine. Every province lit up red. Kyiv and Donetsk oblasts covered in emergency yellow check. I look out at the little square in front of my hotel room and I’m not quite convinced that I’m actually here.

My alarm smashes on at seven, no less welcome than Mark Hamill was at four and I see that the “critical” state passed at six fifteen. I open the web browser on my phone and see the headlines flash “Fresh wave of air attacks as missiles hit cities’ and “Deadly wave of missile attacks”. The BBC and Guardian both have that red, live, rolling news banner as reports of casualties come in from Dnipro and Uman. Towns in flames and fire engines. I look again to the square in front of the hotel and there are two kids walking to school. Missile attacks were happening all over Ukraine last night. Western media thinks that this is a show of strength in advance of the annual May Day celebrations in Moscow.

I was nervous in the hospital in the mountains on the seventh floor. Tonight I’m writing this from the twelfth floor of the Hotel Ukraine in Kyiv. The back window looks out over the old Dinamo Kyiv stadium and the front over Maidan Nezalezhnosti. We were shown to the hotel’s air raid shelter on check in, just past the beauty parlour. My stomach pulses when I hear the motorbike engines rev in the square below. There’s a noise that could be a hallucinatory low drone in my ears, or the first seconds of a siren two streets away.

On the way home from a restaurant we walk over the cracked stones of the Maidan. Cracked with the bones and the teeth of students in the bitter winter of 2013 / 2014 and I look up to clear spring skies and a bright moon. I look up past the two hundred foot golden column celebrating the tenth anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, built in 2001, upon which is fixed a statue of Berehynia with her arms outstretched. In Ukrainian folklore, on the one hand Berahynia is the life giving mother, the protectress of the hearth, the creator of heaven, rain, fertility and all living things. On the other hand, she is the merciless controller of destinies. The column is built in the old style to project strength and permanence, to forge a link to Ukraine’s Imperial past and to not be Marx or Lenin.

The streets are populated with defiant kids, some break dancing, some playing football, some drinking coffee. As we head towards curfew, only the kids remain. And in the Hotel Ukraine, the lift keeps rising and rising and rising. I write. We are on the cusp of curfew. It’s silent and we wait.

Last night Nick and I walked round the streets of Lviv. Like everywhere so far, the war is both staring you in the face and yet doesn’t seem to be real. The Church Of the Most Holy Apostles Peter and Paul has its ancient stained glass shielded from shrapnel by enormous sheets of aluminium. It’s prettiest treasures are wrapped in duvets and duct tape and there is a service taking place. Prayers, as the priest intones and we see a collection of shrapnel from cruise missiles that landed here as part of an improvised monument to the dead from the people of this city. Before they’ve had the chance to carve their names in marble, a sea of photos of the dead from this parish is pinned on a board mounted with a series of Ukrainian flags. I takes me a full five minutes to walk along the sixty foot long display. One photo in particular fixes my gaze. Gennady Zhukotinsky, pale blue eyes, white hair and white beard. There’s the usual mosaic of serious looking boys who don’t look old enough. But Genndady Zhukotinsky looks back at me with a great beard and a smile. These men are all professional soldiers or volunteers. There’s no conscription here. Yet.  

The car comes for eight AM sharp and we head to Unbroken, the main trauma centre for the whole of Ukraine, for the last of our fittings in Lviv. With the war in its first flush of violence, people came from all over the country to be treated here.

As we arrive, Nick is in talks with Admiral Rixs in London, who is keeping an eye on the security situation across Ukraine. He says that of twenty three drones and missiles that were sent to Kyiv last night, twenty one were shot down by Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles. “One swallow does not a summer make”, says the Admiral. His advice is that it will most probably be fine, but on making our trip east, we should keep our party to a minimum. Captain Ed is ahead of the game, his chest has got worse overnight and he’s not been sleeping. Despite this, he’s chuckling in to his phone. On his regimental What’s App group, someone has sent a sext to the whole group that was clearly intended for his mistress. Captain Ed has decided to take the car with Nate from Lviv to Krakow and fly back to London.

But not until we’ve fitted the last of the soldiers.  

Nick does an interview down the line to the BBC in London to talk to 5 Live breakfast after the news has reported on the steadily climbing casualties Uman, a few hundred kilometres from the twelfth floor of the Hotel Ukraine, Kyiv. The interview to London is cut off because of the hospital WiFi, all adding to the drama, I suppose.

Unbroken is smart. Glass and steel grafted on to the side of an old Soviet Hospital. It has a fantastic name and a slick website and its chic logo is in English. We are taken down many flights of stairs, past the emergency shelter for patients, deep in to the hospital, to the prosthetics laboratory (sponsored by Nescafe) run by Nuslan. As I arrive, Nate is already purring at the British designed and manufactured bionic hands and feet, some of which come with stylish tattoos. Nuslan stands in his small stock cupboard like a buffalo in an airing cupboard.

Sergei is brought to us and as I tap in to my phone to make notes, Vyacheslav looks at me and I stop. He says in English, “Hey. My friend. Shakespeare” it is clear he doesn’t mean it as a compliment. Vyacheslav gestures to my phone and says something in Ukrainian. Michael translates: “if you use any photographs, his face must be pixellated out”.

