The hotel I stayed at in Kyiv was a massive 12-story block, gray on the outside and gray on the inside, true to the style and spirit of the Soviet era in which it was built. The cavernous reception area was prowled day and night by four burly, silent, black-clad guys who might have been bodyguards for a mob or, which is more or less the same thing, for Stalin, Brezhnev, or their successor Vladimir Putin.
But I felt good there. Protected. And from my bedroom window I had a fantastic view of the wide Dnipro River and a square with twelve flags, eight of them in the colors of Ukraine, four of them of the European Union. The contrast between the gloomy appearance of the hotel and the gay flags seemed to me to sum up the essence of what is at stake in the Ukrainian war: Russia's dark endeavor to keep Ukraine under its iron fist and the Ukrainians' desire to breathe freely and establish itself as a democratic European nation.
They see two of the countries on their borders, Belarus and Poland, and they know which of the two offers the model to follow. Belarus: a corrupt, poor and cruel dictatorship, a puppet of Moscow. Poland: A developing democracy that has taken a quantum leap in prosperity and freedom since joining the EU and gaining NATO protection. Getting to be like Poland, or perhaps better, like the Baltic countries that were previously within the Soviet sphere, is what it means for the Ukrainians to win this war.
More united and more country today than ever thanks to the Russian invasion, Ukraine will one day achieve its goal. The day after the reconstruction will begin and the European institutions will be there, contributing their share. European individuals will also have their chance. Despite the pain and destruction that I have seen during eleven days traveling more than two thousand kilometers of Ukrainian soil, one idea has not stopped floating through my mind: the great potential that this country has as a tourist destination.
In the future I hope to have the opportunity to explore Ukraine for the travel section of this journal. Today I limit myself to a sketch.
First, it is the largest country in Europe and to travel around it, the ideal thing to do is to do it by train, which is always a pleasure and also much better for the environment than flying. Ukrainian trains are as punctual as Swiss (an extraordinary feat in wartime) and perfectly comfortable, especially first class, which is very cheap. A bed on a night train for a journey of 500 kilometers costs less than 50 euros.
Kyiv is a majestic capital with wide avenues, huge squares, beautiful parks and delightful walks along the river. There are plenty of historic buildings worth a visit, particularly the grand churches with their golden domes. The food is good, especially in Georgian restaurants, but worth a special mention is one that is proudly Ukrainian, called 100 Years in the Future, chaired by Kyiv's Ferran Adrià, a cooking artist named Ievgen Klopotenko.
The train journey to Odessa, 500 kilometers south on the Black Sea, took nine hours and would have been smoother except for one detail. We passed halfway through the city of Uman, where 24 hours earlier the Russians had launched a missile at a residential building, killing 23 people, including four children. It wasn't the fear of a repeat attack that affected my sleep as much as the harrowing images I'd seen on television of the children's parents the morning after. And also the feeling that this gratuitous act of State terrorism, 700 kilometers from the war front, symbolized with terrible perfection how absolutely grotesque, absurd, cruel and anachronistic this conflict that Tsar Putin invented is.
The usual description of Odesa as “a gem” is well deserved. A UNESCO world heritage site, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Cossacks and, among many others, the Soviet empire passed through here. Happily, the last one is the one that left the least trace. The city invites you to stroll. Images from the 19th century come to mind, of elegant ladies and gentlemen conversing in tree-lined avenues and immaculately tended parks, shaded by magnificent buildings such as the Italian-designed Opera House and St. Paul's Cathedral.
Cafeterias abound and certain streets are reminiscent of Paris or Berlin, but when you get to the sea with its port and its beaches, where the famous movie Battleship Potemkin was filmed, the predominant feeling is Mediterranean. In an all-white restaurant with a view of the sea –floor, chairs, walls– they offered me a Verdejo wine, but I chose a more than acceptable pinot gris from the area. The food I would not have enjoyed more in Barcelona: burrata with tomato and pesto; Tuna tartare with avocado and a grilled sea bream.
On the way back to my boutique hotel, nothing to do with the one in Kyiv except how cheap it was, two guys in their 20s approached me, wanting to speak English. Soon, they recognized, they might be called upon to fight, but they looked carefree, living in the moment. Salty, smart, each with a large bottle of beer in hand, they told me they were college students, but they also work. What about? I asked them. Without blinking, they answered me: "We are cybercriminals." That? "Yes, we speak perfect Russian and we make hundreds of random calls a day to people in Russia and, when we are lucky, we extort money from them."
We said goodbye with smiles, without it ever occurring to me to report them to the police.
