Even on a sunny day, signs of a dark history with Russia were all over Kyiv

Aljena Shehukina has tears running down her cheeks. 

We are standing in the final gallery of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Kyiv, astounded at the sight of army canteens and tin plates placed on roughly hewn wood table stretching the length of the room.  Opposite each plate is a simple glass tumbler.

A song is playing in the background. It’s about how when a soldier dies, he becomes a white bird that flies away, she says.

“Every year the veterans come here and each takes a glass of vodka and raises a toast to the dead.” 

Welcome to Kyiv, Ukraine, where memories of war, Joseph Stalin, communist oppression, famine and Nazi brutality are as thinly covered as the top soil on the vast steppes ringing the city.

Shehukina is too young to have any memory of the conflagration that Ukrainians — and Russians — call the Great Patriotic War. Yet even for her, it was sometimes as close as the fields outside the brutalist apartment block where she grew up.

One day, while playing with friends in one of the old defence lines, she found some unexploded grenades.

“We took them home and hid them under the bed,” she says.

Her mother was not pleased, not least because the authorities had to dispatch bomb demolition experts to the apartment to defuse the lethal devices.

Shehukina wipes away her tears and smiles. Outside it is still a warm spring Saturday in the Ukrainian capital and the wide, slow Dnieper River is sloughing past as it has always done. 

Kyiv started as a trading post on the west bank of the mighty Dnieper which rises in the Valdai Hills near Smolensk in Russia and then ambles 2,000km across Ukraine’s fertile plains to the Black Sea. 

At the point where the river breaks out of the marshes and mountains, hunters gathered to trade furs, honey, wax and slaves, with merchants who brought Byzantine silks, gold, wine and fruit from the south. 

Later they grew wheat in black soil so rich that the German invaders scooped it up and sent it back west by the trainload during their nasty, brutish and short occupation in World War 2.

All that sadness is on hold today. At least two weddings are under way in the square in front of St Michael’s Cathedral, whose blue walls and gold-leaf onion domes gleam in the sunshine.

One of the just-hitched couples is having a pillow fight. Feathers float away on the breeze, over the head of a man on stilts and into a sky full of drifting white chestnut blossom. 

The other wedding couple on the plaza is less content. The bride glowers at the groom who has been momentarily distracted by one of the wedding party whose clacking stiletto heels have made everyone look up as she totters across the square in the briefest of bridesmaids’ dresses.

It occurs me, 12 years later, that one half of the grumpy couple might have been Russian. 

I learnt a couple of things over the course of a four-day weekend in Kyiv. 

One, there is no love lost between Ukraine and Russia, despite Moscow’s protestations. Ukraine is no backward, agricultural former Soviet republic yearning for the return of the Russian bear. People loathe the memory of Comrade Stalin, whose orchestrated famine, the Holomodor, killed as many as 10-million people between 1932-33.

Then there was the subsequent purge that killed an estimated half-million artists, politicians and military commanders. 

Two, the food, while not exactly the stuff of heart attacks, is unlikely to appear in any faddish diets. In four days I ate more sala — raw pig fat — and bowls of Ukrainian borscht with garlic-soaked pampushky and smetana or sour cream than I care to remember. There was also red caviar on crushed ice and potato pancakes, stuffed cabbage rolls and fortetsya, pork fillet baked with potatoes, tomatoes and cheese. 

Three, Ukraine — and Kyiv in particular — have treasures that risk being destroyed, again. While few will shed tears if Russian tanks roll into Chernobyl and flatten it, expect fierce resistance if they attack St Michael’s, Kyiv’s most spectacular church.

The Soviets destroyed it once for having “no historical value”. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Ukrainians rebuilt it in a decades-long project, finishing in May 2000. On this warm Saturday, it and all the other churches were full of people lighting candles and saying prayers.

The other treasure, if one could call a monument to the worst that people do to each other a treasure, is the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, which sprawls through 18 galleries stuffed with artefacts, photographs and detritus of battle dug up from the steppes. 

Thanks to the obsessive record keeping, the galleries are stuffed with photographs, letters and documents. Rusted weapons lie in heaps. German helmets are arranged in a pyramid of rusty skulls. There lie the tree stumps that Red Army soldiers used to cross the Dnieper, in winter and under heavy fire, because there were not enough boats. 

One entire wall is a map lit up by dots of red light where once stood villages and towns that were erased from the Earth. In the west, where Ukraine touches Poland, the map is a sea of red.

Afterwards, we take a taxi down to the Oleg Antonov State Aviation Museum. The museum sprawls across a former training airfield on the west side of the city. Parked jet fighters and vintage airliners and flying boats stand in orderly ranks but grass grows through some of the wheels.

A retired, grumpy fighter pilot shows us around. It does not matter that most of what he has to say is not so much lost in translation as incomprehensible. That’s fighter pilots for you — they have slipped the surly bonds of Earth even when they are retired.

The last relic of the tour is a Tu-95 long-range propeller-driven bomber. The Russians still use them. It’s hard to think that something so clunky can exude so much menace but even on the ground, the Tu-95 — Nato code name “Bear” — is a terrifying sight. 

Twelve years on, I think of the Bear and the laughing wedding couple pillow-fighting in the square and suddenly I am more than a little afraid for Kyiv.