            Sergei is Ukrainian special forces and any publicly shared photograph has the potential to put his and his unit’s life in danger. Sergei is about five nine and about as wide. His dark eyes survey the room. He’s put on weight waiting for a new prosthetic, but underneath every muscle twitches and flexes like a hunting bird on the gauntlet. Vyacheslav takes Sergei’s stump in his hand and gently rubs it as if he were soothing the head of a baby. Sergei tells us how he came to lose his arm. Nate asks him gently what he wants from his prosthetic. Sergei stops dead like he’s spotted a mouse and says “I want to do press ups”. I start think arms are wasted on me.

Sergei lost his arm five kilometres behind enemy lines a few weeks ago. They were spotted by Russian soldiers and he led his troop in to a trench to avoid enemy fire. In order to get reception for his field radio to call for back up, he put his arm above the ridge of the trench and it was taken clean off by shrapnel from a tank shell. He quickly saw that his hand was on the floor ten yards away still clutching the radio. He wrenches the receiver from his severed hand in the mud, he initially struggles to remember his call sign and calls in to command to request permission for his platoon to withdraw from the ‘gray zone’ (no man’s land). He reached behind himself to haul his shoulder back in to position and with his remaining hand and his teeth, applied two tourniquets and managed to save his own shoulder and upper arm, he and his troop eventually march five kilometres back to the Ukrainian position tending to his arm and trying to staunch the blood loss. Sergei’s heart stopped twice in the field hospital. This all happened when I was directing Anna Karenina in February.

Alexander and Nate fit his new soft prosthetic in under ten minutes. Sergei looks at his new arm, curls his lip at the floor, scowls, quivers and assumes the press up position. His entire body is vibrating, he snorts and does ten of those press ups where his hands leave the floor. His back pulses and contorts like some martial beetle. Even Sergei seems amazed and he takes a round of applause like a child who’s just won at monopoly. Nate asks him a follow up question; is there anything else he’d like, and he says he’d like an attachment to fire a gun. Sergei and Vyacheslav launch in to heated discussion in Ukrainian. Sergei puts his hand in position to hold a rifle, and measurements are taken. Where might his rifle balance on another prosthetic attachment? A new idea from Sergei. He thinks the attachment made for carrying shopping bags, is the perfect shape for firing the trigger of a rocket propelled grenade launcher. The atmosphere and the sound in the room changes, it’s hushed and focussed. Why not an attachment that fires live rounds? We could call it ‘The Sergei’. Nate writes ‘RPG Launcher’ in his notebook. I am in a real live Q branch and I’m not sure where the line is here. The line between making Sergei happy (and what makes Sergei happy is killing Russians) and… something else. I’m unnerved by the implications, the precision, the new blank pages and the sharp pencils. The impulse to begin. A mind teeming with questions. Prosthesis to carry you back to death.

It’s hard not to feel for Sergei. The macho performance often masks something darker. Alex Lewis, a former soldier and quadruple amputee, who was on the last mission, told the team that amputees often wake up with hot, implacable itches on their missing limbs. Every year Sergei will have to inject his shoulder with silicone just to keep it moving. Often these men sit alone in the dark in the hospital with their disability and neck a half bottle of pills just to get to sleep. This is why Vyacheslav really wants to make Sergei’s dreams come true. Captain Ed looks on, pulling his lips tight and keeping his emotions in check. I ask Nuslan, the Q of Unbroken’s prosthetics lab what message he’d like to give to the people outside Ukraine who might read this diary. He says “I’m sorry for my English, its like when I was speaking at school… but people are lazy who don’t know wars. They don’t know about this disgusting thing, that it is the worst and kills people… people need to know wars”.

And our work in Lviv is done.

Captain Ed takes his early bath well, even though he’s bitterly disappointed about not coming to Kyiv. He removes his mother’s St Christopher from her car that has driven us from London to Lviv and hands it over to Alexander and Vyacheslav. He speaks with a broad smile, a little falteringly: “So. The keys of my mother, um, my late mother’s car, being given to the team from Ukraine, uh, by the Douglas Bader Foundation and the Hall family in aid of prosthetics for every person in Ukraine, starting with the veterans, finishing with everyone, including children. From the team and from me, and from Nate, thank you”. Vyacheslav speaks slowly and fluently in Ukrainian in thanks. Ed leaves his mother’s car with the little lift at the back for her wheelchair in carpark in Lviv destined to rescue the wounded on the front line and bring them back to safety. Mrs. Hall was married to a distinguished officer and was mother to another distinguished officer, and a fine, fine man. I dearly hope I’ll see Captain Ed again before too long.

Before Nate and the Captain’s car arrives to take them to Krakow, Me, Nick, Nicholas and young Theo leave in faithful Abbey and start the eight hour drive to Kyiv, three hundred and fifty miles east. Before we leave I am approached by Vyacheslav ‘Shakespeare…’ he says, in less complimentary tones than he used before. He looks at me expectantly. I explain that Boris Johnson has not yet written back.

