It was snowing again at the checkpoint on the edge of Kyiv’s heavily protected government quarter. My papers were checked by guards dressed in Ukraine’s pixellated camouflage fatigues, with woollen hats under their helmets, snow settling on their shoulders and Kalashnikov assault rifles slung across their backs. For a visitor from a grey and tepid island in north-western Europe it can be too easy to lose yourself in the romance of winter in Ukraine: ice floes in Kyiv’s mighty Dnipro River and snow piling up on the cobbles, sandbags, golden domes and rusty steel tank-traps. The corrective is in the homes that freeze when the Russians attack the power grid, and the blocks of flats with fronts ripped off and residents dead or gone.
The meeting was inside one of the monumental, parquet-floored government buildings bequeathed by the USSR. I was shown down a long, empty corridor to a grand and warm office that must once have been occupied by a Soviet functionary. Its current resident, a middle-aged man who didn’t want to be identified, knows Volodymyr Zelensky well. He talked about the president’s childhood in the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih in the centre of the country. It is an extraordinary place, not because of its beauty – there isn’t much, unless you like post-Soviet industrial decay – but because of its shape. Kryvyi Rih is 100km long and only 20km wide, built along the iron ore seam and studded with steelworks and towering winding gear for the mines.
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