Will Kyiv or the Kremlin win East Ukraine?
Anyone who thinks Ukraine’s revolution is over, or that it has been won by the western-backed politicians now running Kyiv, should spend some time in Kharkiv.
Ukraine’s second city is a nervous, uncertain place. Its 1.4 million people are going about their daily business, but, as the country is swept from one crisis to another, they seem to be braced for the next blow, whether from Russia, which is only 40km away, or from within their own ranks.
The Kyiv government has only a tenuous hold here. Its supporters have been driven from the streets by pro-Russian protesters, and an ally of the old regime is still mayor of the city, despite being under house arrest.
The huge protests in Kyiv, the bloody end of Viktor Yanukovich’s presidency, and Moscow’s annexation of Crimea have applied such pressure to eastern Ukraine that its society is fracturing. Some here now consider Russia a deadly danger, others see it as their saviour, and the West is alert to any military moves that could dramatically escalate its conflict with the Kremlin. And there are growing calls in southern and eastern regions for a referendum on greater autonomy from Kyiv.
One night this week a young woman, perhaps one of Kharkiv’s 150,000 students, took a microphone and talked about the need for real democracy, greater transparency and a proper fight against corruption in Ukraine.
With great conviction she delivered a speech that would have won loud cheers from the crowds that for months packed Kyiv’s Independence Square, or “Maidan”, which gave its name to the protest movement.
In Kharkiv, however, she spoke to perhaps 40 people, as rain drummed down and rush-hour traffic rumbled past their meeting place, a statue of Ukraine’s greatest poet, Taras Shevchenko. A few policemen stood around, hands in pockets, looking bored. It seemed tonight would be quiet. But it’s not always like that these days in Kharkiv.
Exchanges of gunfire
Last Friday two pro-Russian protesters were shot dead and other people injured in exchanges of gunfire at a Ukrainian cultural centre in the city, in clashes that Russian media said were provoked by members of Right Sector, nationalist revolutionaries who were prominent on Maidan.
Two days later a mob broke into the building, threw Ukrainian books into the street and set them on fire, as about 2,000 people gathered on Kharkiv’s vast main square. Beneath a towering statue of Vladimir Lenin they carried banners and placards hailing Russia and denouncing the West, including one that read: “Our homeland is the USSR.”
Later, groups of young men jostled with police outside the local government building, and the crowd unfurled an enormous Russian flag and chanted support for Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin leader, before delivering a letter to the Russian consulate asking him to intervene in eastern Ukraine.
The protest leaders did not make a serious attempt to storm the governor’s headquarters, and local officials said the whole event appeared to be a well choreographed show for the Russian television cameras. That evening the footage featured heavily in reports that suggested huge numbers of eastern Ukrainians wanted Putin to save them from bloody chaos.
Local administrations have been at the centre of the struggle for this region, and Ukrainian and Russian flags have regularly swapped places on their roofs as different groups have seized control.
On March 1st, as Moscow’s troops fanned out across Crimea, pro-Russian demonstrators seized Kharkiv’s government building and beat up Maidan supporters inside, injuring about 100.
Among them was Serhiy Zhadan, one of Ukraine’s best-known contemporary writers, whom police led away in an armlock with blood streaming from his head.
“They told me to get down on my knees,” he wrote of his attackers. “I told them to f**k off.”
Warnings of similar violence last weekend prompted pro-Maidan activists to cancel their planned rally to mark the 200th anniversary of the poet Shevchenko’s birth, leaving some of them angry at the inability or unwillingness of Kharkiv’s politicians and police to protect a peaceful march.