‘A woman screams from a high balcony: “Help me! I’m freezing to death!”’ – novelist James Meek returns to Kyiv

My first flat in Kyiv was a couple of metro stops outside the city centre, just opposite Volodymyrskyy market, in a nondescript mid-20th century block. The lease was arranged by post. It took me five days to drive there from Edinburgh in an old Polo in November 1991. Finding my way to Kyiv was easy – one road from Calais takes you straight there – but once I got to the outskirts, I must have used a paper map to navigate through the city. I spoke no Ukrainian, and enough Russian to ask basic directions, but not enough to understand the answer. I could read the street signs. I found a parking space round the back and began to unload my stuff.

Recently, I went back. I crossed the road from the square by the metro and went through the market. It’s a neater, quieter place than I remember from the early 1990s, not so much because of the war as from the gradual changes over the intervening years, when peasant farmers around Kyiv became fewer and post-communist supermarkets and commercial food distribution systems replaced the old state shops. In the weeks before and after the 1991 referendum, when Ukrainians voted to leave the Soviet Union, precipitating its quick disintegration, I went to the state shops to queue for cheap, rationed, often scarce items such as bread and hard cheese; the market was a place of plenty and, for locals, high prices. Row upon row of countrywomen in aprons sold huge jars of sour cream, chalk-white towers of cottage cheese wrapped in muslin and pots of horseradish in beetroot juice, alongside vendors from the Caucasus offering persimmons, pomegranates and fresh coriander, and pickle merchants with buckets of Korean carrot salad and wild garlic stalks. All this is still abundant in Kyiv, still locally made, but packaged and stacked on supermarket shelves by big firms. Nobody’s selling homemade sour cream now – perhaps they’ll be back in spring? – there’s only one pickle seller, and the meat counter is no longer quite the shrine to pork fat it once was.

I managed to get into the stairway of my old place. It’s cleaner and brighter than when I lived there. It no longer has the smell of old vegetables and kidneys, and nobody is stealing the lightbulbs any more. The tiny, clanking lift is the same. But it was remarkable the bulbs were working at all. A Russian attack two nights earlier had torn apart the bare threads connecting Kyiv to what remains of the country’s power stations and grid; for much of the previous day, the city centre – even places with their own generators – had been without running water. I didn’t want to get in the lift. Iva, the optimistic young photographer I was working with, thought it was fine. She was living to a different scale of risk. On her last trip to the front, she’d watched as a Ukrainian military drone warning system intercepted the live feed of a Russian attack drone and she’d seen, on the screen, the Russian drone operator’s POV centred on the car she was travelling in, before it mercifully veered away.

We got in the lift, and the power didn’t fail, and knocked on the door of the old place: nobody home. The war and Russia’s winter bombardment of essential services have driven many people out of the city.

A lot of the early entries from my journal at the time are about food. A smoked goose from the market was the Christmas lunch I gave friends a few days before the Soviet Union died. The state food shop on the corner is long gone. Every so often a beaten-up tanker truck used to turn up there with “FISH” roughly stencilled on the side. The driver would pull out a hose, open a valve and decant a stream of live carp a foot and a half long into a stone tank set in the counter. One day I bought one. I assumed the shop would kill it for me, but the shop assistant simply wrapped a newspaper round its middle and handed it over. It was strong. I clamped it against my side with my elbow and fought it all the way home, its head and tail thrashing against my coat. I tipped it into the sink. What could I do? It was too late to put it back. I reached for a blunt object.

This winter it seemed almost indecent for me, a foreigner, to step off the night train into the great murmuring hall of Kyiv station with baggage of memories of the city I arrived in 35 years ago. What good was memory now, when everything that mattered seemed to crowd into the present? I lived in Kyiv from 1991 to 1994. But the Kyiv of winter 26 is a city that’s been under Russian attack for longer than the Soviet Union fought Hitler, where Vladimir Putin manifests himself every few nights in black-painted, delta-winged drones, cruise missiles and rockets, smashing the power, water and heating network that keeps Ukrainians from freezing. Painfully, they patch it up, only to have the Russians smash it again. In the midst of this torture, I wondered – still wonder – if it’s wrong to write anything beyond bearing witness to the pain and stoicism of the moment. But that would be to diminish the long life of post-Soviet Kyiv and Ukraine before Russia’s invasion. When disaster strikes it can seem to wipe out the complexity of a previous life, of a person, of a city. The extremity of a crisis simplifies us into a before and after, and all the bickering, the joys and disappointments and weirdnesses of the decades before, which seemed so meaningful, are subordinated to the yearning for an end to the emergency. To dismiss memories of peacetime, even a foreigner’s, would be almost as if those decades of freedom from Moscow’s control had never happened, as if Ukraine had only broken free yesterday: exactly the illusion Putin wants to encourage.

