Catching up on some London Review of Books reading – with which I always seem to be in arrears, and which is not always my fault because continental Europe delivery from the island is somewhat tardy – I would very much commend Tom Stevenson’s excellent reportage (LRB Vol. 44 No. 7 · 7 April 2022) of the first weeks of the Ukraine war. Framed by his journey out of Poland, first to Lviv then Kyiv, and described with an observant eye for the landscape and the human elements of the catastrophe that has befallen this land, Stevenson doesn’t shy from the complexities of geo-politics and some of the more technical aspects pertaining to defense and military – strategy, equipment, etc.
With words familiar to me for reasons different but somehow the same – see this recent post – the title of Stevenson’s piece, “Things fall from the sky”, resonated, and came to be explained by this passage in which Stevenson describes his crossing into the eastern side of Kyiv:
[…] A two-chair barber shop in a corrugated metal shed at the side of the road had opened its doors under a sign that read: ‘Express haircuts: fast and quality. 60 hryvnia.’ Marina, the woman working there, was turning away the local babushkas: she only wanted to serve volunteers. She spoke Russian with a heavy Ukrainian accent. The barbershop had reopened one week into the invasion, she said, and it would stay open ‘until things start falling from the sky’. In fact, things were already falling from the sky. […]fragments of a Russian missile – shot down by Ukrainian air defences – had landed on a housing complex next to a nursery school. The crater at the foot of one of the tower blocks was about four metres across. […]
LRB Vol. 44 No. 7 · 7 April 2022
In my blog post that I refer to above, I was pondering – my thinking very much influenced by how it was that so very many clever people over a considerable amount of time failed to recognize Russia’s intentions – the Bruegel depiction of Icarus’ fall from the sky; an extraordinary event seemingly unattended by all and sundry, and here we have Stevenson’s Marina, representative of many of the inhabitants of Kyiv, trying as best she might to get on with her life but ever alert, waiting …
Tom Stevenson’s piece is dated 25th March. Since he wrote, the war has intensified, atrocities against civilians have been uncovered – in Bucha for instance. And, as I write now, both Mariupol and Kharkiv are devastated, as are any number of villages in the eastern and southern regions. Kyiv still stands and with it a nation and a legitimate government, and its allies – with ever more financial and military support (the latest package from the US: a mind-boggling $33 billion). The prospects of an end to warfare, even of a return to diplomacy, have evaporated I fear. But to whom does one talk? To Putin? I think not. I would welcome Stevenson’s reasoned voice again, even when anything said may quickly be overtaken by events.