I have seen much of Ukraine over the past two weeks, travelling on night trains from Lviv to Odesa, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and Kyiv.
Train stations play the Cossack March on loudspeakers for departures and arrivals. Passengers in sleeper cars are supplied with clean bedding.
For 10 hryvnia – 30 cents – the conductor will bring you tea or coffee when you tuck in or wake up. Poor suspension on older trains makes for a deafening, uncomfortable journey. A passenger on the 11-hour trip from Odesa to Dnipro said the train had square wheels. It took me several minutes to realise he was joking.
One is allowed to lift blackout shades in daylight hours, revealing vast fields of wheat and sunflowers rolling across the steppes. The journey gave me a sense of the enormity of this country.
When a map of Ukraine is superimposed over the map of Europe, it stretches from Brittany in the west to London and the Netherlands in the north, Italy in the south and eastward almost as far as Vienna.
Because I was reporting faster than I could write up my articles, part of my mind remained in the cities I had just left. On arriving in Kyiv, I was still thinking about Zaporizhzhia.
A journalist sometimes leaves out moving stories because they are not immediately pertinent, then continues to think about them.
An official I met in Zaporizhzhia told me that his son is one of the Azovstal prisoners detained at Olenivka, in the Russian-occupied part of Donetsk. He did not want me to quote him, because he feared it might endanger his son. The official’s daughter-in-law fled to Italy, where she has just given birth to his first grandson. They had no way of telling the infant’s father.
I earlier met two other relatives of Ukrainians imprisoned at Olenivka. A retired army colonel was trying to help his nephew, a naval captain. A woman who accompanied a wounded soldier to the military hospital told me her husband was at Olenivka.
When I learned on Friday that the prison had been shelled, and that 40 prisoners, if one believes the Russians, or 53, if one believes the Ukrainians, had been killed, my heart went out to their relatives and I said a secular prayer for the safety of their imprisoned loved ones.
The war takes an emotional toll on everyone. A theatre director in Zaporizhzhia told me how an old friend of his, a soldier who is serving in Donetsk, attended a recent performance of a play about a German soldier returning from prison in Siberia after the second World War. The returning German discovers that he no longer has a wife or home, that no one needs him.
The Ukrainian on leave from Donetsk told the director, Andriy Yemets, “I have fought for five years. I have buried my brothers. I have lost many friends and relatives. I never shed a tear, but I cried here”.
In St Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, I discovered an icon of Hetman Petro Sahaidachanyi, a Cossack leader who fought Turks and Poles in the early 17th century and was canonised by the Orthodox Church.
The icon was painted in April of this year, on an ammunition box from Bucha, scene of the worst atrocities of the war, creating a link across four centuries of Ukrainian turmoil.
I visited the so-called Arch of Friendship which straddles a knoll in Kyiv. It was built under Soviet rule in 1954, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Hetman Bohdan Khlmelnytsky’s short-lived alliance with imperial Russia.
After the 2014 invasions of Crimea and Donbas, the Ukrainians painted a black crack on the arch, which is slated for destruction. Statues meant to illustrate Soviet-Ukrainian friendship have been walled up.
Walking back to my hotel that evening, I passed a young man who walked with difficulty on a shiny new prosthetic leg. A young woman held his arm, a look of pride and pain on her face.
A sea of tiny blue and yellow Ukrainian flags wave on the grass on Maidan square, scene of the pro-western revolution that precipitated the past eight years of war.
“If you know someone whom Putin has killed, write their name on a flag and put it here,” says a sign taped to the wall.