There’s a paradox for the returnee to Kyiv. You know there’s a war on, and not just because you know. On my first night I was woken by the distant sound of explosions and anti-aircraft fire. But most of the changes that the Russian invasion has wrought aren’t immediately present to the senses: cold radiators, cut-off power (apart from the noise of on-street generators). You have no way of knowing whether a woman you see walking down the street has lost a son, or a husband, or a boyfriend, or is a refugee. Only gradually do you notice that most of the advertising hoardings are promoting military units. There’s destruction; how could there not be? Russia has sent many thousands of missiles and drones against the city. But Kyiv is huge, with more people before the war than Paris or Rome, and it would take much more bombardment to start showing obvious signs of damage on every street, never mind for it to be reduced to ruins, as Russia has destroyed multiple large towns in the east. The startling and obvious change for anyone who remembers the city from the 1990s is the proliferation of speculative apartment blocks and office buildings from the 2000s and 2010s, mostly 20 or so storeys high, usually topped off with an awkward mansard roof sampling neoclassicism or Haussmann’s Paris. They rise up from Kyiv’s hilly terrain, seemingly dropped willy-nilly among older buildings like darts thrown blindfold. One such 20-storey edifice has sprouted right next to my old apartment block, a top-heavy residential anvil of glass and cream-coloured stone. The ground floor, faced in black, houses a branch of PrivatBank, once the country’s biggest commercial bank, nationalised in 2016 amid allegations of imprudent lending. One of its founders, Ihor Kolomoisky, a key backer of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s 2019 election campaign, is now in prison; the two are long estranged.

The chaotic redevelopment of Kyiv by speculative builders since the 1990s isn’t just some precious outsider’s obsession projected on a city struggling to keep warm and defend itself from attack. Kyivans talk about it, too. The legacy of the flat-builders’ free-for-all in the city, like the PrivatBank logo, is a reminder that there was corruption and a militant resistance to it here before Putin forced Ukraine to make resistance all about him. Russia’s war on Ukraine began decades ago as a Russian intervention in an inter-Ukrainian political struggle between pro-EU liberals and working-class nationalists on the one hand, and a corrupt criminal-capitalist elite on the other. Russia took the side of the latter.

At the second place I lived in Kyiv for any length of time, opposite the opera house, on what was still called Lenin Street when I moved in and was called Bohdan Khmelnitsky Street when I left a year later, I couldn’t find my old flat. It was in a courtyard behind a handsome 19th-century facade. It had been a big, high-ceilinged, sparsely furnished place with herringbone parquet floors and a spacious balcony with windows framed by the branches of a big chestnut tree. I couldn’t find it because it

had been demolished, along with the equally handsome building on the corner next door, to make way for a pompous faux art nouveau business centre. As Dmytro Perov, a campaigner to repair and repurpose rather than knock down old Kyiv, explained to me, the municipal authorities handed the buildings over to a developer for restoration in the early 2000s. When the scaffolding and hoardings came down, the old buildings had vanished, replaced by the business centre.

“I’m not against modern architecture,” he said. “I’m against modern architecture on top of historical buildings.” Not that the business centre, like so many of the new-build blocks that have landed in Kyiv’s historic heart, is exactly modern architecture. Speaking of the overall effect, Perov said, “It’s like you took a spaceship, a medieval castle and a toy car, mixed them up and built something out of the resulting vinaigrette.”

The way central Kyiv has been variously redeveloped, neglected, cleared, restored and bombed since independence matters for the country as the legacy its early years leave for, it has to be hoped, future generations in a free Ukraine. Mightn’t the seeming mess, with time, find its place as the true style of the era?

Perov didn’t think so. “The developers tell me, ‘Dmytro, in 50 years, you’ll defend what I’m building now.’ And I say, ‘That will never happen.’ They say, ‘‘Why?’ I say, ‘Because I have an architect colleague who’s looked at your plans, and it’s written on them that their design life is 49 years.’

