In the midst of a global diplomatic frenzy, many living at the border remain calm, in spite of – or perhaps because of – the region’s grim history.
There are times when Olia Zayko can hear the thud of artillery echoing across the dun grasses and leafless forest that mark the border between Ukraine and Belarus.
At a training field just more than 20 kilometres away, Russian forces have held live-fire exercises, part of the roughly 130,000 troops, missiles and fighter jets that have amassed around Ukraine’s borders, striking fear of a looming invasion.
Tuesday marked the eve of a day of great uncertainty, identified by the United States as the date chosen for a Russian invasion.
From Ms. Zayko’s home, which looks out on Belarusian border guard towers, that threat is no distant concept. Nor is bloodshed. A short walk away, a trio of rough-hewn crosses marks the spot where her husband’s grandfather buried three Red Army soldiers, their names unknown, during the Second World War. Eighty years ago, German forces eradicated nearly two dozen nearby villages.
But that war is long ago, says Ms. Zayko, an ethnic Russian who tends potato fields and chickens with her husband. They collect mushrooms and firewood from local forests.
“I can’t believe the Russians would attack,” she says. When it comes to fear, “here, you don’t feel it.”
Others confess to a different outlook. It’s “scary. The situation is unstable, and anything can happen at any time,” says Lena, who sells green borscht with fried cutlets to truckers who carry Russian flooring and Serbian women’s socks across the border here. Even “our oligarchs are escaping,” she says, declining to give a last name. Flight-tracking services have shown the departure of private jets belonging to the country’s wealthiest.
Few in this northwestern corner of Ukraine have that option, however. Elsewhere, drumbeats of war have incited a global diplomatic frenzy. Here, those drumbeats remain as distant as the sounds of military preparation: audible, but without immediate danger.
“I cannot change anything. Whatever happens happens, what else can anybody here do?” asked Helena Gornyk, whose rural home is little more than a kilometre from the border.
As she delivered candles blessed by the priest to an elderly neighbour Tuesday, a pair of border guards in camouflage walked past, one with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder.
Only a pair of fences – one built by Belarus, another more recently by Ukraine – separate her home from a country that is among Russia’s closest allies, and the fearsome arsenal positioned on the other side. Russia has said it has no plans to invade, and on Tuesday said it would pull back some troops from around Ukraine’s borders.
The U.S., however, said it had seen no evidence of a pullback.
On Tuesday, Greek Catholics and the Orthodox Church marked Stritennya, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord. At morning services, local priests urged parishioners to avoid fear. Shop shelves remained stocked.
War is built into the architecture across Ukraine. Beneath the school in Mlynove, staff keep a basement bomb shelter clean, with functioning lightbulbs. “We hope we will never need it,” said Olga Kovalchuk, principal of the school, which has 130 students from preschool through high school.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared Wednesday a “Day of Unity,” and teachers have asked students to wear traditional clothing. They plan to make badges in blue and yellow, the colours of the flag. But there is no plan to interrupt instruction.
“We carry on with everyday life,” Ms. Kovalchuk said.
People here “are fatalists,” says Mykola Myhalevych, director of the historical museum in Kortelisy, situated about three kilometres from the Belarusian border.
If fate is inescapable, why allow worry to consume you?
That is despite a history that, for those willing to contemplate it, has shown the immense toll of an expansionist regime led by a man with a desire to reshape history.
In 1942, amid the German occupation, groups of communist activists and underground Red Army soldiers – some escaped from an earlier defence of a fortress in Brest – banded together in an insurgency. Hiding in farming villages, they ambushed passing convoys, disarmed police, killed German officers and robbed local banks.
German forces responded with arrests and executions, but failed to quell the guerrilla action. When the insurgents got word that the local German leader would pass through, they planned a roadside attack. They failed to kill the passing dignitary, and on Sept. 22, 1942, the Wehrmacht responded with force. German police and soldiers surrounded Kortelisy in the dead of night. By morning, they had pushed all residents into a central square.
As some dug ditches, others began shooting.
“People were screaming and crying, but it was impossible to escape,” said Mr. Myhalevych. The attackers raced vehicle engines to mask the screams.
When the shooting was done, the German forces looted homes, razing them before moving on to neighbouring villages. In total, historians documented 2,875 dead – 1,620 of them children – and 715 households torched. More than 20 communities were reduced to cinder.
Today, however, few people are old enough to remember what happened, while “the young people just cannot comprehend what it was like,” Mr. Myhalevych said.
Nearly a century later, with Russian forces now gathered around Ukraine, “maybe that’s why they’re not afraid,” he said.
It’s a reality that sits uncomfortably beside a local monument to the dead, where a Soviet-style memorial sculpture has been erected with an inscription: “Human memory will never forget the suffering of the tortured and the screams of the ashes.”
Mr. Myhalevych nonetheless shares at least some of the local optimism at the moment. He sees a Russian invasion as unlikely. Instead, he expects a campaign to foment discord inside Ukraine, destroying it from the inside.
“Then,” he said, “they will collect what remains.”
A statue commemorates the 2,875 killed by German forces in Kortelisy, Ukraine, in 1942.
NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE
U.S. CORRESPONDENT
The Globe and Mail, February 15, 2022