My Time in Eastern Ukraine: A Story of Beauty, Community, and Hope

Kupyansk is now on the frontlines of the Russian invasion. The streets I walked every day have been decimated, the bridge into town destroyed, and my old students scattered across Ukraine and abroad, or sucked into the vortex of fighting.

When I landed in Kyiv in September of 2009 to begin my service, the country was at peace. It was a fledgling democracy, having gained its independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At 18 years old, the country was young, which meant naive and unsure of itself, but also deeply hopeful and optimistic about its future.

The word “Ukraine” means “borderlands,” and the land has indeed always been at the crossroads of many frontiers: between East and West, between Russia and Europe, between the Slavic world and the Latin and Germanic worlds, between Orthodox Christianity and Western Christendom. The sweeping, flat, fertile plains that make it an agricultural breadbasket have always beckoned to conquering armies from every direction to try their luck.

This identity of being in-between, of being at the periphery, gives Ukrainians many of their gifts, from their warmhearted hospitality and multicultural mindset, to their peacefulness and spirit of international cooperation. It makes them humble, grateful, creative, and bold. 

It’s also led to tremendous suffering. The Holodomor, the Soviet Union’s equivalent to the Holocaust, killed between 3.5 and 5 million people in a directed genocide and forced collectivization from 1932-33. The Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people who populated the Black Sea shore for many centuries, were forcibly removed from their homes by Stalin in 1944, loaded aboard sealed-off cattle trains, and transferred almost 3,200 kilometres to the barren, remote reaches of Uzbekistan. It’s hard to imagine such tragedies happening anywhere else but the edges of a “great” empire.

I had wanted to serve in the Peace Corps since I was a teenager when a friend of my parents had told me the stories of his service in the 70s. It sounded like the perfect scenario to me: lots of time in an exotic foreign location, immersed in a new culture, learning a new language, and serving people in need. This combined most of my main interests at the time, and I leapt at the opportunity.

When I arrived, I was so determined to put all my energy into serving and teaching that I decided I wasn’t going to write about my experience while I was there, which I now consider a grave mistake. I had been blogging about my travels in South America for about a year at that point, but still saw writing as an optional indulgence, not an essential way to document and understand my life, as I do today.

I did, however, make a video out of all the short clips I took on my iPhone 3G during my time there. It was my attempt to capture the spirit of my experience there – to commemorate the memories of the most exhilarating, and also most challenging, two years of my life.

14 years later, that video is also a record of what life in Eastern Ukraine was like before the wars. It feels like a snapshot of the final days of a beautiful experiment in Ukrainian independence, now undermined by the Russian invasions of 2014 and 2022.

I’ve decided to share it publicly as a small testament to what was lost. As one more piece of evidence that Ukraine once thrived, that Ukrainians know what kind of country they want to build, and could build it again if given the chance by the wider world.