“Modern architecture is finite. You’re expected to say how long it’s going to last. Architects didn’t used to have this burden, this concept of a limited lifespan. Now, an architect comes along and says I can build something with such and such a material, it’s going to last 100 years, it’ll cost 20 dollars. Or you could use a cheaper material that’ll last 20 years, and that’ll be five dollars. Most of our developers have a very limited record. They start their business, build their buildings, make their money and go to live in London. And a new developer comes along and it starts again. They’re not worried what happens to their creations in 10, 20, 50 years. Nobody builds in Kyiv for the future now.”

In the early months of the invasion in 2022, most of Perov’s fellow campaigners went to fight the Russians. Many of the aesthetes who picked up weapons didn’t survive. Meanwhile, the developers are back and building again. Perov waits to be called up. It’s as if for him the Russian assault and the commercial destruction of the fabric of old Kyiv are two fronts in one wider war. “The people who defended the historic city have either been killed [serving in the military] or are at the front,” he says. “The bad old days of development are back, but there’s no one to oppose it.”

There were moments, in the bitterest frosts for many years, when Kyiv seemed to be coping with panache and ingenuity. Ukraine shoots down or jams off course more than half of Russia’s attack drones. Cafes and restaurants keep going on generators, even somehow on the day there was no running water. A friend put into my hand three LPs, the first vinyl pressed by her new modern music label. She wanted me to know that, in spite of everything, there had been joys, especially the birth of her third child. Although the pavements, not well cleared, are treacherously embossed with iron-hard black ice, the centre still looks pretty in winter white. One night I drank good Ukrainian red wine in a cellar bar with a new friend, Oleksandr, who told me how the residents of his apartment block had clubbed together to buy a giant battery to keep essentials such as lifts running during blackouts, a minority of the relatively well-off putting in extra to cover for the minority who couldn’t or wouldn’t chip in. The block had been hit by a drone, killing several people and rendering one floor uninhabitable. Yet, in spite of Perov’s scepticism about the longevity of Kyiv’s new steel and concrete towers, the building held firm; Oleksandr’s flat, several floors below, was undamaged.

One time Oleksandr pressed the wrong lift button and the doors opened on the devastated floor, as if he’d accidentally slipped into his own nightmare what-might-have-been world. Later, I was in the metro when the air raid sirens went and although the network keeps running, trains to the newer part of Kyiv on the left – that is, eastern – bank of the Dnipro River are disrupted. Many people were left hanging around mid-journey, looking at their phones. They looked exhausted, frazzled, a little unkempt. It hinted at the million immense personal daily efforts just to keep going, to do the basics, to get to and from work, feed the family, keep warm, wash clothes, wash yourself, charge devices and wrangle the children when the heating, water and electricity keep cutting out and the city is under fire.

One day I visited the left bank, a sprawling forest of apartment blocks, heavily built up in Soviet times and built up more since independence. Although you might take to it a middle-class western prejudice against “the estates”, the projects, les banlieues, it’s very much a mix now of private and municipal blocks. For a long time Kyivians liked its modernity, open spaces and bigger apartments. But Kyiv’s Soviet-era utilities –underinvested in by their private owners even before the war – are set up in such a way that the left bank has suffered disproportionately from Russian strikes, which knock out heating, power and water for hours or days at a time. The drones are a sometimes fatal menace, but the deepest systemic damage is done by Russian missiles. The only real defence against them is an expensive American weapon, the Patriot system, and Russia has so saturated the sky with cheap targets that the US can’t or won’t supply enough costly missiles to keep up. During at least one, highly destructive recent attack, the Patriot launchers sat empty and useless.

In a municipal tent heated and lit by generator, pitched in the snow between rows of Soviet-era apartment blocks, I came across Alla, a 79-year-old former military clerk, eating a bowl of hot kasha. She had gas and running water in her partially damaged apartment, but no heating or electricity, and hence no lift – she lives on the sixth floor of a nine-storey building. (Most apartments in Kyiv depend for heat and hot water on a few giant fossil fuel-powered district heating plants, an efficient energy system that is also an efficient way for an attacker to hurt an entire civilian population in temperatures lower than -20C (-4F).) A couple of months earlier, air defence forces had brought down a Russian drone, which crashed into Alla’s neighbour’s apartment at 2.30am, starting a fire. A month earlier, the neighbour, who’d already lost her daughter, got news that her only grandson, serving in the Ukrainian army, was missing in action. She had a stroke and lost the use of her legs. On the night of the attack, her occasional carer was away. The fire brigade arrived quickly, but it took time to charge up the foam to fight the fire, which was being fed by a severed gas line, and trees had to be cut down to bring the fire engine close enough. All the while, Alla could hear her neighbour calling for help. When the firefighters reached her, it was too late. Two other neighbours were also killed and many injured. The blast sent shattered glass into Alla’s front room, blew out doors and damaged furniture, but Alla was protected by being prone, dozing on a low sofa.

