In the minutes before midnight, the streets of downtown Kyiv were empty, save the ghosts of parties past. The city was not in a jubilant mood, carrying the grief of two years of full-scale invasion and suspended between the winter’s renewed air attacks. Curfew also complicated the matter. Wherever you are at midnight in the city, that’s where you gotta stay until dawn.
I was outside, when the calendar flipped to 2024. Just a few dozen metres from home. At the stroke of midnight, a few muffled cheers wafted over the wind, issued from the open windows of apartments lining the capital’s historic city square, Maidan. Beyond that, the only thing to greet the newborn year was the damp gleam on the streets, and the fluttering of tiny flags in the grass at the national memorial, each bearing a name, written in black marker, of a soldier who didn’t survive to see this year come.
Does Ukraine have hope, for 2024?
It’s a complicated question, I think. There is always hope, which is tied up with a firm obstinance, a refusal to succumb to the pressure of war. Still, there’s no doubt that the dawn of this year feels tougher here than last. One year ago, the country was hunkered down to face Russia’s attacks on the nationwide electrical system, which forced homes to go without electricity for hours or even days at a time. On the other hand, there was optimism: Kherson had just been liberated, and it seemed that the new year would see more such victories on the battlefield.
That didn’t happen, not really. This year was difficult for Ukraine, in the war. Along the front, the two armies wrenched amounts of land amounting to little more than a few hundred metres at a time back and forth, but at unimaginable cost. Meanwhile, the American appetite for supporting Ukraine seems to be waning. People here are well aware what it would mean, could mean, if the United States elects Trump.
Where do they go from here?
Where do we turn, when the world feels like an increasingly dangerous place?
The older I get, the more I think everything that seems complicated in this world is, in fact, quite simple.
All beings in this world can suffer.
All beings wish to be free of suffering.
With those two things being true, then our moral orientation should always call us to the relief of suffering. Sometimes the path there is shrouded in fog, and the journey is unclear and full of false paths. Still, the relief of suffering can be a compass, to keep us pointed in the right direction. Keep pointing that way, and eventually, we will arrive at the right destination.
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I’m writing this one from bed, where I’ve been for no fewer than six days, thanks to a cold that won’t quit. (It’s not COVID-19, thankfully.) I’ve concluded that, of all minor ailments, a bad cold is the worst. Why? Because it puts you right in the purgatory of sickness. You feel good and clear-headed enough to want to do things, such as work, but are much too gross to go anywhere or do anything. So you can’t even just sleep it off. All you can do is sit there and feel your face keep leaking, for days.
In other words, it wasn’t an auspicious start to the year, for me: I had two respiratory infections sandwiching travel and a tough Free Press deadline. Hey, maybe I just got the worst out of the way early. Anyway, that’s why this one is late, again. But I’m back on my feet now, more or less.
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At the dawn of 2023, a young Ojibwe advocate, Riley TwoVoice — a name I bet we’ll be hearing for years to come — Tweeted a phrase that still sticks with me: “may this year justify our hope.” I’ve never seen a more artfully succinct way of expressing the cautious optimism that each turn of the years holds, for me.
So I was thinking, about what moments justified my hope in 2023.
There is one. There is one, and I should have written about it at the time, but I was deep in my funk of not knowing what to say about anything. It was the moment that Wab Kinew was sworn in as Manitoba premier, with a war bonnet on his head.
That’s not a comment on Wab specifically, or on the provincial NDP — I do not root hope or allegiance in politicians, or their parties. But as I watched Wab’s swearing-in ceremony from here in Ukraine, I felt goosebumps dance on my arms, knowing I was witnessing something that, not too long ago, would have been difficult to realistically imagine. A First Nations man, chosen by Manitobans to the take province’s top office; Indigenous culture visibly celebrated at the heart of it at all.
I thought: this is neither the end of the road to reconciliation, nor is it the beginning. But it is a point to stop and admire the view. It’s not about Wab. It’s about something much larger than him.
