On my road trip, taking in cities and villages waiting for the Russian onslaught, I meet Oleksandr Senkevych, the mayor of the industrial city of Mykolaiv, near the Black Sea in southern Ukraine. We first met some years ago at a fancy business school. “Our city could be like Hamburg. That’s our role model,” he said then, explaining his strategy to reinvigorate the famous port. The pre-Dreadnought battleship Potemkin – known for the crew rebellion in 1905, in the lead-up to the Russian revolution – was built in the local shipyards.
Senkevych was a businessman elected in a suit in 2015 after the Euromaidan revolution; the youngest mayor in Ukraine, praised for fighting corruption. Now, with more than 1,500 Russian units of military equipment brought from the occupied Crimea surrounding the town from the east and north, he is a war leader. The Russians have already occupied some of the villages 20km away. Only the Pivdennyi Buh river that divides Mykolaiv saves it from blockade, but the Russians may soon build a pontoon bridge to the north to close the circle.
It is key to Moscow’s aspirations, for by controlling Mykolaiv, Moscow would be able to approach Odesa, 80 miles to its west, and then the Ukrainian land border up to Transnistria – the breakaway republic of Moldova. “The only road from Mykolaiv is to Odesa – it is our lifeline, that’s how we’re evacuating people,” he tells me. “There are 250,000 out of 500,000 left. The task is to move another 50,000 – the rest won’t agree to be relocated.” He greets me, wearing a bulletproof vest and holding a gun, in the city council building. The exterior is designed to resemble Buckingham Palace.
An estimated 27 civilians have already died in this area, killed by shelling. Hundreds of houses have been damaged, some fully destroyed. The administration’s task now is to fix the electricity and water supply, but just as important is the race to stockpile provisions, medicine and water for at least a few months of a possible blockade. Kherson, the bigger town on the east, is already occupied by Russian forces. The population there gathers on a daily basis for peaceful demonstrations with their Ukrainian flags. In Mykolaiv, meanwhile, they are preparing for guerrilla street war if the invading Russians make it there.
We are all people of war now. Before the war, the mayor’s press official was, like the president, a successful standup comedian, but now the Kalashnikov automatic rifle on his shoulder doesn’t look unnatural. The last time we met was four months ago, in a spacious art gallery in Mykolaiv on the riverbank. Needs must. Another city council member carries his gun in a tennis racket case. In his prewar life, he also chaired a regional Olympic committee.
As I put on my flak jacket, he notes that I am handling it “as if I had experience”. This might be seen as a compliment, but I have seen wars abroad and reported on the conflict in eastern Ukraine. It is the politicians-turned-wartime leaders who are having to learn new skills.
But then so many people are having to see things differently. Until recently, Russia controlled 7% of Ukrainian territory. A million people were internally displaced, 14,000 were killed, but it was still possible for the majority not to know where the battlefield was.
It was we who covered the war, helped civilians, fled the region or fought the battles, who sometimes felt at odds with that everyday reality of peaceful towns. We wondered how ordinary people saw us. Did they think us neurotic? Did we have PTSD? Should we refrain from discussing the war with the rest of a country that just wanted to get on with living?
But the distinction is being shot to pieces. Many now understand the real ugliness of war, a fact that only becomes truly clear when you hear the airstrike yourself or need to flee to safety.
“I was sitting in my house and saw two black planes. I was paralysed: what should I do?” Nadia said, sitting near the debris of her house in Balabanovka in Mykolaiv’s suburbs. Her neighbour’s building was hit. Her husband, a man in his 60s, relates it all and cries. They are the only ones left in the area now. Up to a dozen houses around them have been destroyed.
Moving on to Odesa’s train station, I see a few hundred women and children from Mykolaiv and its outskirts waiting for the trains to western Ukraine, to Romania, to Slovakia and Poland – to anywhere the trains might go. The Ukrainian railway moved more than 6,000 of the most vulnerable residents of Mykolaiv this week.
How they are coping matters, because in the minds of many Ukrainians, Mykolaiv is a symbol of resistance. First because of its successful defence of airports and airfields, and for the bravery of the local military commander. But also because of the local governor, Vitaliy Kim. A half-Korean Russian speaker and a successful developer before war enveloped everything, he has been bolstering people’s morale with cheerful video diaries that are popular on the internet. When Kim calls residents to bring tyres to the city streets to block the path of Russian tanks and promises that “the smoke of rubber will hinder the enemy”, the next day the town is littered with tyres.
We need to hit the road again, to leave Mykolaiv while the drawbridge on the way to Odesa is still open, and to get there before the curfew. The mayor and his team advise me to get out. They do not know what the next night will bring. It feels like a betrayal to leave, but leave they say we must. As for them, “We would fight. We are ready,” they say.
I have been taught that when interviewing in a conflict zone, it is a kindness to try to end an interview on a positive note and ask about the future. But it’s hard to be optimistic when you think about what may come soon. The Russian advance has been slowing, but that could merely mean that the terrorising of the population from the skies with deadly shells could last for a while. Attacks from the air and on the ground; a sense of siege.
“So how about Mykolaiv becoming Hamburg after the war,” I ask the mayor. “I do not think so any more,” he says. “We were promised the Marshall plan for Ukraine after the war. But I am not sure anything on that scale is coming. We’ll rebuild what we can. But what we need now is more bulletproof vests and helmets. Pass the message.”
We “people of war” were a minority for so long. Now there are more than 40 million of us. Our focus now is on how we can stop this advance.
Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist specialising in foreign affairs and conflict reporting, and author of Lost Island: Tales from the Occupied Crimea