I was struck by how calm, uncomplaining and sharp she was, especially given that, on top of everything, she, too, has a son serving in the east. She’s spry. She took the stairs up to the sixth floor without trouble. But there are more ways for disorder to creep into a super-stressed life than we can imagine when things are going well, or notice when they aren’t. The temperature in Alla’s place was at the low end of what you’d expect in a domestic fridge and, naturally enough, she was keeping food out. Perhaps naturally enough, too, she wasn’t throwing food away. Chilled food scraps and leftovers had accumulated on horizontal surfaces and on the floor, like clothes strewn across an untidy bedroom. I knew from being a guest over the years how cosy and neat the interiors of these 1960s concrete panel blocks, which seem so shabby on the outside, usually are, and somehow the sight of a retired person’s comfy home transformed into a giant, overstuffed fridge turned inside out was more affecting than the blackened concrete and boarded-up windows where the drone went in.

On my way back with Iva we passed another apartment block. A woman was screaming from a high balcony: “I’m dying! Help me! I’m freezing to death!” A neighbour let us in and we climbed the unlit stairs. On the eighth floor we found 87-year-old Broneslava. She was living alone in her flat, not only without heat or power but with no lead to charge her non-smart phone, no food and no money. She’d never been registered with social services or any of the volunteer aid organisations. She walked with great difficulty, using a frame, and without a lift had no way to get downstairs by herself. Speaking through waves of panic attacks, she demanded we call the police; she’d paid her bills, she said, but the radiators weren’t working. The police came, and said there was nothing they could do. We called an ambulance, and the paramedics said there was nothing they could do either, but agreed, in the end, to take her to hospital.

I was wearing two pairs of socks and (disgracefully, for a guest in a Ukrainian apartment) the snow boots that had kept my feet perfectly warm in Greenland the previous winter. It was so cold in Broneslava’s dark living room that I felt the frost grip my toes.

We learned from the hospital several days later that they’d been able to trace relatives of Broneslava’s in a city west of Kyiv; they’d collected her and taken her home with them. When I recounted the story to people in central Kyiv later, they were sympathetic to Broneslava but also to the police and paramedics. Most of all their thoughts flew to thousands of others trapped in cold, dark rooms like Broneslava who didn’t shout for help from a balcony, who didn’t get heard.

My friends from the 1990s all left Kyiv long before the invasion, for North America, the EU and Britain. Only my ex-mother-in-law is left. It doesn’t make it any easier for her but, like Iva, the range of extremes in her life has been great. She was born in a trench in northern Ukraine during the Nazi occupation. When I went to see her, she sent a message reminding me not to risk the lift. I took the stairs. As I crossed the threshold, the lights went out.

When it was part of the Soviet Union, Moscow allowed Ukraine to have its own make-believe foreign ministry so as to get an extra seat at the UN. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the fake foreign ministry became the real one. In the early 90s, under the brusque, sceptical supervision of the media minder Valery Ingolsky, the burgeoning foreign press corps would squeeze around a long table in a house around the corner from the parliament for press briefings. I was one, selling stories to this newspaper at £13 per hundred words. Among us was a future deputy prime minister of Canada and a future Tory MP. From the Ukrainian journalists I remembered two young regulars, early hires of international news agencies, scribbling away in desk diaries, as notebooks were in deficit. I didn’t know them, but I knew who they were: Oleksandr Tkachenko of Reuters, serious, intense and seeming about 16 years old – he was in his 20s, like me – and Yulia Mostova of Agence France-Presse, confident and regal, always with a knowing smile.

I met Tkachenko for lunch. He suggested we meet at a grand new place in the heart of the old city, specialising in luxurious versions of Ukrainian home cooking. After he left Reuters in the mid-90s he set up his own TV production company, created and fronted the country’s top-rated political talkshow, and ended up running TV channels for some of the most powerful, eventually notorious oligarchs in Ukraine, most notably the 1+1 channel of Ihor Kolomoisky, he of PrivatBank fame, now in jail. Kolomoisky and Tkachenko were important parts of the media-financial support for Zelenskyy, a key entertainment provider for 1+1, when he won the presidential election in 2019. Tkachenko left 1+1, became an MP in Zelenskyy’s party and was culture minister for a short time before public outrage over state subsidies for TV light entertainment in wartime forced his resignation.