We approach Kyiv from the north west skirting the suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, eighteen miles from central Kyiv where mass graves were filled by tortured Ukrainian civilians in the first brutal salvos of the war. I hadn’t quite comprehended out how close that was to central Kyiv. One story from Bucha, from the refugees that Nick took in to his home in Spain, told of a family made to walk laps in their garden, naked, in the snow, watched by Russian soldiers. At the end of the day the soldiers told the family: “we might be back to kill you tomorrow”. We see destroyed bridges, bombed out factories and isolated family homes used for target practice. There are skeletal frames of signposts torn down to make life more difficult for the invaders.

The roadside graveyards as we get closer Kyiv are vivid with colour. Fresh flowers and blue and yellow flags freshly placed in soft spring earth. Slabs of yet unengraved marble headstones sit stacked by the gates. There’ll be time to carve the names of the dead in to grey, permanent stone, but now they are all colour while there’s still a war to be won. Old women are selling honey and pickles in jars near army checkpoints and rows and rows of tank traps. And for all the talk of Kyiv’s energy and defiance, you feel last night has shaken everyone. We arrive at rush hour and perhaps its not unusual for there to be twice as many cars leaving as arriving in the city, but there are long traffic queues. There’s none on our side of the road.

            The spring counter offensive has been on the horizon for so long. And now it is spring. The flowers and the riotous blossom tell them so.

Alla and Dmitro will meet us tomorrow to firm up plans for the next mission in a month or so, before a trip to a children’s hospital. Alla tells us she is judging a children’s Kick-Boxing championship and won’t be able to join us until five. Nicholas wants to do more. We all do.

Theo, who’s scheduled to perform his conjuring act for the injured children, seems to have booked us in to a hotel closest to the Chinese Embassy. It may just be one of the safest places in Europe.

The sun sets in the west, blinding me in the wing mirror. I breathe deeply, look forwards to the direction of travel. Magnificent Kyiv bathed in twilight under a clear sky. And a peaceful moon. I take the lift from the foyer of the Hotel Ukraine overlooking the Maidan where the teeth and the bones of the students broke the stones at the feet of Berahynia, where their fathers and mothers made angry millions more at the feet of Berahynia, demanding their freedom and their place in Europe.

            These people have come too far now. Berahynia has towered over the Maidan for twenty two years, she is magnificent, every bit of her designed to look like a permanent monument, to be looked at by free Ukrainians for the next few hundred years.  And the lift goes up and up. In the lift we meet an experienced war photographer from Hereford who’s been embedded with a platoon at the front line. He’s coming back to from Bakhmut to Kyiv for a few days R and R. ‘What’s it like out there?’, I ask. He opens his eyes wide. “Fucking mental”, he replies. As he leaves the lift, I see that one of his many tattoos reads ‘War is on my mind’. It’s on my bloody mind too.

Up, up in the lift to the twelfth floor. And I’m now looking over Berahynia’s shoulder, down the Maidan and all is black and quiet as I type. From the twelfth floor I can hear dogs growling in the street below. But apart from that… silence. No sirens, no planes, no ambulances. A city of two million people in Europe at midnight on Friday. Silent. The hotel, silent. The Valery Lobanovsky Stadium, silent. Kyiv silent. All black. Black and silent. Now even the dogs have stopped growling. From my room on the twelfth floor of the Hotel Ukraine, I look out over total silence and the only light is the moon glancing off the golden shoulders of Berahynia.

 All is silent. 

 For now.

 …Don’t be careless

 Your overconfidence is your weakness”.

Saturday 29th April 2023

 “Eva’s pretty hands reached out

 And they reached out wide

 Now you may feel it should have been a voluntary cause

 But that’s not the point my friends

 When the money keeps rolling in

 You don’t ask how

 Think of all the people guaranteed a good time now

 Eva’s called the hungry to her

 Open up the doors

 Never been a fund like the ‘Foundation Eva Peron’…

    Evita, by Tim Rice

We campaign in poetry and govern in prose.

        We get to the ‘Gray Zone’ through the black and white.

Sleep begins last night with trepidation and no little anxiety. The hotel WiFi is unreliable, I’m out of data and I’m worried I might not hear Mark Hamill. Mercifully he wasn’t required. I wake at seven with light shining through a gap in the curtains. My bags are packed neatly in the corner of the room on the way to the door and the stairwell and the shelter.

But nothing has happened.

No red banners with rolling news of Russian missiles. It’s no longer the top story on the BBC, it’s the cancer nurses striking over pay and conditions. Kyiv drifted soundly off to sleep. It was all very normal. Sort of. The night before, the Prime Ministers of Slovakia and the Czech Republic spent the night in an air raid shelter under the hills of the city. I search out news of the aftermath of the attacks on Dnipro and Uman. Twenty four dead and counting, many of them children.

           We head for a future strategy meeting with Dmitro, the founder and head of the Ukrainian Medical Mission and former regional director of infectious diseases at the main hospital in central Kyiv. Dmitro wears a bomber jacket and t-shirt with a chain over the top of the neck, a tightly shaved head, trainers and jeans. You could mistake him for a nightclub bouncer. One who’s just about to finish a long and busy shift at dawn. It’s a countenance I’ve seen a lot. He stands outside the main entrance to the hospital at midday, smoking. I ask him about Uman, about it’s strategic significance. He says there was none. It’s just a small town between Kyiv and the front that has no air defences. “It was probably not even the target, but who cares. They bomb an apartment block with some little kids in it, so some other little kids behind a screen in Rostov can say they did something in the war’.

