Anyone wanting to understand the geopolitical background of the current conflict in Ukraine will probably have found their head spinning at the complex history of occupation, independence and ethnic, linguistic and political divisions in this contested “borderland” region. As Victoria Belim writes in her memoir: “Ukraine, with its key position between Russia and western Europe, was always going to be a battleground for Russian imperial ambitions.” For Belim – half-Ukrainian, half-Russian, raised in Ukraine until the age of 15, when her family emigrated to the US – “making sense of Ukrainian politics was a thankless affair”.
But in 2014, with Putin’s annexing of Crimea, her feelings for her homeland grew into something more visceral. From her home in Brussels, Belim had watched footage of government forces shooting student protesters in Kyiv’s central square, where she remembered eating ice-cream with her friend as a teenager: “These bright memories flickering against the news of carnage in Ukraine were excruciating, but I sought them, conjuring up the minutest of details, the way one pressed a throbbing bruise to see how much pain one could bear.” As the conflict in Crimea escalates, she argues on Skype with her late father’s brother Vladimir, a staunch Putin supporter, and talks on the phone with her maternal grandmother, Valentina, who refuses either to discuss the war or to consider leaving Ukraine. Vladimir taunts Belim, asking, if she is such a “Ukrainian patriot”: “Why are you in Brussels and not in ‘your country’ with ‘your people’?” In the end, she decides that the only cure for the sense of dislocation brought on by the situation is to return to Ukraine in search of her family’s past.