We chatted amiably enough, although he was guarded about Kolomoisky and Zelenskyy. About the president he said, “We’re not friends.”

I said he made his move out of critical journalism into the world of money and power sound terribly natural, as if it had simply happened, and he said that was just how it seemed to him, natural: he’d seen what he wanted, and gone for it.

Had there ever been a moment when he was conscious of leaving others behind, colleagues who weren’t interested in business and management, and who just wanted to go on investigating and reporting?

“That’s my problem,” he said. “Because of narcissism, a big ego, I didn’t always care about this type of stuff. With age, I realise that it is a bad habit.”

He and Mostova, I knew, had once been close, had gone to the same Soviet journalism school, but had since fallen out badly. Tkachenko said their relationship had been destroyed when Mostova took it personally that 1+1 criticised her husband, a former defence minister who was one of Zelenskyy’s rivals in the 2019 election.

I went to see Mostova a couple of days later at the office of Mirror of the Week, the newspaper she’s edited since she founded it with her father in 1994, with cash from an Odesa businessman who got rich in the US. She wasn’t in a forgiving mood towards her one-time friend. She saw them as having moved in opposite directions, Tkachenko in the service of Ukraine’s pre-invasion oligarchy, herself and Mirror ever in the vanguard of the fight against corruption, the toxic merger of politics, media and extractive billionaires.

“He was a good guy, but he just chose a different course, and he’s ashamed to admit it.”

Mostova is an extraordinary force, a brilliant off-the-cuff polemicist, smoking away in her freezing office with the power out, offering pirozhki, going over to the window at one point for a silhouette with her arms held out away from her sides to show how tough she is: “Look, I’m a girl. And just look at the size of balls I’ve got.”

She echoed much of what I’d gleaned from Perov about the relationship between the war and the despoiling of the Kyiv cityscape. For her, it reflected different sides of a national character: the surge of emotional energy that had made so many small-scale entrepreneurs and craftspeople volunteer to fight in 2022, swelling the army with “a complicated construct of reckless individualists and heroes”, and the narrow-minded selfishness that summoned up the ugly tower blocks. “It’s the same old indifference to everyone else in pursuit of your own profit. If I bribe someone and get my bit of land, I don’t care if there are 30 parking spaces for a building with 90 flats. I don’t care that there’s no nursery. I don’t care that it clashes totally with the buildings around it. I built it, I’ll sell my flats, I’ll rent out my offices, and I’ll get lots of money for my family. The end.”

A few hours before my train to Poland was due to leave, I went back to the last flat where I lived in Ukraine, in an old brick tenement on Reitarska, opposite the French embassy. It’s been painted golden yellow, and an extra floor has been added to the top, but otherwise it’s the same. Even the unfinished construction at the end of the street is in an identical state of non-completion to how it was 32 years ago. The area’s been much gentrified; it still has a slightly grubby, dusty patina, but it’s become a desirable, expensive address. I found out the entry code. The people living in my old place weren’t chatty, but on another floor, Lesia Donets invited me in. The apartment she and her husband are renting is Europeanised, walls knocked down, space opened up, minimalist, stylish. There was heat and light, though sometimes the radiators go cold and Donets has to heat a fire-brick on the stove to keep warm. She used to be a fashion editor and now co-runs a PR agency. It turned out we had friends in common.

She and her husband have committed to the war. Her husband has been searching for the right unit to join; Donets’ agency is working on fundraising and recruitment with the National Guard’s Khartia brigade.

We talked about the link between the preservation of old Kyiv and the war. Donets told me about the activist Serhii Myronov, who began going round Kyiv restoring historic doors on 19th-century buildings whenever residents and owners were about to replace them with modern mass-produced versions. He inspired a mass volunteer restoration movement, joined the army after the invasion, and was killed soon afterwards.

“If we’re talking about Kyiv looking like Kyiv … we cannot lose it, otherwise what exactly are we fighting for?” Donets said. “This independence does have to be symbolised in something.”

It had already struck me that, whatever their differences, Tkachenko and Mostova have in common that they chose to stay in Kyiv, even through this bitter winter, even though each has the legal right and financial means to leave. When I started to talk in terms of an alliance in Ukraine between liberals and patriots, Donets gave me short shrift. “For me,” she said, “90% of the people who decided to stay in Ukraine are patriots. Just staying here is like taking part in this war.”

James Meek is the author of Your Life Without Me, published by Canongate at £18.99.