           Nicholas tells Dmitro that we’re meeting Alla later, depending on what time the Kickboxing championship finishes. He nods sagely, everyone knows of this tournament it seems. ‘The best friend of Gallina’ - the chief executive of the hospital now sat behind her desk - is the former world Kickboxing champion, “but he’s forty one now”. There are forty seven thousand members of the Ukrainian kickboxing federation and all the girls who took part in last year’s tournament received a gift bag from Ukraine Medical Mission. We go through the formality of posing for official photos as we hand over the keys to Abbey to Dmitro and his team. He’s very practiced at a grateful smile that disappears a mere second after the photo has been taken.

We get in to the specifics of delivering medical aid to Ukraine in the spring of 2023. I hadn’t realised that we are one year out from a Presidential election. But war or no war, it seems the usual political rules apply. Influence pushers are jostling for position and it is the issue of veteran care that will decide the outcome. Whoever can ostentatiously promise most for the veterans will hold the keys to Ukraine’s future. Photo ops with wheelchairs and celebrities will be increasingly big business in the run up to March 2024. There’s another dimension too, the question of what the military’s increased political role will be after they’ve won the war (probably). Soldiers, injured and healthy are allies that every ambitious young politician in Ukraine very much wants to have. Zelensky’s name is once more conspicuous by its absence in our conversations. In the cafes and bars in Lviv and Kyiv, the popular view seems to be that his reelection is by no means a foregone conclusion. In the past, Zelensky has proven adept at playing to the domestic agenda and energising the people. But the talk is that he is just exhausted.

            Madame Zelenska, was one of the first visitors at Unbroken in Lviv, the money-no-object rehabilitation centre where we were yesterday. The First Lady is also on the letterhead at the new kid on the block Superhuman, co-founded by up and coming oligarch Andrey Stavnitser. Last week, Stavnitser was talking to the international media from Tokyo, where he was meeting the world’s best reconstructive surgeons. There appears to be a growing sense of competition for attention between Unbroken and Superhuman. The two hospitals you suspect will be at the centre of the agenda at the next election. The head of Superhuman came from AIDS research and has unimpeachable contacts. She organised the visit of Sting, Trudy Styler and Warren Buffet as well as a concert in the Maidan by Elton John. At Unbroken the media were there, jn force, to record a soldier with a newly fitted soft prosthetic hand, sit before Madame Zelenska and write ‘Glory to Ukraine’ on a piece of paper. The sense among people on the ground, is that money for veterans exists, but it is being funnelled towards media friendly initiatives, rather than less glamorous projects. And less glamorous people who can really make a difference. People like Dmitro.

“What did you think of Lviv region?’ he asked, raising a sceptical eyebrow. “And thank you very much for coming”. Vyacheslav, who is moving heaven and earth to help individual soldiers, sprinting to get them the help they need by this time yesterday, is undeniably extraordinarily effective in the short term, (the only term that matters for the individual soldier). Dmitro is interested in systemic questions and how to make it all sustainable. Like it or not, public health consequences of this war will have to be dealt with in the long term. Which is of little interest to the soldier who needs a prosthetic today. Or an electoral cycle as it gears up for (yet again) the most important election in the young history of free Ukraine.

“No-one knows the future of prosthetics”, says Dmitro. “This could be very serious business for Nate and Koalaa. Improvements to the prosthetic need to be fed back and while its fine for now, for the individual prosthetics to be gifted by a British foundation, if they are going to deal in the long term in Ukraine, this will need Ukrainian certification”. For Dmitro, real rehabilitation is an unglamorous long term process. There is a massive skill shortage in physical rehabilitation and counselling for psychological rehabilitation. Brilliant surgeons work in brilliantly built new hospitals, behind brilliantly built walls, all painted in brilliant white, but there are simply not enough rehabilitation specialists. For the price of one photogenic bionic leg, you could run programmes for the sharing of skills and information among medical professionals for months. For the price of a single Javelin Anti tank missile, (one of the iconic weapons of this war from a Ukrainian perspective at $178,000 a pop), you could run it for a year. And also, Vyacheslav can’t do anything in Kyiv, that’s Dmitro’s manor. Dmitro can’t do anything in Lviv.

And I still haven’t heard back from Boris Johnson regarding Viktor.

Dmitro sees a cluster bomb of social and psychological issues that are already washing up on the shores of the hospitals in Kyiv. “The population is tired of war. There is more aggression, depression, alcoholism, drug use”. He worries that after war, “many people will not know how to live”. Research shows that suicide rates soar after war. Soldiers became gangsters as they did in Russia after the bloodbath unleashed in Chechnya. “40% of homes were destroyed in Bucha for example, there’a civilian population that doesn’t know what to do. What do you do with these people. The economic situation is really bad in the second year of the war. There are thirty seven million people in this country. Who will stimulate the economy?”. We’re back to the question of the future, what are people like Dmitro fixing Ukrainians for? Andrey Stavnitser, spoke inspirationally about the need to rebuild Ukrainians before you can rebuild Ukraine. But as far as rehabilitation is concerned, there are scant skills available, few structures in place, no deadlines and no agreed definition among stakeholders as to what that it looks like. And Dmitro reckons there are around a quarter of a million Ukrainians and counting, suffering with PTSD.

