https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n22/james-meek/nobody-wants-to-hear-this
Nobody wants to hear this

[Long and pro-US-Ukronazi]

The authorities​ in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, have been de-Russifying its street names. Instead of commemorating an avant-garde Russian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s, the name of the street where I stayed last month now remembers an avant-garde Ukrainian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s: Vladimir Mayakovsky Street is now Mykola Khvylovy Street. I’d been reading some of Khvylovy’s stories on the long train journey from Poland. His bitter, hallucinogenic I (Romance), told from the point of view of a Soviet Ukrainian secret policeman in post-revolutionary Kharkiv who executes his own mother, has atmospheric echoes of the wartime Kharkiv of a century later – a city under siege, unreliable electricity, the sound of shelling in the distance – and differences from it. Kharkiv is under no immediate threat of falling to the Russians, and despite the bombardment and boarded-up windows, the city is mainly bright and well-kept. Where Khvylovy’s story resonates with Kharkiv today is in his motive for writing it, his horror that his enemies – Russian imperialism, global capitalism, localist small-mindedness – were as strong as ever, but the causes he believed in (international socialism, Ukraine, art and human kindness) were being undermined by the institutions created to fight for them.

Something like this is happening in the Kharkiv of 2024. Vladimir Putin is still the enemy, and shows no sign of losing; but more and more, the war itself, the instrument that was supposed to deliver Ukraine from Putin’s cruelty, is the enemy too. There is still reverence for the Ukrainian army, for its brave soldiers, as a noble ideal, but the perception has grown that the army is shackled to the selfishness and stagnation of Ukraine’s regressive side, the corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and small-town cronyism that fermented in the 1990s with the combination of late Soviet decay and foreign biznes. That was the first obstacle to progress in post-independence Ukraine, long before Putin came along; it turns out still to be a force, a dead weight.

My visit to Kharkiv coincided with an intensified trawling of the streets for army recruits. The Ukrainian army is chronically short of soldiers to hold back the steady, creeping Russian advance across eastern Ukraine. Checkpoints and patrols, supposedly intended to ensure that people’s military details are up to date in the national conscription database, are widely believed, against the letter of the law, to be taking men straight to medicals, and from there to military training and dispatch to the front. As much as they may admire the courage of their army, the men of Kharkiv fear, and in many cases actively avoid, having to serve in it. Ctd....