OUTSIDE THE MAIN train station in Kyiv there was a jovial almost electrically charged vibrancy in the air. The wartime streets were thronged with people, friends embraced as they met, couples walking hand-in-hand, people laughing.
Not much is different to a night-time scene on a busy street of an Irish city – except that many of those normal interactions of life were being performed by people dressed in combat uniforms.
Getting to the Ukrainian capital is, unsurprisingly, difficult, involving a 12-hour train journey from the town of Chelm on the Polish border across the rural but intermittently industrial western heartlands.
Through the windows of the slowly advancing train, life goes on. The land is regularly peppered by little hamlets of houses, farmers in the fields, kids en route to schools and groups chatting or smoking cigarettes on village streets.
Back in Kyiv city centre, near the square where the Maidan Revolution happened in 2014, there are police stationed and at midnight they enforce a curfew – this is a city under martial law.
At 4am, the wailing haunting sound of an air raid siren blasted three times across the city’s empty streets.
The bomb shelter in the subterranean corridors of the hotel was occupied for the next hour and a half until the all clear – after the anti-aircraft defences of Kyiv successfully dealt with the attacker. A notification on one of the Ukrainian guest’s phone alerted all in the bunker that it was safe to go back to bed and contemplate a fresh attempt at sleep.
A Ukrainian woman Anastasiya was standing restless when I arrived with the other guests to the basement.
She calmed as she spoke of her time staying on the northside of Dublin but is back home, hoping to travel to see her family. She speaks of the situation in the region north of Kyiv – near the Russian border – and repeatedly mentions that her parents don’t have access to a bomb shelter in their town.
For the duration of my visit to Kyiv, whether on the overnight train, in the cafés, in the hotel or on the streets, there are people like Anastasiya.
Within a few questions, they adopt a silence or visible distress, overcome with grief for the lives lost and the destruction of the normality they once had in Kyiv and other places.
This was the same story for Oksana who travelled on the same train. She was coming home to see her elderly father but as I broach the subject of the war, she put her hand in front of her mouth, her chin trembling.
Tears flow in some instances when stoicism breaks.
The assignment for this trip was to report on Tánaiste Micheál Martin’s attendance at an extraordinary meeting of Europe’s foreign ministers and as the only travelling reporter from Ireland, there was an opportunity to talk to the ordinary people of the country.
At times, my questions felt like an added intrusion. Instead though, there was a constant refrain of gratitude for coming to Kyiv to cover the war.
Walking the streets by day, there are soldiers and heavily armed police; displays of captured and destroyed Russian hardware; Ukrainian flags and bunches of flowers; and there are also countless tributes to the civilian and military dead.
At a wall of remembrance in Mykhailivska Square, thousands of pictures of fallen soldiers who died fighting in the war are memorialised. In the square next to it, there are the burned hulks of Russian hardware and rockets destroyed by Ukraine.
The security situation in the city itself is precarious but there is no active shooting nearby and locals told me the Kyiv air defences are so well developed that it is rare that anything gets through.
The fighting is to the east and south – Odessa is allegedly being hammered at present as Putin’s forces attempt to destroy grain before it is shipped abroad. I am also informed that so effective is Ukraine’s maritime drone campaign that the Russians are not willing to expose their naval ships to the risk of a sinking.
As well as an active team in the Irish Embassy under Ambassador Therese Healy who has been in the country for two years since setting up the mission, a number of Irish people have stayed living and working in Kyiv or moved to the city since the invasion.
They are war crimes investigators, policing reform specialists and refugee aid workers with the United Nations. I meet a mental health worker putting in place supports to try and stem the issue of suicide in a traumatised population.
The diaspora includes ex-gardaí, former Irish Defence Forces members and people from the legal and health sectors.
Paul Niland was born in Dublin but has lived in Ukraine for 20 years and four years ago he started a national suicide prevention hotline: Lifeline Ukraine.
Limerick woman Maura O’Sullivan, a former garda who has been in Ukraine since late 2019. She is working with the European Union advisory mission.
The project has been in the country since 2014 and is primarily working in the civilian security sector to reform Ukrainian Law Enforcement and policing agencies. The programme, O’Sullivan said, is part of the effort to bring Ukraine to a standard that will enable it to make its way into the EU.
O’Sullivan, who is deputy head of mission, said that there are a sizeable number of Irish working in the unit dealing with war crimes in the east of the country.
Andrew Carney’s family hail from Leitrim and he works in the European Union mission as its head of international crimes – the team that assists prosecutors investigating war crimes.
Aonghus Kelly, who is originally from Oranmore in County Galway, works with Carney and has been involved in war crimes investigations for 16 years. He is a senior advisor on Prosecution of International war crimes.
Fiona Allen’s family emigrated to the UK from Strokestown in County Roscommon. She is working with UNHCR with refugees and displaced people since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Her work is as a conduit with the Ukrainian Government to ensure protections for returning refugees.
All have their own professional experience of the war but also their own very personal perspective as residents of Ukraine.
Niland said his team began to rapidly upskill to find a way to support traumatised, displaced people who would call the helpline.
He said his company has also developed ways to deal with liberated areas in the country where women have suffered profound sexual violence. Before the full-scale invasion, he said Lifeline Ukraine would field around 1,000 calls per month but its most recent figures show 4,000 incidents of support per month.
“I have been here for such a long time, that I said as the invasion looked imminent that I would never leave Ukraine, this is my home,” he explained.
“It is as simple as that, I live here and I am not going anywhere. The initial stages of the war were the blitzkrieg, the land grabs, the attacks on Kyiv.