Unbroken officially opens on Monday. I think back to our tour of the brand new building with stylish black and white photographs of injured soldiers on the wall, with information alongside written in English and German. I now realise that I didn’t see too many actual soldiers. I thought about Roman, Vasil, Victor and Halina and the men in the dark corridors in the hospital in the mountains. And the man with the plectrum attachment playing ‘Blackbird’ with his new soft prosthetic.

News comes in on Gallina’s phone - from the former world champion - that there have been some injuries at the kickboxing. Dmitro once more raises his eyebrow and suggests that he takes this is as his cue to step outside for a fag. As Dmitro takes out his e-cigarette, he addresses Nicholas and, I suppose, the whole situation “we need to understand how we can work together, what direction we can work in, in the future”.

Partly as a result of last night’s Russian attack and the anticipation of the counter offensive, partly because of the end of a holiday period, partly because there are no planes, every train in and out of Kyiv is fully booked for the next few days. It’s a strange feeling, being in the capital city of the biggest country in Europe and a day and a half’s travel minimum from an airport. It’s unclear as to how we’re going to get out in the foreseeable future. The Kyiv leg of our trip has been thrown in to some doubt. While Nick, on logistics, works out the extraction, I decide to walk round Kyiv for a couple of hours. I half expect another epic road journey tonight.

It’s a warm, bright spring day. The clearest, bluest sky. The second day in a row. Hour by hour the ground will be firming up in the east. At the Maidan, wall to wall young people and an ocean of Ukrainian flags and the odd stars and stripes, fluttering in the breeze. Each flag representing a Kyivian death in the war. As I take a video, a woman with official creditation asks me for a donation in exchange for a blue and yellow ribbon. Her English is non existent, but as I take out my wallet she says quietly “maybe your country be my country”.

There are tulips everywhere, crowds thronging around Mariinsky park with epic sweeping views of the city’s panorama and the Dnipro River. Kids playing in electric cars, taking rides on a sweet miniature pony, kids eating blue and yellow candy floss, a boy pretending to be a wizard with the sticky stick. A man walks past with a baby in a sling, she’s the only baby I see all afternoon. There are cossack balladeers playing folk instruments, tabla players and rock singers throatily singing what sound like protest songs. Soldiers in uniform walk with their girlfriends and people pose for photos over the city’s panorama in warm, bright sunlight. Artists sell their work from stalls and people cue for coffee. And hour by hour the ground is firming up in the east.

It’s difficult to describe the scale of the Dnipro River. From five hundred metres above Kyiv, looking out on an infinite plain the Dnipro is wide, magnificent and blue, hugging beautiful Kyiv to her western bank and an island that was flooded in anticipation of Russian attacks a year ago, with miles of residential tower blocks away in the distance on the eastern  bank. It’s strange to think that something as ancient as geography should so fundamentally dictate the course of a war in which satellites can read news print from space. The physical fronts of this war are still the massive rivers of this country. The first problem for any Russification of Crimea is how you get water to it without the colossal Dnipro reservoir and dam, north of Kyiv. There’s a crucial political decision to be taken in the next few months as to when Kyiv turns off the taps.

           The first invasion was planned for late February 2022. Russian generals were banking on a regular Ukrainian winter this year to get their tanks across the frozen plains, but the world climate being what it is, this winter was extremely wet and the sixty tonne tanks couldn’t move across the boggy ground. For twenty-five years men sat in front of computer screens six thousand miles away have been able see impermanent footsteps in the dew on any battlefield anywhere in the world, and infra red cameras have made night time in warfare a thing of the past. Yet what has resulted in the winter of twenty twenty three is a stalemate, a meat grinder on the banks of ancient rivers in which men in wet trenches die at frightening rates while they fight backwards and forwards for meagre territorial gains, while artillery shells pound the earth. Every tick of the clock.

Stalemate.

A litre of oil can contaminate a hectare of soil and that’s before we consider the explosion of lithium batteries and depleted uranium shells. The view of the Dnipro river from the foot of the Arch of Freedom Of The Ukrainian People brings the home the enormity of this land and its abundance. I remember the poppies on the roadsigns in Belgium that we drove past on Monday. I think about the future that will be bequeathed to the Ukrainian people by this war and the future of the land they fought and died to liberate.       

