Yesterday: a brief meeting with a Norwegian photographer, Tom Kristensen, in the Dnipro Hotel. The main entrance is shut off and deep in shadow, as if the place were closed. But it is definitely open, and you have to enter through the London Pub to the left. Inside, there’s a little sentry box with a window, manned by a black employee. There’s also a security guard sitting on a stool close by. The bar actually functions.
Kristensen has been to Berdychiv and other towns. He wanted to talk about an interview I gave, published in a Norwegian newspaper, in which I said that Ukraine urgently needed psychologists because there were, at the moment, two groups of citizens in the country suffering from psychic trauma: those traumatised since childhood, particularly in the east of the country, and those in the centre and the west, of perfectly sound mind at the beginning of the protest movement but who, their cries of protest having gone unheard, have also been traumatised, and have been transformed from romantics into radicals.
The four hours I spent in the evening at the Hotel Ukraine’s sauna passed like a party, ephemeral but joyous. Dan Yanevsky showed up dressed like a dandy in hat and coat, twirling a walking stick with a shiny gold head. The sports journalist Dima Kharitonov arrived after everyone else. The publisher Krasovitsky advised me to leave Kiev with my family before Friday, as he fears that blood will be spilled.
After the sauna, we crossed the Maidan towards the Kozatskiy Hotel, where Dima’s car was parked. On Institutskaya Street, a line of young men in helmets was forming, waving UDAR and other flags. To the left of the Independence monument – at the foot of that girl perched on a stick, as it’s known – eight people were playing giant chess. On the other side of the Maidan, we passed a small group of short-haired, nervous-looking youths, aged about sixteen. They were speaking Russian, and the acronym ‘SS’ kept coming up in their conversation. Near a tent, in front of an extinguished brazier, stood a well-dressed, elderly woman, with a vacant look in her eyes. She was staring into space, as if she had no idea where she was, as if she had lost her memory.
This morning, the radio announced that Yanukovych had offered Poroshenko the position of head of the NBU, Ukraine’s national bank. If he accepts, there is the possibility that a coalition government will be formed. ‘Yanukovych is screwed,’ Dan said in the sauna.
During the night, I noticed on Facebook that a woman with a Lithuanian name had been looking at my old photographs. I clicked to see what she’d been interested in, and saw the picture of Serhiy Nigoyan, when he was still alive. That gave me a shock. I had taken his photograph in December in the Maidan, a month or so before his death, a big smile on his bearded face, a placard in his hand: God speaks through the voice of the people.
A letter from Tymoshenko was published yesterday, a letter which – according to rumour – has stirred up conflict in the opposition, dividing it into two camps and causing Yatsenyuk to lose his grip on the leadership of Batkivshchyna. What Tymoshenko fears is an agreement with Yanukovych and a coalition government, which would mean that the opposition politicians had forgotten she was still being held in her hospital prison.
Today, a box that supposedly contained medicine exploded in the Trade Unions building. A volunteer lost his hand. The police sealed off the place. Their version is that home-made bombs were being manufactured inside the building and that one of them must have gone off prematurely.
Yesterday, a first wedding was celebrated in the Maidan! A story worthy of a romance novel: injured during a protest march, young Yulia, from Rovno, went to the infirmary. Bogdan, a volunteer from the Zhytomyr region, bandaged her hand. After that, Yulia ended up volunteering at the Maidan’s infirmary too. And yesterday, in Kiev’s city hall, where the two of them have lived since the day the building was seized by revolutionaries, everything was made spick and span and the red carpet was rolled out for the young couple. The wedding ceremony was conducted by two priests who blessed the union and wished the newly-weds happiness and courage in their struggle for Ukraine. Some deputies turned up, but only from the Svoboda Party. The party’s leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, gave the couple a bouquet of white roses and a set of bedlinen. At the end of the ceremony, Yulia and Bogdan went to the barricades together.
Last night, thirty or forty people in balaclavas smashed the windows of two restaurants, including the O’Panas in Shevchenko Park. The titushky are suspected. Strange that a photographer from the newspaper Segodnia (‘Today’) should happen to be at the scene of the crime at three in the morning! Are vandals inviting journalists to come with them nowadays?