The Sunday Times May 1, 2022 2GN 19
It may not feel like the Third World
War yet but the seismic impacts of
this conflict are everywhere we look
patriotic tunes on an accordion. Some
hum along, others groan.
Announcements over the loudspeak-
ers are not for trains but warning people
not to overload the electricity. The blue
and yellow carriages parked at the plat-
form where Natasha and Veronika live,
along with four other families and a few
single people, are the most sought-after
living space as there is a little more pri-
vacy and no lights.
Halfway along the platform a group of
women sit on camp chairs at a table with
mugs of coffee and biscuits, almost like a
coffee morning. Luba, 61, and her daugh-
ter Katarina, 35, gather with Tatiana, 56,
and Zoya, 75, every morning. A large grey
cat, Titia, purrs contentedly on the blan-
kets. Luba is knitting a red hat.
They are joined by Katarina’s husband
Andrey, 47, a security guard. The couple
were evacuated from the basement of
their home on March 6 by police after
shelling in Saltivka left their place in
flames. “We thought it would be a couple
of days but now we don’t know,” he said.
“We are waiting for victory. This is hell-
ish. I miss privacy — you can never be
alone here.”
“It’s like what Hitler did,” says Tatiana,
a former cook. “What they are bombing
are only people’s homes. What reason
can they have to destroy these?
“Now because of the Russians I am
having to sit here in this underground sta-
tion, wearing this filthy jacket the whole
time and watching my seven-month-old
granddaughter grow up on the phone.”
Zoya says she stays because her only
son is a volunteer in the Kharkiv defence
force and she wants to be near him. “But
it’s hard to sleep,” she says. “Everyone is
ill. We just watch the news on the phone
and take tablets.”
The station even has a resident nurse,
Natalya Klemba, 56, who sits on a blanket
with a blood pressure monitor sur-
rounded by pills. She had retired because
she had cancer but shortly after fleeing to
the station in early March with her daugh-
ter-in-law and grandchildren, she heard
people calling for assistance. “There’s
very little oxygen and no fresh air,” she
says. “There is lots of flu, diarrhoea, chest
problems and Covid — eight people have
been hospitalised.”
Her daughter-in-law and two grand-
sons had left the day before to head west
but she decided to stay. “I’m glad they are
going to a good place and will miss them
terribly but I couldn’t go and leave all
these people.”
Many have become institutionalised
and refuse to leave. “Even when we take
them to safe places they sometimes want
to go back,” says Terekhov, the mayor.
Mykola Korepa, Ukraine’s former
ombudsman for children, agrees. “Once
people have been underground a few
days it becomes very hard psychologi-
cally for them to leave,” he says. He now
runs an organisation called Save Ukraine,
rescuing children from the front lines.
Last month it took him two hours to
persuade Tanya, 55, her daughter Katya
Ivanova, 34, and her four-year-old daugh-
ter Vera to venture out of the station and
board a bus to the relative safety of the
west. They had been in the station for
seven weeks.
Tanya, Katya and Vera are now in a
summer camp in the foothills of the Car-
pathian mountains south of Lviv. “It’s
fresh clean air, so good,” says Tanya. “The
metro was awful, the floor was damp
where we slept and smelly. It was not a
place for humans. I don’t think I’ll ever
get the metro again.”
Vera has developed a stutter and is
now scared of loud sounds. When local
volunteers held a class for her and other
children and played music, she was terri-
fied, said Tanya. “She doesn’t want to
play with other kids or go outside.”
Astonishingly, last Thursday, a day that
11 missiles struck the city, council work-
ers were busily planting cheerful yellow
and orange marigolds in a city square
while another man was determinedly
mowing the grass verges.
“It’s to show our love for the city,”
shrugged Terehov. “Even after hellish
shelling, shooting and bombing, people
see these flowers and everything clean
and it lifts their spirits.”
@christinalambIt’s hard
to sleep
and we
are all illKatya Talpa, left,
and top with her
husband Yuri at a
table with tulips,
believes in
keeping up
appearances.
Above, a couple
settle down to
rest with their
dog. Below left,
Veronika
underground in
KharkivThe
battle is
over the
world
orderPHOTOGRAPHS
PAULA
BRONSTEINWhen President Vladimir Putin’s “special
military operation” began on February
24, Russian soldiers thought they would
be in Kyiv in a matter of days, if not hours.
