What Putin Wants
by Andrey Kurkov

I am haunted by memories.

I remember spending ten days in Croatia, during the Yugoslav war, as a writer-journalist almost thirty years ago. I wrote the first reports to Ukraine from the front line, near the Croatian city of Sisak. I remember how I participated in the Orange Revolution, hoping that with the help of the revolution Ukraine would be cleansed of all its problems, of corruption and bureaucracy, of attempts to falsify elections.

I also remember happy moments. Such as a trip to Japan in 2015 for the presentation of the Japanese edition of my Maidan Diaries. This trip was one of the most important in my life. I have been fond of Japanese culture since the age of thirteen. Later I read Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe. I tried writing Haiku Tanka and Sedoka. And at the age of eighteen, I attended Japanese language courses. There were about forty students at the start of the course, but only six completed it. Two of them became writers!

I also remember my regular trips to Great Britain, England, and Scotland. My wife was born in Surrey and we got married in 1988 in London. Our honeymoon started in Edinburgh at the George Hotel. Our children were born in Chertsey, Surrey, but grew up in Kyiv.

I have so many memories, I can't write them all down. Since the late 90’s I have spent about six months of every year traveling the world. I was shown the world by my translated books. They took me with them to India and China, the USA and Iceland, Norway and Greece.

The memories continue to give me strength. I hope that after the war, after Ukraine has defended its independence, I will visit Japan again. I would like my family, my wife, and children, to see Japan. I don't know if this is really possible, but a man needs to have a dream. Without it, life becomes gray, banal, like life in the gray zone of Donbas between the Russian and Ukrainian troop positions.

Four years ago, I wrote about this kind of life in my novel Gray Bees. It is more relevant now than when it was published. The length of the front line is no longer 430 km, but almost 3000 km. Now the question is; will there be an independent Ukraine, with all its pluses and minuses, or will it become the new Southwestern Federal District of Putin's Russia? We cannot back down. We have no choice. We must defend our independence, our freedom. We cannot capitulate. That would mean becoming obedient, silent subjects who support their leader and ignoring the consequences of his decisions.

I am horrified by the open letter by Russian poets and writers published in Moscow’s Literaturnaya Gazeta, where the “flower of Russian literature” state their support for Putin and his aggression against Ukraine. A day after the publication of this letter, a rocket flew into the house of Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Mikhed. Now he and his family are homeless. Now the whole of Ukraine is their home and the Ukrainian sky is the ceiling of their not very reliable world, where Russian bombers are shelling Russian-speaking cities in the East, South, and centre of the country. This is how Putin “protects” the Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine from “Ukrainian Nazis” who, in reality, are almost non-existent and who definitely don’t live in the regions currently being destroyed. Not a single nationalist party is represented in the Ukrainian Parliament – people simply didn’t vote for them. Ukrainians are mostly liberals and do not vote for radicals.

Ukraine has been approaching world glory for a very long time. But the country does not want to be remembered as a good dead person.

In Ukraine, there is a proverb about funerals: “Speak well about the dead or don’t speak at all!”

I mention funerals because I saw on YouTube a video of murdered residents of Kharkiv lying on the streets. I don't see how it is possible to organise funerals now, not while the Russians are bombing the city.

Compared to the people of Kharkiv, I have shamefully petty problems. I need to buy a disposable razor and scissors. I am almost bald, but my mustache gets in the way when I eat or drink. I also need to shave my neck. I look at myself in the mirror and understand that this is far from a priority in the current situation. For a Ukrainian who has been forced by the war to flee his hometown, leaving everything behind, I look pretty good. No, I am not going to be a refugee. I'm not leaving Ukraine. I plan to return to Kyiv, but I don't know when.

My wife and I spent the first two days of the war at home, in the centre of Kyiv. I didn't think to leave. I thought, if I had to leave, I wouldn’t go far. We have a small country house with a garage and a garden, 90 km from Kyiv towards Zhytomyr. We kept it warm all winter so that we could go there whenever our schedules allowed. We ‘hid’ in this house from coronavirus. I kept the house warm through the winters of 2013/2014 and 2014/2015 too, although at that time, the war was far away, 800 km from Kyiv.

And now outside my window are the domes of a beautiful rural church. I am in Western Ukraine with my wife and children. The church is not high. It is painted a heavenly blue and the domes are gilded and reflect the bright March sun. It's already spring here. A warm breeze is blowing. For Russia, this is an attempt at a second “Russian spring” in Ukraine. “Russian Spring” was the name of their military operation in March 2014, when Putin wanted to cut off Ukraine from the Azov and Black Seas, seizing all coastal cities, including Odesa, and connecting the Donbas with Transnistria. It was then that the leaders of Transnistria turned to the leadership of Russia with a request to accept them into the Russian Federation. The first "Russian spring" was not fully realised. But two fake republics of separatists emerged in the Donbas. Two territories from which the entire local elite fled. Some to Ukraine, some to Russia.