Our last face to face meeting in Kyiv is with Alla, in the foyer of the Hotel Ukraine. She recently won the ‘Humanitarian Of The Year’ award in what one imagines is a pretty competitive field. Her Ukraine On Palms Foundation (the logo being a map of Ukraine being held up by two hands), deals mainly with internally displaced people. This ranges from support for boarding schools for disabled children, evacuations of families of sick children to Europe and Great Britain and homes for those that lost them. Her problem now, is that every politician wants a piece of Alla and she’s trying to resist offers of various degrees of unclean money for the thousands of people that depend on her. She reminds me of all of those tough, capable women in the UK who in the face of the porridge of incompetence, low politics and base corruption, roll their eyes, roll up their sleeves and get on with making the bloody thing work. I think of my sister, a bed manager at the Royal Hospital in Liverpool, working round the clock through the pandemic because people need help. Simple as that. She doesn’t have the time to think about ‘partygate’ (she assumes they’re all wankers anyway), nor the pan bashers in Berkshire who still vote for parties of the nutter Ayn Randian right, or about her terrible wages, or the private car parking company her colleagues have to pay to park their cars at the hospital, or the fact she’ll be branded an enemy of the people by the papers that claim to love Britain the most for asking for her conditions and the conditions of her patients to be better.

Alla is gold to the future of missions like Nicholas’s. A place to send money where you know it will get to the people that need it. This is grass roots stuff of a donor’s dreams, not getting caught up in webs of bureaucracy in NGOs or local government. She has recently brokered a donation from the Premier Inn hotel chain in the UK for a hundred mattresses, which the company has smartly delivered directly to Alla, free of charge. Its amazing that there are so comparatively few like her. Vast sums of money from well meaning charity drives in the west, earmarked for specific humanitarian work are still sat in bank accounts because there’s no established channels of accountability to spend it.

          Two years ago, Alla didn’t think of herself as being in a country that would need vast amounts of foreign charity. Before establishing her foundation, Alla had a successful career and her husband Fyodor was very successful in the property business. It makes it easier for them not to be bought. They were up at dawn making bed bases out of heavy wooden pallets in advance of the arrival of the mattresses. They will lie in basic temporary accommodation in the ruined streets of the previously smart suburbs of Bucha and Irpin. Whole families will sleep together in these beds. Some of whom will walk past the ruined husks of their three bedroom family homes and their blasted lawns on their way to receive their charity.

Alla’s daughter, about six years old, her mother's image in cascading ringlets and green and red flashing shoes, sits with her father, playing on a phone on other side of the foyer. Her older brother is at a football tournament in Lviv. Alla has to run their lives too. Sweetly, Fyodor opens the car door for her everywhere they go. Nick asks Alla about her views of the provision for non-military victims of the war. He asks about other regions of the country. The warm expression on Alla’s face creases. We see her eyes are dog tired. Her children can tell the difference between different types of missile by sound alone and she tries to be diplomatic. She says little. She’s good at it. Before the war and before his presidency, she worked in PR for Vlodomyr Zelensky, the comedian.

            Anyway. She and Fyodor have decided to just get on with it. The mattresses will be here soon and there’s no time. We’re travelling light so the best we can do is some presents for Alla and the kids, and boxes of Marks and Spencer’s ‘Coronation Biscuits’ for her children’s homes. Nicholas will be back in June when he’s put his plan together. It’s obvious, yet surprising to me that humanitarian charities are constantly having to start again, in new crises, building new networks, new structures, improvising, assessing the best way to get resources to people in countries like Ukraine. Countries that didn’t know they needed aid fourteen months ago. Countries that were a long way from being in the ‘countries like…’ bracket.

Because of the transport problems, the trip to one of Alla’s children’s hospitals will have to be postponed until June. For our magician, Theo, all the rabbits will stay in his hat. We need to leave Kyiv now if we are to be at the border for Sunday. The best way out is to take ‘Abbey’ for an eight hour drive back to Lviv, leave the car with Vyacheslav and his team at the station carpark and take a bus out to Krakow for our flights home. In Kyiv, Alla and Dmitro give Nicholas some much needed wider perspective, after the extreme close up of Lviv’s broken soldiers. The only way to mitigate risk attached to charitable endeavour is to be here. To see it. To meet people. To grasp how and why. Why and how. How. How. How. The attachment with the plectrum. Take these broken wings and learn to fly…

We head north west out of the city at around five thirty and within fifteen minutes drive of Maidan, we start to see evidence of just how close Russian tanks got to central Kyiv. Before we get to the sandbagged trenches dug near busy commuter roundabouts next to KFCs and Audi dealerships, Nick, our former soldier, points out that you can tell tanks have been here because the roads are knackered. I suppose I’m useful here because I ask stupid questions. Wasn’t it a stupid idea to invade along the roads? Surely everyone would know where and when they would be coming and ambush them… “Firstly” said Nick “the idea was to take Hostomel Airport with Russian special forces, to give the Russians a base from which they could provide air cover for their army and tanks to flood in at speed along the main roads”. But the attack on Hostomel was repelled by Ukrainian special forces, so the air cover and massive back up for the miles long armoured Russian columns at the border and on the outskirts of Kyiv didn’t arrive. The Battle for Hostomel Airport is perhaps one of the most significant in Europe’s recent history. Without a Ukrainian victory, Kyiv would probably have fallen in hours, and President Zelensky most likely executed.