Left to stand alone, Ukraine was
expected to collapse. The war has not
turned out that way.
Last week Liz Truss told listeners at
Mansion House in London that the con-
flict might last for a decade. The foreign
secretary also said that the UK and its
western allies must show “courage, not
caution” and help Kyiv to push the Rus-
sians out of “the whole of Ukraine”.
Her remarks were reported on Russian
news channels as evidence that the war is
one “between the West and Russia” and
that “it has been decided in London that
it will not be concluded until a full and
conclusive victory has been achieved
over Moscow”.
THIRD WORLD WAR
Russians have been told repeatedly by
their TV anchors and columnists that
they are engaged in an existential global
conflict. But what might have looked like
wild exaggeration a few weeks ago is an
increasingly credible point of view out-
side Russia too.
Fiona Hill, until recently the senior
director for European and Russian affairs
on the US national security council, was
asked last weekend whether talk of a new
world war was far-fetched. She answered
bluntly: “We’re already in it. We have
been for some time.”
Such warnings should force us to look
beyond the horrifying scenes in Mariu-
pol, Bucha and other cities and to assess
wider, global perspectives — including
what this means from the perspective of
the UK and Europe, and indeed the rest
of the world.
What has happened in the past nine
weeks is having seismic consequences —
whose shockwaves will grow stronger
and more dangerous over the summer
for those living far away from the front-
lines and far away from Ukraine itself.
UNIQUE DANGER
The war has come at a uniquely bad and
dangerous time in global affairs. Apart
from the costs of the pandemic, the clo-
sure of commercial ports on China’s
eastern seaboard has led to a
build-up of ships waiting to load,
adding to inflationary pressures
that have begun to push the costs
of living up not only sharply but
also quickly — something that
gives little time to adjust.
Those inflationary pres-
sures are themselves closely
linked to the war and to Rus-
sia using its natural resour-
ces as a weapon in its diplo-
matic and economic arsenal.
Despite efforts to stop
imports of fuels, the flow of fos-
sil fuels out of Russia has contin-
ued on a staggering scale, with the
Centre for Research on Energy and
Clean Air suggesting that the EU has
spent €43 billion (£36 billion) since the
start of the war primarily on pipeline
gas, liquid natural gas, crude oil and oil
products.
Despite talk of the need for action and
energy independence, the reality is that
shifting away from such chronic overreli-
ance will take years — decades even — and
massive investment in other technolo-
gies, many of which will depend on raw
materials such as nickel or zinc where
Russia also has a dominant position in
global markets, if not a stranglehold.
Such are the risks of globalisation:
claiming the benefits of low prices makes
it tempting to evaluate associated risks
improperly or not at all.WAKE-UP CALL FOR EUROPE
The sudden shock has pushed the UK, the
EU and the US into crisis mode, and into
high levels of co-operation, at least when
it comes to co-ordinating military sup-
port for Ukraine — and beyond. “We are
determined to work with the US, EU and
other allies on a new Marshall Plan for the
country,” Truss said in her speech.
Such commitments have raised eye-
brows in many other parts of the world,
which wonders where their own “Mar-
shall plans” are — such as Libya, Syria,
Afghanistan or other countries riven by
war and conflict in recent years. While
some might argue there are reasonable
explanations in each case, the different
reactions to those fleeing Ukraine from
those of the migrant crisis of 2015 has
been much commented on, particularly
in many parts of Asia.
S Jaishankar, India’s minister of exter-
nal affairs, put things in emphatic terms
at a conference in New Delhi last week.
When “the rules-based order was under
challenge in Asia”, he replied to one EU
foreign minister when asked about the
war, “the advice we got from Europe is:
do more trade”. What had happened in
Ukraine, he said, should serve as a
wake-up call for Europe to look at Asia,
where “the rules-based order has been
under continuous stress for more than a
decade”.
BIRTH OF A NEW WORLD
Russian diplomacy has sought to capital-
ise on widespread views that the West has
been good at looking after its own inter-
ests — and ignoring those of others.
“A new reality is taking shape,” said
Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign
minister, in China before flying to
Delhi at the end of March. “The
unipolar world is irretrievably
receding into the past and a mul-
tipolar world is being born. This
is an objective process that can-
not be stopped.”
