DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine – Amidst swirling international diplomacy and an apparent rift between Europe and America over the potential arming of Ukraine, people in Dnipropetrovsk, on the edge of the fighting in the Donbas, are hoping that the latest flurry of diplomatic activity will lead to a cease-fire.
“We try to stay calm and hope everything will work out,” says 21-year-old Nastya Alanasyeva, a waitress at Rio Café beside the Dnipro River here.
But her family and friends are affected by the fighting, she says, in tangible ways. “My sister has followed her husband who moved abroad to St. Petersburg” in Russia, she says.
Aside from war, Ukrainians woke up on Feb. 6 to the shock that their currency, the hryvnia, which lost 50 percent of its value last year, from 8 to 16, tumbled another 50 percent and now stands at Hr 25 to the dollar.
Alanasyeva’s supervisor, Andrei Lymar, says business is hurt by the ongoing fighting as people are reluctant to spend money, concerned about the future.
Lymar’s concern about business is shared by the owner of a brick factory, 44-year-old Vitaly Kuchuk, who says his own profits have fallen in keeping with the general trend in this region, 100 kilometers from the fighting west of Donetsk.
Would Kuchuk join the fight? “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s our land, you understand? I have family, I have a little daughter, two years, I have a son studying at university. I have a mother with health problems. I have a big family.”
So you are needed at home.
“Yes, not at the war.”
Alina Shadura, visiting on a business trip with a friend from Kharkiv, says the war is constantly on her mind, though she tries to detach herself from its worries. She knows people fighting at the front, friends of friends.
“It’s scary,” says Shadura. “Many people are leaving the country.”
Architect Sergey Gotvyansky 33, says the whole thing continues to shock him. “We don’t understand why (it began). The ambition of one person has forced millions to suffer. We want peace, and the independence of Ukraine.
“We need to keep our hearts calm, but we are constantly thinking about the war and about the people who are now dying there.”
The next week promises to bring renewed diplomatic attempts to end the war.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 9.
Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko hope to meet in Minsk, Belarus, on Feb. 11, if enough progress in talks is reached by then.
Merkel and Hollande met with Poroshenko on Feb. 5 and Putin on Feb. 6.
And, over the weekend, Russia’s war against Ukraine was the main topic at the annual Munich Security Conference, highlighted by differences of opinion over whether the West should supply Ukraine with lethal weapons to defend itself. The U.S. Congress is swinging in favor of doing more to help Ukraine militarily, but Obama and key European leaders, including Merkel, are opposed.
Brad Bird is a freelance Canadian journalist.
