Ukraine is very much on peoples’ minds at the present time and this thought has prompted me to remember that I visited Europe’s second largest nation (after Russia) in the earlier part of this millennium. Then Crimea still formed part of the country, the ‘Orange’ revolution had yet to occur and the war in the Donbass region had not yet started.

My visit was distinctly divided into two parts.

First, the Crimean peninsula, that stupendous Russian Riviera, favoured by artists and writers such as Anton Chekov and location of one of the most important conferences of the modern age, Yalta.

Second, the capital of ‘little Russia’, Kiev, a city amazingly rich in its architecture which ranges from rock-cut mediaeval monasteries through to gloriously gilded Baroque churches, the finest art nouveau, to monumental soviet memorials.  

Ukraine is both Russia and not Russia: its history has been intertwined with that of the Muscovite Empire but it has evolved its own very distinct culture and politically it has stood apart from the Soviet period even to the point of much of its army allying itself with the third Reich!

The foremost impression I had of Ukraine was of a country on a vaster scale than that of any other European nation, a country straddled between the desire to adopt European values, in particular its wish to form part of the European Union, and the need to appease its Muscovite neighbour and, above all, a country imbued with a history of immense glory and immense suffering. (We still don’t know how many millions died in the Holodomor, the devastating Ukrainian Stalinist famines of the nineteen thirties, the horrors of the Babi Yar massacre, or how many are still suffering as a result of the World’s greatest nuclear disaster, Chernobyl.)

I just hope this epic country will not have to submit itself to further futile suffering – surely it has agonised enough!!! My dream would be that Ukraine is left alone to become once again not only the bread-basket of Europe it used to be but form an integral part of the European Union to which it historically and culturally belongs.