Such comments play well in
many parts of the world, where
talk of new axes of power, of mul-tipolarity and of non-alignment where
states do not have to take the side of the
US/the West, of China, of Russia or of oth-
ers seem attractive. Walking that tight-
rope is not easy and requires the ability to
withstand pressure from potential allies
and rivals. But many states feel that this
will produce better outcomes.
We are witnessing the birth of a new
world — one that like all births is painful
and traumatic. Lavrov spelt this out
recently when he said that “this is not
about Ukraine at all, but the world order.
The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-mak-
ing moment in modern history. It reflects
the battle over what the world order will
look like.”
That might sound melodramatic but
the stakes could hardly be higher. The
possibility of the potential use of nuclear
weapons should be taken very seriously.
As Fiona Hill put it about Putin: “Every
time you think, ‘No, he wouldn’t, would
he?’ Well, yes, he would.”
LOOMING FOOD CRISIS
The apocalyptic warnings of what may
happen in the Ukrainian arena should
not obscure the real, imminent and per-
haps even unavoidable set of crises brew-
ing elsewhere. Africa as a whole faces
severe problems, according to the IMF,
whose latest regional outlook warned
about chronic food insecurity, rising pov-
erty levels, greater economic inequality
and the possibility of social unrest.
The importance of Ukraine as a pro-
ducer of cereals, combined with fertiliser
prices that have almost quadrupled in lit-
tle more than a year, alongside the pan-
demic, sanctions and war have resulted
in high global prices that expose hun-
dreds of millions of people to risk.
There have been murmurs of what lies
ahead; protests about rising costs of liv-
ing have brought people on to the streets
in Peru, rioting in Sri Lanka has brought
social and political turbulence, while
parts of Africa that depend heavily on
cereal imports will face testing times.
Much will turn on the weather over the
summer — which directly affects crop
yields and prices, as well as energy con-
sumption. Last year, more than 40 per
cent of China’s industrial activity was
affected by power cuts and blackouts
because of unusually hot weather that
pushed up use of air-conditioning.
Early indications are not
encouraging. India has experi-
enced its warmest March on
record. Demands on energy
to cool down, on healthcare
and on power infrastruc-
ture that can struggle with
high temperatures have
been compounded by
low rain.
Have no doubt that
we are living through
a turning point in his-
tory. How those
wheels turn leaves a
lot of scope for vari-
ables — and in the
best case, even
scope for hope: out
of disaster can come
new initiatives that
provide protection
against greater threats in
the future — with Ukraine’s
defence the salvation of
Poland, the Baltic states and parts
of Central Asia that feel distinctly
uneasy with where Russia’s long-term
interests may lie.
The ways in which peoples across east-
ern Europe, as well as in the UK, have
shown compassion for those who have
fled the conflict reminds us of the gener-
osity of so many people, and of the ruth-
lessness of the few.
The storm clouds that broke on Feb-
ruary 24 affect all of us around the
world. And the skies seem to be
getting darker.
Peter Frankopan is professor
of global history at Oxford
UniversityPETER
FRANKOPAN NRussia’s test
launch of its
Samat
intercontinental
ballistic missile
last month was
designed as a
warning to its
enemieswatching state TV all day long
since the war began and he’s
definitely become more
aggressive,” said Irina, a
woman from central Russia.
“I asked him if we could turn
it off for a bit and he started
swearing at me, using words
I’d never heard from him.”
Putin’s top television
presenters have all been well-
rewarded for their services,
with salaries and other
benefits worth millions of
pounds a year. Yet no one is
entirely sure if they are true
believers or cynics willing to
spout the Kremlin’s lies in
exchange for a sackful of
roubles.
“I think some of them
definitely believe, but there
are nuances,” said
Borzunova. “They certainly
don’t live in an information
vacuum. They cannot but
know that, for example,
[Ukrainian] civilians are
dying during shelling. But
when you have been in the
system for so long and work
for it, you learn to negotiate
with yourself, to adapt to it.
For some, there is simply no
going back. And for some,
‘the end justifies the means’.”the devil.” When Yevgeny
Popov, her husband and co-
host, warned there would be
no one left alive on the planet
after nuclear war, Skabeyeva,
37, grinned and said: “We’ll
start from scratch.”
