The Press in Ukraine | Volodymyr’s New Normal

This is without doubt the most harmless cliché that my colleague Martin Tremblay has taken in Ukraine.

Photos: Martin Tremblay
The Press

We had stopped to eat borscht and dranikis, Ukrainian specialties made from potatoes, after returning from a report at the Belarusian border. It was late afternoon. The light was beautiful.

Martin was about to get back into his car when he saw a few villagers approaching in the setting sun. He took a photo. A woman asked him what he was doing there. She didn’t look happy.

We got back on the road. Night has fallen. At the road checkpoint, a hundred kilometers further on, we were blinded by beams of flashlights. Volodymyr, our driver, was ordered out of the car with his hands in the air. The soldiers turned him over to face the vehicle and searched him unceremoniously.

The soldiers escorted us to the station. There, sinister-looking police scrutinized our passports, searched our cell phones, examined each of the photos on Martin’s cameras. We finally understood that it was the woman photographed in the setting sun who had denounced us.

In a country at war, even the most innocent of clichés can earn you a visit to the police station.

Extreme paranoia? Without a doubt. But the climate of suspicion in Ukraine is understandable. The hunt for Russian collaborators and spies infiltrating the country is in full swing.

These “saboteurs” are regularly arrested thanks to the vigilance of the local population, who report anything that seems suspicious to them. Including us.

The soldiers ended up letting us go. Martin and I shrugged our shoulders: that would give us an anecdote to tell. Volodymyr, on the other hand, was obviously shaken. We would have been just as much, I suppose, if this story had taken place on the 20 freeway.

If this had been our country, our war.

* * *

Volodymyr Tsisaryk was our first contact in Ukraine. At 14^and the day of the invasion, he was waiting for us in his white Honda Accord, a few hundred meters from the chaotic border crossing which separates his country from Poland.

He had agreed to be our driver, the time of some reports. We did not regret it. On his way to Lviv, he zigzagged with the virtuosity of an F1 driver between potholes that would have made the streets of Montreal look like bowling alleys. “It’s to slow down the advance of the Russian tanks,” he told us, tongue-in-cheek.

We quickly understood that dark humor is an outlet in times of war. In Ukraine, we laugh not to cry.

I asked Volodymyr if he had ever worked with journalists. I wanted to know if he knew what to expect from these particular beasts who work impossible hours and insist on going where the going is.

He didn’t quite understand the meaning of my question. “Oh, yes, I know journalists well,” he replied. I gave several interviews…”

I looked at him, taken aback. Our driver happens to be a local celebrity!

Volodymyr Tsisaryk is a sculptor. Some of his works enrich the public art of Lviv. At the beginning of the invasion, the artist made his war effort. In his workshop, he welded “Czech hedgehogs”, these steel anti-tank obstacles intended to block the passage of Russian tanks.

Then he closed his workshop. Why keep it open? No one had the nerve to order works of art when a brutal invasion threatened to destroy everything.

And that’s how a Ukrainian sculptor came to lug Quebec journalists across the country in his Honda Accord.

* * *

On day 18 of the war, when Russian missiles pulverized a military base housing foreign fighter units near Lviv, Volodymyr’s wife decided to leave, along with the children.

The threat was getting too close to home.

For her, the war was not a game of Risk, where you study the cards trying to anticipate Putin’s next move. It wasn’t a movie, where everything would go back to normal after the credits.

For her, war meant losing everything: work, home, certainties. Everything she took for granted. The future she envisioned bright, now dark.

On day 19, she no longer knew. Leaving also meant tearing oneself away from everything one knows and loves. Find a new school for the children, in another language. Start all over again, from scratch.

And then, because of martial law preventing men from leaving the Ukraine, leaving meant leaving Volodymyr behind.

* * *

That evening, Volodymyr drove us to the Lviv train station. We took an overnight train to Odessa.

There, we recruited another driver to travel from one city to another. It was essential. Even if we had been able to decipher the Cyrillic alphabet, the road signs would have been useless to us: they had been hidden to prevent enemy troops from navigating inland.

The Ukrainians took the opportunity to send a message to the Russian soldiers. On the road to Mykolaiv, a blue sign now read: “Straight ahead, fuck you. Left, fuck you again. Right, fuck you to Russia! »

This spirit of bravado, we found it everywhere in Ukraine.

Ever since a handful of coastguards had let out a “Fuck you!” well felt by the sailors of a Russian warship, in the middle of the Black Sea, it had become the rallying cry of the resistance.

The businesses of Lviv were covered with them. “It’s a problem with children,” laughed Volodymyr. They were always told that they had no right to write swear words and there, it is written everywhere! We explained to them that with the war, we could make an exception…”

He picked us up at the station on our return from Odessa. He took us to the border post, to the very place where he had waited for us ten days earlier.

It was day 24 of the invasion. He had decided to reopen his workshop. Life had to resume its course, despite the war. We were returning to our world. Volodymyr had no choice but to adjust to his new normal.