  ‘But still…’ I said…

Nick pointed to the trees on either side of the road we were driving down. Thick, dense forest surrounding Kyiv’s north and western perimeter. “You’re not getting tanks, artillery and men through that. Not at any speed”. The Russian soldiers would be sitting ducks for defensive artillery and the trees would become a hell storm of deadly splintered wooden shrapnel, killing infantry”. The river was flooded to the east. The roads were the only way in. “You need a lot of men to take Kyiv”. Because they didn’t have an airport, they didn’t have enough men. So they didn’t take Kyiv. Geography again. Simple maths.

The grim newsreel image of the Bucha Massacre is of 458 civilians including children as well as prisoners of war being blindfolded, hands tied, shot and scarcely buried in two mass graves in the woods. I remember seeing the first footage as it emerged on April 1st last year. My birthday. Today, I’m struck by how… well… nice Bucha is. Tall, neat, family houses in Bird’s Custard yellow, with lovely neat gardens. Much work has gone in to repairing Bucha in the last year, so today you could almost be forgiven for not knowing that forty percent of homes were completely destroyed and many more rendered uninhabitable. This hell is made more palpable by the David Lynchian image of a row of three neat yellow houses behind well tended hedges with black scorch marks on the paint round the windows like teeth forcibly removed. The roofs burned through to reveal stumps of charcoal that were wooden frames. Where Russian troops extracted some people hiding in their homes by burning it down around them. A former pro Russian Presidential Candidate and  supporter of Putin was killed on his estate at Bucha by drunk Russian soldiers. On Telegram, the Russian social media channel, you can buy t-shirts that read “we are not ashamed” and “Bucha: We Can Do It Again”…

I’m trying to think of an equivalent proximity in London… maybe Hampstead, Kilburn, Ealing. They got very close.

            We left Bucha. We passed the screaming wreckage of the bridge across which so many tried to flee and headed west through the forest. It was warm, the billion shades of pale green in the forest catching the last of the sun. Driving west along the roads where Russian tanks menacingly waited. Down the roads where they’d retreated after seeing what they’d seen. Some little kids murdered so some other kids could say they can say they did something in the ‘special military operation’. Boys egged on by men. Veterans of Grozny and Idlib and Homs and all those massacres and images that they wish they could unsee in the world and in themselves. Pass it on boys, pass it on. Who’s driving a thousand miles to make those Russian boys better in their bodies and in their minds. Which woman in a flat a thousand miles east of here will reap the full force of this unknown soldier’s darkness?

             We were never going to make it by the midnight curfew and so we stopped at Rivne, eighty miles or so east of Lviv. We stayed at a mock up of old baronial lodge, with suits of armour, boar’s heads rendered in treated polystyrene, next to a framed photograph of Iggy Pop when he took a room here in peacetime. Pop’s photo was next to the first image that I’d seen on this trip of a young President Zelensky. Pre beard and world-wide fame, back when he was playing a teacher in a sitcom who becomes President of Ukraine almost by accident. During his last election campaign, he walked onstage to its theme tune.

            The rooms were themed. We were given ‘Roman General’, bedecked in SPQRs and vermillion velvet, ‘Viking Warrior’ with horned helmets, ‘Moonlight’ (I guess because it was intensely lit like an operating theatre and the window must have looked like the moon from forty miles away). I was in ‘Josephine’s Boudoir’, in a four poster bed and a riot of chintz, from where I watched my first piece of television since I’ve been in Ukraine. There were interviews with residents from the survivors at Uman, pictures of the damage and an improvised video blog from the iPhone of a fully bearded President Zelensky at the front.

             We campaign in poetry and govern in prose.

Get to the ‘Gray Zone’ through the black and white.

             I set my alarm.

I put my phone on a doily.

I turn in. 

Sunday April 30th 2023

 “And I went down to the demonstration

 To get my fair share of abuse

 Singing, “We’re gonna vent our frustration

 If we don’t we’re gonna blow a fifty amp fuse”

I woke in ‘Josephine’s Boudoir’. Deep sleep. Like I was drugged.

There had been a second night of silence in Ukraine. The predicted amping up of Russian aggression in the build up to May 1st appears to have abated for now. All that remains is to drive the final miles to Lviv, pick up a bus to the border and on to Krakow.

Nick tapes the keys to Abbey under her bumper. At some point today one of Vyacheslav’s team will pick her up and drive her all the way to Khramatorsk within spitting distance of the front. Ed’s mother’s Berlingo is already there operating as a field ambulance.

            It’s hot in Lviv. At the car park at the station a Roma woman, heavily pregnant, pushes her filthy baby girl around in a filthy pram in the midday heat, begging from car door to car door. Her son, no more than five, looks me square in the eye and begs in persistent Ukrainian. I know he knows I’m foreign, but he persists, with his hand out, as if I owed him twenty quid and I’d been avoiding him all week. He scuttles past me to the pile of bags, eyes them up and looks to his mother. I give him a small denomination note in a currency I don’t understand and he stands his ground and asks for more. I raise my voice a little and tell him to get lost. He tries to move past me again. I block his path and this time I shout, sharply, to tell him to get lost for the last time. His face doesn’t change. He just looks at me with a sneer. Almost laughing at my sweaty discomfort with my myself in the heat. He weaves between my bag and my leg and tries his luck with Nicholas.