Now, eight years later, we have the second “Russian Spring”, and this is a more serious attempt. It is an attempt not just to cut off Ukraine from the seas, but to occupy the entire country and insert it into the Russian Federation, together with Moldovan Transnistria. If Putin succeeds, the next targets will be the Baltic states and Poland. Putin needs a corridor to the Kaliningrad region. The border between Poland and Lithuania is just right for this. If you take 500 meters from both Lithuania and Poland, you can build a reliable highway along which tanks and other equipment can easily be transported. Previously, Lithuania allowed the Russian military to transport supplies to Kaliningrad via its railroad. But Russian military freight trains have long disappeared from Lithuania.

Why does Putin have such hatred for Ukraine? Why can't he talk about Ukraine calmly? Why is he scaring the world with an atomic bomb?

The answers to these questions are not straightforward. When Putin says that Ukraine is Russia's little sister, he is trying to mislead people who know little about the region’s history. First, you need to understand that Kyiv is more than 1540 years old, while Moscow is 875 years old! Moscow was invented and built by Kyiv Prince Yuri Dolgoruky. Yuri Dolgoruky, by the way, is buried in Kyiv, in the main Ukrainian monastery of the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate - the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. The Moscow Patriarchate still has more than 12,000 parishes - churches and monasteries – in Ukraine. All of them are strongholds of Russian Orthodoxy. Many priests of the Moscow Patriarchate have been involved in politics all their professional lives. Before presidential or parliamentary elections, they have always told their parishioners for whom they should vote.

You have to look deep into the region’s history to see why Russians and Ukrainians are not one people. But it is important to study this and to understand it.

The historical paths of Russia and Ukraine are different. The Russians, the heirs to the Moscow Principality, grew accustomed to living under a tsar. They developed a "collective mentality", loyal to the authorities, loving their king. If they got bored of a tsar they sometimes killed him and loved the next one. They love mass festivities and prefer not to stand out from the crowd. Under Stalin, it was especially dangerous to display any individualism. People wanted to dress like everyone else, walk the streets like everyone else, be silent like everyone else.

The independence of the Ukrainian territories was formed during the 16th and 17th centuries. At that time, Ukraine was not a state in the full sense of the word. There was no king - that is, no sovereign. It was a kind of republic in which the Cossacks elected a hetman - a chief commander of the Cossack army and the head of the territory. They also chose their own officers. There were courts and even a diplomatic service. In Istanbul’s historical archives, you can find many diplomatic notes and letters from Ukrainian Cossacks. The only thing that still surprises me about Ukraine of the 16th and 17th centuries is that it did not have its own currency. They paid each other with Polish silver, Turkish gold, Russian coins.

Ukraine was huge at that time but it did not have fixed borders. The borders were front lines that moved depending on the result of the most recent battles against the Poles or the Russians or Crimean Tatars. Sometimes the Cossacks fought alongside the Crimean Tatars against Poland, sometimes they joined Polish forces to fight against Russia.

Since that time, organised anarchy has been the matrix of the Ukrainian mentality. Ukrainians are individualists. While Russians generally have the same image of one great Russia in their imaginations, each Ukrainian has his or her own Ukraine in which they would like to live. Ukrainians value comfort, a good standard of living and delicious food. Ukrainian cuisine requires a wide variety of ingredients and is extremely labor-intensive. Perhaps this is connected to the fact that Ukraine’s black soil is some of the best agricultural land in the world. Everything grows here except bananas and oranges. If global warming continues, we might be able to grow those here as well soon!

The natural wealth of the Ukrainian land is one reason for the greedy desire to take Ukraine over. But, of course, there are other reasons as well. For example, demographics. In 2014/15, many of the people who fled from Donbas into Russia were sent to live in the far east of the country, closer to the border of China, where there are abandoned villages and towns. Few people want to live there, so these vast territories cannot be controlled, developed, or protected. Putin sorely lacks population.

Ukraine is a promising country with seaports, natural resources and its own gas and oil – although both gas and oil production are controlled by local oligarchs and the country does not benefit from these resources. Ukraine has many problems, many unresolved issues, and unfinished reforms. But Ukraine is used to living with its problems and solving them bit by bit, probably too slowly. After all, if we had solved the problems quickly, like the Baltic countries, we might not have become a victim of the Russian Federation!

One of the reasons for today's war is the purported threat to the Russian language - my native language, in which I write novels and children's fairy tales. In fact, it has always been the Ukrainian language that was threatened. Under the Russian Empire, officials tried to marginalise the Ukrainian language, driving it into the ghetto and away from the big cities. To a large extent, this policy continued in Soviet times.

