Message from Kyiv
War in Ukraine is deeply personal for many of its citizens. Therefore, peace is likely to be a complicated affair
On Kyiv’s main boulevard Khreshchatyk, a teenager is making a social media video on the zebra-crossing as a row of cars patiently waits for the lights to change. For a second, you forget there is a war going on. The cafes are full, gorgeously attired people have converted the wide pavements into a public ramp-walk, and a young man is strumming the acoustic version of Imagine Dragons’ Radioactive: “Welcome to the new age… I raise my flag, dye my clothes, it’s a revolution I suppose.”
Just metres away on Maidan square – the site of the iconic student-led protests in 2014 that forced then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia – a sea of Ukrainian flags with names of the fallen flutter in the balmy summer wind. Family members in solemn silence diligently replace the ones that are sullied, paying obeisance to this unfortunately growing monument to Ukraine’s war heroes. Life and grief it seems have become conjoined twins in the Ukrainian capital.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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