“To hear small arms fire on the streets of Kyiv was shocking, the missile attacks also and we could hear the artillery on the outskirts of the city as well,” he added.
Niland said that there were many ways Russians sought to demoralise the Ukrainian people. He said that elderly neighbours were struggling as power and other utilities were cut.
“Looking around the country, it is the constant images of destruction that we see everywhere. That’s the thing that gets to me, the thing that upsets me.
“Another thing that upsets me are the cases of people displaced twice – people who initially were displaced in 2014 with the invasion in the east and then displaced again due to the full-scale invasion.”
Niland said there is a positive in witnessing “these incredible people” taking up arms to “defend their values and way of life and their neighbours”.
“It is inspiring how they responded – individually and collectively,” he said.
O’Sullivan recalled that she and her colleagues evacuated their office on the day of the invasion in February 2022 but returned shortly afterwards.
“Hearing the war on the invasion day, it was horrific,” she said.
O’Sullivan said that the human stories of people’s lives being put on hold and irrevocably changed stand out for her.
“It was the very human things that stood out – people who were due to get married, people who were due to start university, have kids and just how the invasion changed all that for them.
“But it is also the resilience of the people, we see it every single day,” she said.
O’Sullivan said that policing has changed immeasurably and in a policing training centre in Dnipro she said students are now studying in mock ups of mass graves to teach them how to process a scene of mass murder.
Andrew Carney wanted to get a simple message back home to the Irish people: “Keep the faith and keep supporting and advocating for Ukraine. Especially in the wake of the bad news coming out of Washington DC in the last few days… the result of the Slovak elections are depressing to listen to – but we need to keep helping the people of Ukraine.”
He is referencing the disjointed and chaotic vote to prevent a Government shutdown in the US in which Ukrainian support was halted. He has also referenced the victory of a pro-Putin politician in the Slovakia elections.
Carney has a long history of working on war crimes investigations and prosecution – his task at the start of the war was to set up an office investigating the atrocities as part of the EU’s mission in the country.
“What we found is that our local law enforcement counterparts don’t have the skills so they don’t want to see your face on a screen from Dublin or London – they need us here permanently with them,” he said.
“The task facing law enforcement in terms of atrocity crime, international crimes, crimes against humanity potentially is massive. Everyday war crimes are being committed here – it is not just the sheer number, it is the massive geographical spread – it is all over Ukraine.
“There is a huge variety of war crimes – this is on a huge scale. From rape and war to ordinary war to missile and shelling attacks on civilians, it requires a huge array of skills and experience to investigate and prosecute,” Carney said.
Aonghus Kelly said that he believes that to understand the current situation in Ukraine, Irish people need to realise that the war started in 2014 with the incursion of Russian forces in the east of the country and the annexation of Crimea.
“I think that without that context, it is very difficult to understand the challenges day-to-day for Ukraine. This isn’t something that arose two years ago,” he explained.
He works in an office developing cases and assisting prosecutors as they work through the horrors and atrocities of Russian troops in war crimes such as Bucha and elsewhere.
He said it is hard to comprehend the scale of the war and distress – but added that there are “profound” parallels between Irish history and the experiences of Ukrainians, especially for the 30 years of the Troubles in the North.
Kelly said his team will bring a group of Ukrainian judges to Ireland in the coming weeks where they will meet and discuss prosecutions with senior members of the Irish judiciary in Dublin and Belfast.
The Irish footprint in Kyiv and Ukraine in general highlights the soft power of Irish diplomats and Non Governmental Organisations. They work quietly with Ukrainian locals and agencies to start the process of rebuilding a country that is ravaged by landmines and a collective trauma that will scar the land forever.
Ireland has recently given €23 million in humanitarian and institutional support for Ukraine and it brings to €210 million the State’s total support since the beginning of the war in February 2022. There are plans for modular homes near Kyiv and funding is in place.
Ireland has also trained Ukrainian soldiers in landmine clearance at a base in Cyprus. Combat medical training was included in that programme and there is to be an escalation in what Ireland is offering as the Tánaiste has confirmed that Irish troops will now also offer “basic drilling”.
The Journal understands that this will be similar to the package offered by Ireland in the EU training mission in the African country of Mali (EUTM) and will see Ukrainians learn tactics and marksmanship.
Sources said the British Army has developed a programme which removes any superfluous military drill training to only what is needed to stay alive on the battlefield – it is a three-week course and it is likely the course that Ireland will offer.
Fiona Allen’s experience is “rooted in human stories” and the impact on individual people as they are forced away from communities and homes because of the fighting.
“This is a war that is completely uprooting communities and Kyiv is a bubble. It is a rural country really reliant on agriculture and you have a lot of communities who were already losing their young people to cities.
“This war has hastened that demise – it is impacted across this country and those communities will struggle to find a way through this,” she said.
Allen said that one key issue to consider is that while people, mostly subsistence farmers, depend on farming for their living there is a new risk that will last for years after the war.
She said that the country is now covered by massive amounts of landmines – Ukrainian Government figures show that 174,000 sq/kms are “contaminated”.
“That will be a huge problem into the future. Those mines will be there for decades to come and not to mention the unexploded remnants of cluster munitions,” she added.
As I leave Kyiv and pass through the enormous Soviet-era station, I join a packed train of people on the move again – mostly women and children.
In the same sleeping compartment are three women returning to Gdansk in Poland after spending some days with their partners back home.
The men stand at the door of the carriage, catching a last glimpse of their girlfriends and wives. Amidst tears, they return to the front, while the women prepare to raise their children in a foreign country.
The long trip out is uneventful but at the border, Ukrainian military board the train and search known hiding spots and check documents. They are looking for men who may try to leave the country – and the fighting – behind.
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