Three quarters of Russians
get their information on the
war from television,
according to recent
independent research. They
are told that the Russian army
is using “precision strikes” to
“liberate” Ukrainian towns
and cities from “nationalist
battalions”. Reports of
atrocities carried out by
Russian soldiers in towns
such as Bucha are described
as a malicious western plot to
discredit the Kremlin.
Putin’s approval rating
among Russians has risen
from 69 per cent to 82 per
cent since the invasion began,
according to the Levada
Centre, an independent
polling and research
organisation. But the same
pollster found that fewer than
one in five Russians thought
everyone answered truthfully
when asked about Putin.
The Kremlin recently more
than tripled its spending on
state media to 17.4 billion
roubles (£194 million) for the
first three months of the year.
Seeking out alternative
sources of information has
become harder since Russia’s
remaining independent
media outlets were shut
down. Scores of opposition
journalists have been forced
to flee the country or risk up
to 15 years in prison under a
new law banning “false
information” on the war.
Foreign social media websites
such as Facebook and Twitter
have also been banned.
“Media control is the key,”
said Masha Borzunova, who
hosted a show called Fake
News, which debunked
Kremlin propaganda, at the
independent TV Dozhd
online channel before its
closure in March. “It is easier
now for state TV to build its
own reality and to put
Russians inside of that.”
Many Russians have
reported disturbing changes
in family members. Older
people are more likely to be
more enthusiastic
consumers, creating rifts
between generations.
“My father has beenDisgraced former Tory minister helping
thousands to escape from eastern Ukraine
Standing in a car park, a few
belongings crammed into a
Father Christmas bag,
Valentina dabs away tears.
Her eyebrows are pencilled
into perfect arches but her
expression is of anguish.
On Tuesday morning the
66-year-old carer was Face-
Timing her only daughter,
Natalya, and two-year-old
granddaughter from the
basement of her apartment
building in Shativka, in
eastern Ukraine, when there
was a huge blast on the
screen. “I watched her fall
down then it was all smoke
and I could hear my
granddaughter calling,
‘Mama, mama.’”
Natalya was taken to a
hospital far away in the
western city of Lviv where
she is in a coma. Desperate to
reach her, Valentina got wordof a free bus through social
media and took a lift to a car
park in the small, grim town
of Lozova where an anxious
group had gathered.
None had any idea who
was organising the bus — and
several feared a Russian trap.
But when the silver tour bus
pulled up on Wednesday
evening, their unexpected
saviour appeared: a slightly
tubby British man in a
Barbour jacket.
Brooks Newmark, a former
MP and Conservative
minister, has almost single-
handedly rescued more than
7,500 women and children
over the past two months.
The 63-year-old is not only
putting up his own money to
get them out but also risking
his life. Two other British
volunteers helping people
escape from southern
Ukraine were reported to
have been captured by
Russian forces last week.Christina Lamb
Lozova, eastern UkraineNewmark’s heroism might
be seen by some as an
attempt to redeem himself
after a fall from grace. The
father of five was forced to
resign as minister for civil
society after barely two
months in 2014 when it
emerged that he had sent
naked pictures of himself to
an undercover reporterposing as a Tory activist. But
Newmark points out that he
took on humanitarian work in
Rwanda, Pakistan and other
countries long before his
personal scandal.
In Ukraine he started with
one bus and now has 16,
drawing on a $300,000 fund
raised by friends and family
as well as his own money.“As a Jew, a lot of people
stuck their necks out when
we needed help and I grew up
hearing the stories of [Oskar]
Schindler and [Raoul]
Wallenberg [who rescued
hundreds of Jews from the
Nazis],” he explained. “So I
thought this is my moment to
stand up and be counted.”
Working with local mayors
and bus companies, he has
moved east from Kyiv and
Mariupol, coming to the aid
of 200 orphans. Last week he
was asked to rescue 250
disabled children and 150
staff from two care homes but
it was too late: one was in an
area under Russian control
and the other feared the
move was too risky.
Newmark believes his
buses will get busier. By last
week five million Ukrainians
had left their country and the
UNHCR expects the number
to reach 8.3 million.
Brooks Newmark has organised buses out of Ukrainian cities @ChristinaLambPAULA BRONSTEIN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES