Local View: Ukraine’s future looks good; U.S. uncertain.
It seems like only a fortnight ago that my wife, Olga, and I were on Kyiv’s Independence Square in Ukraine, and a revolution was raging with an uncertain future.
But it has been four years ago in February, and we, along with millions of others, won that struggle.
Back then, militia assaults were repelled, but 100 people in and around ground zero, 100 yards from our apartment, were killed by sniper fire, their bodies lined up outside the McDonald’s restaurant.
They are known today as heroes, called the “Heavenly 100.”
There is some satisfaction, however, when I see former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort indicted. He was paid handsomely to help authoritarian President Viktor Yanukovych suppress freedom.
I once actually aided Manafort in 1996, briefing him on the business landscape in Moscow. I needn’t have. By 2014, he was cozying up to Kremlin oligarchs close to President Putin.
So much has happened since that time.
For starters, we moved to sunny Florida with two teenagers, where life and doing business is rather placid, more like the “Blue Danube Waltz” compared to Ukraine’s “1812 Overture” with booming cannons.
Revolution and violence are not new to me.
Though on the sidelines as a reporter, I covered the civilrights struggles in America’s South as a reporter. In the 1980s, I witnessed up-close wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, meeting with guerrilla leaders.
The 1990s found me in Sarajevo via a U.N. plane immediately after the Bosnian War, working with the prime minister on an issue not decided by the Dayton Peace Accord.
But absolutely nothing approached the Ukraine struggle for sheer razor’sedge drama, living as we did about the distance Tom Brady could toss a football, uphill from Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti.
We brought food and clothing down the hill, and we stood in large crowds shouting patriotic slogans against a regime that stole what economists later said was $11 billion a year from the state’s coffers.
Proceeds from my novel, “Urainia: A Fable,” were used to buy medical supplies for the injured. I virtually suspended doing business, telling our staff to join the revolution. It was more important — and they did.
I have never known a braver, more determined people, many of whom lost their lives and are still losing their lives in a war against Russia in Ukraine’s east — more than 10,000 to date.
With Mad Max armor, sticks for weapons and motorcycle helmets and makeshift shields, they overturned Yanukovych’s forces with his trained militia, sharp shooters and heavy weaponry.
Then, when called on, they took the fight to Eastern Ukraine and the war with Russian surrogates.
The whole world saw — when we finally got its attention — what a country could do to change its miserable lot.
Some years ago I wrote an autobiographical book about my years in Eastern Europe. It was called “The Optimistic Alien.”
I will confess there was a time prior to the revolution that I was having second thoughts about all this optimism. Now, I am relatively confident about Ukraine’s future.
However, we are in the United States now.
These days — given an authoritarian-leaning president who also seems at times to be bedmates with Russia’s Putin, I am not nearly so optimistic about America’s future.