If Indigenous youth don’t see a place for themselves in our province, then Manitoba, to be blunt, doesn’t really have a future. You cannot keep going the way our province has, when a young and rapidly growing demographic is suffering. You just can’t. The way forward is incredibly difficult. But to think that Indigenous kids today will come of age in a Manitoba in which they’ve been shown, by will of the electorate, that their voices and culture are and will be central in the governance of the province; man, that is just such a different world than the one into which I was born.
Reconciliation is hard, and it takes work, but it is the ultimate expression of hope. To keep working towards reconciliation is to believe in what we have not yet seen. It was what gave me the most hope, in 2023, and I look forward to more this year.
In case anyone missed it, I was back in the Free Press this week with a long story out of Kramatorsk. It felt really good to be back in the paper. You should be seeing more from me there soon: I have a couple other pieces planned over the next six weeks.
I did want to highlight the work of Base UA, a Ukrainian-led grassroots humanitarian NGO who I featured in that piece. Anton Yaremchuk and his team are well-respected in the region for their work evacuating civilians and providing other support for youth who are most affected by war.
One of their most interesting projects, I think, is their ReBase initiative. What they’re doing is looking to buy cheap houses in safe areas of central Ukraine and giving them to families who need to flee areas under shelling. This is one of those initiatives that’s so perfect in its simplicity, it’s a wonder it isn’t more popular.
You can buy good, solid village houses in Ukraine for only about $5,000, give or take — especially now, with so many people fled and not planning to come back. And the cost of putting a displaced family up in shelter housing for even just a year is almost always much higher than that. So it just makes obvious sense: you can find a family a safe permanent home, while also stabilizing and enriching a village community.
Anton sent me a video they made, to tell the story of the family they’re working with to find a home now. You can watch it here:
Anyway, if you’re so inclined to help a worthy initiative in Ukraine, please consider this one. The donation page on the Base UA website isn’t loading properly right now (I’m told they’re getting it fixed), but in the meantime, if you wish to donate, you can do so via PayPal at donate@baseua.org, or drop me a line and I can figure out another way to help facilitate a money transfer.
One last note: this week marks the one year anniversary of when I took my sabbatical, and came to Ukraine. As you likely gathered, I’m not coming back this week. I’ll have a bit of an update in this newsletter next week on my plans for the winter, and beyond.
In September, I wrote about Emmeline, the calico mama who gave birth in a cabinet of the Road to Relief house. I come bearing a happy update.
Thanks to UAnimals, who do amazing work rescuing animals from front-line regions, the kittens all found good homes. (Just in time, from what the volunteer taking care of Emmeline told us — she was, apparently, tired of being a milk bar, and quite ready for the kids to move out.)
And Emmeline? Feeling some sort of bond, or perhaps responsibility for her little life, I’d been trying to figure out a way to keep her with me, but my apartment here doesn’t allow pets. Then last month, my friend Nicholas, who was also there when she birthed the kittens, came back to Ukraine and let me know he’d decided to take her until I am ready — and if I never am, then she will still have a home with him.
A few days later, Emmeline was curled up cozy in his Kyiv apartment. We weren’t sure how she’d take to being a housecat, but turns out, she was beyond ready to retire from street life: she’s been happily availing herself of windowsills, warm beds, and plenty of time for self-care, as pictured above.
It’s still not entirely clear where she’ll end up. I hope to take her and maybe bring her back to Canada someday. We’ll figure it out. For now, she’s got her pet passport, and she’s safe and warm and loved. She’ll be okay.
In the scope of things — even considering the tragedy of how I first met Emmeline — it does seem like a small thing, even silly, to put so much work into taking care of one cat. But that’s how it always goes. You can’t fix the world. You can’t make the hurting places better. But sometimes, you can make the world a happy place for just one little being. That has to be worth something. It just has to be.