Putin recognised Crimea’s independence yesterday, and that very evening the Russian television news programmes were showing a map of Ukraine with the peninsula amputated from it. The sanctions announced by Europe and the United States against twenty-one Crimean and Russian citizens provoked only bafflement and bitter laughter from those around me. But others say this is just the beginning of sanctions. We’ll see. Meanwhile, events are progressing very quickly in Crimea, and very slowly in Europe. As if the news were arriving not by Internet but by messengers on horseback.
Weapons – and there are a lot of them – were being distributed all day long on the peninsula yesterday. The procedure is simple. One must simply be an inhabitant of the region – proved by showing ID with a place of residence – in order to obtain certification as a member of the self-defence; or, in other words, it’s sufficient to go to one of the innumerable addresses provided by this organisation, and to swear one’s love for Russia and one’s hatred of Ukraine. After that, equipped with said brand-new certificate, just head for the local military commissariat to be given a Kalashnikov.
It is noticeable that the more Crimeans there are who receive weapons, the fewer working cash machines there are in Crimea. Many people are in complete disarray. The shops no longer accept credit cards. The banks are closed. The Crimean authorities are announcing the nationalisation of Ukrainian bank branches. The same authorities promise a quick conversion to the rouble and financial aid from Russia. But the Russian government has not said a single word more about the money promised to Crimea.
Self-defence detachments stop cars and buses all over the peninsula to check the papers of passengers and drivers. Anyone without papers is taken away and imprisoned. What are they looking for? Spies from Kiev, perhaps? The local self-defence consists not only of Crimean volunteers but also Russian activists and Cossacks. Soon the different detachments will be checking each other’s papers.
The members of Kiev’s self-defence and other revolutionary groups that took part in the overthrow of Yanukovych also have weapons in their hands. But those weapons were not distributed to them. That is why they have only one or two machine guns for ten people. And these detachments of revolutionaries roam Kiev, searching for some kind of outlet for their energy.
Last weekend, a Kiev businessman asked a Pravy Sektor patrol to protect the cellar of a building, where he hoped to install a shop. The building’s residents, embroiled in a long battle with the businessman – who had no legal proof that he owned the cellar – called on a detachment of the self-defence to come to their rescue. While the two groups of revolutionaries were trying to clear up the situation, a car full of armed police also arrived at 23 Khalturin Street, but they parked further away and did not intervene in the dispute. A few of the revolutionaries fired warning shots into the air in an attempt to demonstrate the correctness of their opinion, but ultimately the affair ended peacefully. The businessman was forced to kneel down in front of the building’s residents and swear that he would never again attempt to take anyone else’s possessions. After that, the police asked everyone to end the argument, and the two revolutionary groups went their separate ways. Their weapons were not taken from them, and no one was taken to a police station. Peace was simply re-established. But when the first gunshots went off, the teachers in the nursery school in the building next door had immediately called the children’s parents to tell them to come urgently and pick up their offspring. I had friends among those parents, and they were shaking with fear as they rushed over to collect their little Artyomka.
I am sleeping a little better now, in spite of all that is going on. Yesterday, the ophthalmologist prescribed eyedrops for me: after almost three months of abnormal sleeping patterns, my eyesight was beginning to worsen. Even once he had given me the piece of paper detailing the name of the eyedrops and vitamins I had to take, the ophthalmologist did not let me go, asking repeatedly: ‘What’s going to happen now? How are we going to live?’
That evening, I went to visit my Kiev publisher. We sat – him, his wife and me – at a small table and filled three glasses with vodka, which we drank with herring, fried fish and pickled cucumbers. Outside, the wind blew with a strength unusual in Kiev, hurling gusts of rain against the windows. We meet like this, my publisher and I, at least once a week. He and his wife prefer these soothing meetings to pharmaceutical tranquillisers. They always ask the same questions: ‘What should we do now? How are we going to live?’ His publishing house is not in operation any more, as the Ukrainian state owes him so much money. For a long time now, he has not had enough money to pay his employees or rent his offices. Every day, he says it is time to close the business for good. Yet, each morning, he goes to work in spite of all this.
As before, I go almost daily to the Maidan and Hrushevskoho Street, where barricades have been erected once more, covered with flowers in memory of the victims. It is now possible to drive down this street to reach the Parliament building and beyond, but the cleared passage remains narrow, just wide enough for a single vehicle. That is why traffic flows sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another. But, although this is one of the main central streets, in fact few cars go that way. Kiev’s motorists have got used to bypassing the city centre.
People continue to come to the barricades, and Maidanistas continue to live in tents alongside them. There is no way of telling which tents have been there since the beginning of the protests and which joined only after the victory over Yanukovych’s regime. At night, there are lots of young people out on Hrushevskoho Street. They come here in couples, young men and women dressed in camouflage, some carrying clubs, some wearing helmets, a revolutionary badge pinned to their clothes. Detachments of young activists, which appeared on the square after that bloody Thursday, sometimes march down other streets. Something must be done with this mass revolutionary energy. So the government is proposing the organisation of a National Guard made up of volunteers to defend the country’s borders. In this sense, Russia’s aggression is a blessing, as strange and terrible as those words might seem.
Thousands of Maidanistas and members of the self-defence have already begun military training. When the radio announces this news, the sense that war is imminent is only intensified. Before, the news was merely bad, focusing on sad events. Now it is bellicose and full of enthusiasm.
In recent days, the governor of Donbas, Serhiy Taruta – a businessman and one of the country’s less rich oligarchs – announced that he had paid for a twelve-foot-wide ditch to be dug along the Russian border and for a six-foot-high earth rampart to be built. Concrete fortifications have been constructed on this rampart, intended to stop the Russian tanks. The ditch extends over the entire border that the Donetsk region shares with Russia, a distance of at least seventy miles. If I ever describe this ditch in a novel, I will be sure to fill it with water and to populate it with crocodiles capable of biting through the Russian tanks’ armour plating.
I had to block access to my Facebook page again yesterday, to stop Russians leaving me insulting private messages. They call me a bastard and a traitor. Weird that a citizen coming out in support of his own country’s national integrity, and against an attack on it from a neighbouring state, can be considered a traitor in another country.