Ten years ago, Mustafa Nayyem wrote a Facebook post credited with changing the course of Ukrainian history. On 21 November 2013, Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych announced he was pulling out of a deal with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia. Many young Ukrainians reacted with amazement that quickly turned to anger.
Nayyem, a well-known young journalist, wrote on Facebook: “Come on guys, let’s be serious. If you really want to do something, don’t just press ‘like’. Write that you’re ready, and let’s try to start something.” An hour later, Nayyem suggested a time and place: 10:30pm, near a monument on Maidan, Kyiv’s Independence Square.
Hundreds came out to protest, and when riot police mercilessly beat protesters nine days later, it only provoked more anger. Before long, Maidan was a tent encampment in the heart of Kyiv, protected by huge barricades and self-defence units. After a stand-off lasting several months, riot police killed dozens of protesters and Yakukovych fled to Russia.
Ten years later, Nayyem is still playing a key role in Ukraine’s battle to evade Russian domination. After Maidan toppled Yanukovych, Nayyem went into politics, and he now runs the State Agency for Restoration of Ukraine, tasked with dealing with the destruction wrought by nearly two years of Russian invasion. Tuesday will mark 10 years since his online post and the start of the revolution.
“In the first years, it was a sad anniversary because of all the people killed,” he said, in an interview last week at his office in the hulking ministry of infrastructure building in central Kyiv. “But comparing with what we have now, we understand that those were not the hardest times in our history.”
Maidan, which was always partly about Ukraine’s place in Europe, began a grim cycle for Ukraine. After Yanukovych fled, Vladimir Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea, then the Russians provoked an uprising in parts of the Donbas, which soon spiralled into war. The Minsk accords a year later reduced the conflict to a simmer, before Putin doubled down last year with the full-scale invasion.
For Nayyem, leaving journalism and going into politics was a difficult decision, but one he took after spending time at Stanford University, and meeting journalists and activists from various parts of the world who had transitioned into political roles. He began to think that the earlier Orange Revolution had ultimately failed because the political class stayed the same. “Social activism and social energy didn’t transform to a political movement and to changing the rules and traditions of the political system,” he recalled.
Nayyem was born in Afghanistan; his father was the deputy minister of education, responsible for the construction of schools in remote parts of the country. Nayyem was eight when his family fled Afghanistan in 1989 – his own son was 10 last year when the Russian invasion began. “It’s a kind of unfortunate symmetry of our family,” he said.
It’s partly the trauma of his own family history that motivates him in the current battle. “The last thing I want is for my family to emigrate again. We are not going to –that’s why I hope we will stop this war here. I don’t want to repeat the destiny of my father,” he said.
Nayyem spent five years as an MP, and after leaving parliament took a number of government jobs. In January this year, he was appointed head of the reconstruction agency. The new role has two different areas of focus: one is based on strategic, long-term planning while the other is to address urgent infrastructure concerns. It’s “planning with short horizons”, Nayyem admitted, as it is never clear what the Russians might do next.
His agency was called in immediately after the explosion of the Nova Kakhovka dam in June, threatening the water supply of more than a million Ukrainians. “We gathered all the information we could find from Soviet times, found some older experts who remembered different contingency plans, and on the third day after the explosion, our team was on the ground. On the fifth day, we started construction,” said Nayyem.
A replacement pipeline to bring water to large parts of the surrounding region is currently the agency’s biggest project – 144km (90 miles) long and with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. Just a few months later, it is already 65% finished, he said.
For now, the agency’s work focuses on mending priority infrastructure: roads, bridges, electricity substations and water pipelines. “We are aware that everything we restore can be destroyed again,” said Nayyem, on the sisyphean task of running a restoration agency during an ongoing war.
Still, one repaired bridge can reduce travel time to certain places by several hours, a reality Nayyem appreciated more when his brother Masi, a Ukrainian soldier, was injured at the front last summer. Masi lost an eye, but survived. “He was delivered to hospital by a road which we had repaired previously, and he was delivered in two hours. Before the repair, it took four or six hours, and he would not have survived,” he said.
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After the much-hoped-for Ukrainian victory, there will be more systematic restoration work to be done. His team has spoken with Japanese experts who worked on reconstruction after the Fukushima disaster, as well as planners in the US, Pakistan and Malaysia who have worked on mitigating the results of floods and hurricanes.
“There aren’t many experts in the world who can plan the restoration of whole cities,” said Nayyem. It’s something that has hardly been required in Europe since the second world war, and his team is focused on trying to build capacity and knowledge ahead of time.
On Tuesday, the 10th anniversary of the start of Maidan, there are rumours that the European Council president Charles Michel will travel to Kyiv to mark the moment when Ukrainians first expressed their willingness to fight for a European future.
Nayyem said he would not take part in any official commemorations, but would try to make it to the square late in the evening, where he has a tradition of meeting up with various people who were there at the beginning of the revolution and went on to different careers in politics, business or the army.
“Somehow, now there is also a kind of nostalgia for those times. It was the last time that the country was in one piece. The last months when our country was not fighting and sunk into these military issues,” he said.
