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. Prowling the cavernous reception area day and night were four burly, silent, black-clad guys who could have been mafia bodyguards or, for what it's more or less the same thing, Stalin, Brezhnev or their successor Vladimir Putin .
But I felt good about it. protected And from the window of my room I had a fantastic view of the wide Dnipro river and a square with twelve flags, eight of them with the colors of Ukraine, four with those of the European Union. The contrast between the somber appearance of the hotel and the cheerful flags seemed to me to sum up the essence of what is at stake in the Ukrainian war: Russia's dark desire to keep Ukraine under its iron fist and the desire of Ukrainians to breathe freely and consolidate themselves as a democratic European nation.
They see two of the countries on their borders, Belarus and Poland, and know which of the two offers the role model. Belarus: a corrupt, poor and cruel dictatorship, a puppet of Moscow. Poland: A developing democracy that has made a qualitative 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 used to be within the Soviet sphere, is what it means for the Ukrainians to win this war.
More united and more of a country today than ever thanks to the Russian invasion, Ukraine will one day achieve its goal. The next day the reconstruction will begin and the European institutions will be there, contributing their part. European individuals will also have their chance. Despite the pain and destruction I have seen during eleven days traveling more than two thousand kilometers of Ukrainian territory, one idea has not stopped floating in 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 newspaper. Today I limit myself to a sketch.
First, it is the largest country in Europe and the ideal way to travel around it is by train, which is always a pleasure and also much better than flying for the environment. Ukrainian trains are as punctual as the Swiss (an extraordinary feat in wartime) and perfectly comfortable, especially in 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 river walks. There are countless historical buildings that are worth a visit, in particular the great churches with their golden domes. The food is good, especially in the Georgian restaurants, but there is one worthy of special mention that is proudly Ukrainian called Fa 100 anos en el Futur, presided over by Ferran Adrià de Kíiv, a culinary artist called.
The train journey to Odessa, 500 kilometers south on the Black Sea, took nine hours and would have been smoother but for one detail. We passed halfway through the city of Úman, 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 shocking images I had seen on television of the children's parents the next morning. And also the feeling that this gratuitous act of State terrorism, 700 kilometers from the war front, symbolized with terrible perfection the absolutely grotesque, absurd, cruel and anachronistic conflict that Tsar Putin invented.
The usual description of Odessa as "a jewel" is well deserved. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Cossacks and, among others, the Soviet Empire passed through here. Fortunately, the last one left the least trace. The city invites you to stroll. Images of the 19th century come to mind, of elegant ladies and gentlemen conversing in tree-lined avenues and impeccably laid-out parks, under the shadow of magnificent buildings such as the Italian-designed opera house and St Paul's Cathedral .
Cafes abound and certain streets remind you of Paris or Berlin, but when you reach the sea with its port and beaches, where the famous movie The Battleship Potemkin was filmed, the predominant feeling is Mediterranean. In a restaurant overlooking the sea in all white – floor, chairs, walls – I was offered a Verdejo wine, but I chose a more than acceptable pinot gris from the area. I could not have enjoyed the food more in Barcelona: burrata with tomato and pesto; tuna tartare with avocado and a grilled bream.
On the way back to my boutique hotel, nothing like the one in Kyiv except for how cheap it was, two guys in their 20s approached me, eager to talk in English. Soon, they acknowledged, they might be called to fight, but they were seen as carefree, living in the moment. Salty, skinny, each with a large bottle of beer in hand, they told me they were university students, but they also worked. Of what?, I asked them. Without blinking, they answered me: "We are cybercriminals". What? "Yes, we speak perfect Russian and we make hundreds of random calls a day to people in Russia and, when we're lucky, we extort them."
We said our goodbyes with smiles, it didn't occur to me to report it to the police.
