We have strikes, protests and scandals – Ukraine is more than a warzone
After a year of war, audiences around the world are used to seeing news from Ukraine nearly every day. They have seen the horrors of the conflict, and the surprising resilience and success of the Ukrainian resistance. But sometimes the view of the actual people and society beneath the military conflict is lost. Ukraine is more than just a place where a war is happening. The country moves forward and faces corruption, emigration and economic issues, and questions of pay and gender-based rights, just like anywhere else.
I cover all these things as a reporter based in Kyiv. One change I’ve noticed over the past year is that people’s desire for justice at home has not diminished. If anything, it has got stronger – and rightly so, since most citizens are risking their lives to fight the genocidal threat posed by Russia. People have such a personal stake in Ukraine’s future, they are more sensitive than ever about what kind of country we are becoming, and how things should be after the war.
Two recent events illustrate this shift. The first was the reaction to videos of wartime parties in Kyiv, made by young Instagram influencers, that allegedly showed women being raped while intoxicated. When the Ukrainian TV presenter Yaroslava Kravchenko drew attention to the videos on her own Instagram page, there was immediate outrage – not just at the incident itself, but at the fact that people could behave this way in wartime.
Ukraine’s authorities haven’t always taken gender-based violence as seriously as they should, but the outrage prompted the authorities to make swift arrests. President Zelenskiy thanked the police in one of his nightly televised addresses. “When society cares and is united, we can do a lot together,” Krav