In Kyiv, I saw Dante under sandbags – a modern image of the hell of war | Clive Myrie

I I took quite a few pictures with my phone when I was at Ukraine this year, but this one jumped out at me as I was browsing through them. Here we have Dante – the Italian poet, philosopher, writer – with his marble head sticking out of the sandbags. It is in a park on Volodymyr Hill in the center of Kyiv.

It’s not just a striking image. Dante is a harbinger of the Renaissance; it is a symbol of culture and learning. And it’s the opposite of war, which is a regression to dark times. This is what Ukraine and Kyiv have to deal with – and so Dante finds himself suffocated by sandbags. Of course, we also think of the Divine Comedy and the seventh circle of hell, which is violence. This is what the Ukrainian people endure: a modern circle of hell.

The fact that Dante must have been covered in sandbags tells you everything – the Russians are attacking things that have nothing to do with a military campaign. It is a particular hell when civilians are considered legitimate targets for an advancing army. And as soon as I see that image, it all comes flooding into my mind.

I took the photo when I was interviewing members of Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra. Some are refugees who have lost their homes; some are serving soldiers who received special dispensation from Volodymyr Zelenskiy to spread Ukrainian culture and art. They went on tour this summer and played the Proms in London.

I had never been to Ukraine before 2022 and I look back on my time there with great sadness. I had always heard that places like Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv were beautiful cities, and it is indeed a beautiful country with beautiful people. But the first time I went there must have been under these circumstances. I remember the people I met who are now refugees, who have lost their homes, their livelihoods. I hope to go back in time for the anniversary of the war in 2023. To say that it is still taking place almost a year later is appalling.

And that’s not just from the Ukrainians’ point of view but, frankly, from Vladimir Putin’s: he thought it would be over in a few days. Now Ukraine and Russia are locked in this long war of attrition, it seems, especially in the east, with the Russians sending Iranian suicide drones sometimes. American writer Francis Fukuyama said he understood that some Russian soldiers from the first wave of the invasion had their costumes with them for the military parades that would take place within a week of conquering Kyiv. There are so many young conscripts, mostly from outlying areas of Russia where life is tough; it is also a tragedy for many of them, as well as for their mothers and fathers. So many lives have been shattered by one man’s vanity.

I have covered wars and conflicts for two decades, from East Timor to the Middle East to West Africa. But I didn’t expect something like this. They are two sophisticated countries with modern weapons and modern armies fighting each other on European soil. Two national armies clash. It is unprecedented in Europe since the Second World War, even taking into account the terrible conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, which I covered.

We always think about the story moving in a direction that takes us to a better place; we like to think that we are moving from darkness to light. Yet we backed down.

Has this war affected my sense of what I do as a journalist and presenter? I’m not afraid to be upfront about it. I’m not going to say “well, on one side this, on the other that” to describe what basically happened. The bottom line is that Putin started an illegal war. He attacked a neighbor without provocation. This is an utterly disgusting war of aggression. I’m not going to try to balance this act of aggression by talking about how worried he is about NATO expansion. I’m too old for this shit. Would I have felt like I could say that 10, 15, 20 years ago? Maybe not. But I’m moving forward, and sometimes you have to call a spade a spade.

  • Clive Myrie is a journalist

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