Theo and me go the dusty hall of Lviv station to see if we can get four tickets on a train over the border. We’re desperate to avoid a coach trip of indeterminate length to Krakow. Long queues at every window, three queues of women with huge numbers of bags heading over the border after the holiday, two dedicated to men in uniform heading who knows where. The approach of May and the hot weather and the hardening ground, minute by minute, hastening what most people think will be the next phase of the war. When I ask where I might buy tickets for a train to Poland, the man at the information desk thinks I’m joking and vaguely gestures to the echoing chaos in front of him. The next train with four seats over the border is tomorrow night at ten past seven. There’s nothing direct to Krakow or Warsaw for a week. A Roma man, an amputee and barefoot is sat in the dirt, begging, next to an abandoned ticket office in the car park, we pass by with just enough distance for him not to see us.

The bus to the border takes us back past the tattered bill boards in blue and yellow, back past the precarious storks high on their telegraph poles. Back past the faded posters advertising kids films from the spring of last year. Back down the roads rough with tank tracks. It starts to rain as we approach the border. We left Kyiv a day and a half ago. I went down to the demonstration and what I got was a walk in the sun and the shadow of a feeling of usefulness. I wanted my fair share of abuse but it didn’t arrive. This country is vast and those people are in the middle of it, walking arm in arm on a spring afternoon and are at the least a slow day and a half from escaping hypersonic missiles and drones that can drop a grenade through a car sunroof from two hundred feet.

Longer if they’re waiting for a train.

We know we’re approaching the EU’s eastern border because from ten kilometres away we see the backed up queue of lorries beginning their three to four day wait to get in. This is a country who’s kids took the brunt of stun grenades and night sticks seven years ago, who were battered and bled in a monastery to be in the EU. When their parents saw the battered bodies of their children, they came down to the demonstration too, a million strong, to get their fair share. Their kids want to be European. And free.

We’re on the same road out of Ukraine that tens of thousands of people took a year ago, before the blood was dry in Bucha. They were waiting, stationery, waiting, sitting ducks for missiles, further than the furthest lorry that we saw today.

Our coach is only half full and we wait in the filthy echoing entry hall, rain leaking though rotten gutters to be processed in a room that used to be the border to the Soviet Union. Six hours from Lviv. Children run around screaming and letting off steam. But our bus was half full and the border isn’t too busy today. It’s not hard to imagine February last year when these processing pens were heaving in the cold and in the rain and the steam was building and people were desperate to get out. On this side of the border they are Ukraine. In another ten yards there are no borders til the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. And long smooth roads down which they can escape.

We leave Ukraine in the spring.

In the rain.

On the cusp of Europe, our coach is chosen randomly for a detailed search. They don’t just let anyone in. Another two hours. I finish writing up yesterday’s diary on my phone in the cold. Agonisingly we can see the coach move inch by inch in a queue of lorries that have been waiting since Thursday to cross the border. With every tick of the clock, plans of making a Sunday night flight finally evaporate, then the prospect of a piano concert does too and maybe even last orders in Krakow.

           We cross back in to Europe. Safety and smooth roads. Factoring in a curfew and a relatively small wait at the border, our journey from Kyiv, carrying only our rucksacks is twenty eight hours. Belarus is to the north. Occupied Crimea and sea to the south. The only route out is west. When the bombs started falling in Kyiv thousands of people bolted for the border, crossing in two days, and have not yet returned.

We arrive back among the blue trams and the cobbled streets in Krakow. It’s the Sunday before a public holiday on Monday. It’s a warm night. A tower in the business district is lit up blue and yellow. People are sat in cafes in squares in the old Jewish Quarter. There are no curfews. I silence the air raid alarm on my phone. I can’t bring myself to delete it. The restaurants in Krakow are open late and there’s no rush to go anywhere. We are exhausted. We haven’t eaten since breakfast.

At the end of the meal, our waitress announces, with a slight tear in her eye that she is a great fan of Haruma Miura, the late, great Japanese actor who I worked with a few times. He played Raskolnikov in my production of Crime and Punishment in Tokyo. She says she is very pleased to meet me, that Haruma spoke very warmly of me and that she has spoken to her manager and our dinner is on the house. My eyes swim. A Polish waitress, a Japanese actor, a Russian novelist and British director who’s just come back from Ukraine. And all these borders.

We eat. We drink. With good friends.

It’s my sister’s birthday and she’s in work in Liverpool.

And it’s thirty four hours to Kyiv by road.

…You can’t always get what you want

But if you try sometimes

You can get what you need”

Jagger / Richards

Monday May 1st 2023

International workers day and the first day of spring in Russia.

I wake at eight AM in Europe.

Sunlight under the blinds in the apartment in Krakow.

Birdsong and bells.

The lock screen of my phone reads “3.12am Air Alert! There is air alert in Lviv and Lvivska community. Proceed to shelter!” and “5:32am Air Alert is over. Watch out for further information”.

I watch the goals from yesterday’s game at Anfield.

I get an “out of office” email from one of Boris Johnson’s assistants.

Breakfast outside in the square and a flight to Britain.

Over Europe’s other border.

PB


© Phillip Breen