Twenty years ago, the border between the Ukrainian individualist mentality and the Soviet/Russian collective mentality ran through the middle of Ukraine. With each year since independence, this border moved gradually eastwards. If not for this war, by 2050 the Ukrainian mentality would have squeezed the Russian one out altogether. Perhaps Putin understood that this was happening and realised he had to act fast to take over Ukraine before it became completely pro-European. Before the start of this war, perhaps about 20 percent of Ukrainians were ready to vote for pro-Russian parties. 80 percent are against Russia and for Europe.

Twenty years ago, the situation was very different. There were plenty of Ukrainians who wanted to join the new Soviet Union. Those Ukrainians who lived closer to the East were more nostalgic about Soviet times and more interested in Russian culture, Russian literature, and Russian newspapers and magazines. These people became the backbone of pro-Russian sentiments, although their region was controlled by local, semi-criminal oligarchs who had no interest in uniting with Russia and did not even let Russian business into their territories. They were afraid that the cruel and resolute Russian business style would simply destroy them. Local residents, however, saw these oligarchs as their defenders against Ukrainian nationalists from the west of the country.

Two equally powerful – and equally inaccurate – clichés that would split Ukraine in two established themselves in the minds of less well-informed Ukrainians: that all residents of Western Ukraine were radical nationalists who hated everything Russian; and that the residents of Donbas are all bandits engaged only in criminal activity. These clichés sprang from a complex and often tragic history for both sides. I see the lack of effort by successive Ukrainian governments to counteract these stereotypes as at least partly responsible for the tragedy we face today.

Pro-Russian businessmen and politicians published newspapers and magazines in Ukraine which were similar to Russian ones. Sometimes they were purely Russian publications, with some local Ukrainian news added: Moskovsky Komsomolets in Ukraine, Izvestia in Ukraine, and so on. The inhabitants of Donbas were especially fond of everything Russian and Soviet. For them, Kyiv remained provincial. Moscow was the real capital. The Russian TV channel ‘Nostalgie’, which shows only Soviet films and old Soviet TV programs has long been popular with the people in the East of Ukraine.

In Crimea, Russians have maintained another kind of nostalgia - for Tsarist Russia. After all, Crimea was a favorite vacation spot for the Romanov royal family and many other princes and counts. The Russian-speaking inhabitants of Crimea speak proudly of the peninsula’s royal past as if they were the heirs of these princes and counts.

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2015, the people of Russia were delighted, but then they began to complain that it was expensive and inconvenient to take a holiday there. It is impossible to use credit cards in Crimea because of sanctions and mobile connections are poor. The Russian government has had to subsidise the Crimean Peninsula for 8 years while trying to solve its problems, the most important of which is not the lack of investment, but the lack of water. Previously, water flowed through a canal from Ukraine; now it is gone. The fact that Crimea is still under sanctions and not recognised as part of Russia is a thorn in President Putin’s side and has frustrated his plans to expand the territory of the Russian Federation.

The climax of Putin’s dream is approaching – the re-unification of Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. We will have to awaken him from his dream. Ukrainans will never agree to become subjects of a Russian empire. Putin will go all out to make it happen, but I don't believe he will succeed. He can steal another piece of Ukrainian territory, but he simply does not have enough people to control the whole of Ukraine.

For Ukrainians, freedom has always been more important than stability. Ukrainians have rarely lived in a stable state, except perhaps in the Soviet Union, where stability was maintained by the Gulag system and the police-state regime.

Today’s Ukrainian writers are some of the clearest beneficiaries of Ukrainian independence. In 1991, censorship came to an end and Ukrainian writers took advantage of that freedom to write whatever they wanted. Mostly they wanted to write whatever had not been written in Soviet literature: science fiction, crime stories, romantic fiction, sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll prose.

During the first 20 years of independence, governments ignored literature, and literature ignored governments and politics in general. The Orange Revolution of 2004/5 saw some writers becoming politically engaged and taking an active part in protests against corrupt politicians and election fraud.

Euromaidan completely changed the situation. Since then, Ukrainian literature has become extremely politically engaged and sometimes borders on propaganda. A number of writers went to fight in the East of Ukraine. For example, Artem Cheh joined the army, while Boris Gumenuik joined a volunteer battalion. Both have written books about their experiences.

By the start of 2022, almost 400 000 soldiers and military volunteers had served in the conflict, and some became writers as a result. 300 books about the war in Donbas have been published, many of them written by soldiers. The war veterans now have their own publishing houses and their own audience. Some of them have produced bestsellers, like Footprints On The Road by Valeryi Markus, or Jupak by Sergei Saigon.

Andrey Kurkov, March 2022