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Opinion|Ukraine Is Running Out of Optimists
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/opinion/ukraine-trump-election.html
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Guest Essay
Nov. 15, 2024, 1:00 a.m. ET
By Andrey Kurkov
Mr. Kurkov is the author, most recently, of “The Silver Bone,” a novel. He wrote from Kyiv, Ukraine.
The residents of Kyiv have not slept properly in more than two months. Most nights there are Russian drones, and sirens sound from early evening until late morning. We know that during an air raid we should leave our beds and go into the halls to get away from the windows, but sometimes, these days, we just pull the covers over our heads.
On the night of Nov. 5, I didn’t sleep at all, but it wasn’t because of air raid sirens. When it seemed clear that Donald Trump would win the U.S. presidential election, the mood on Ukrainian social media and among friends turned overwhelmingly negative (when it wasn’t outright disbelief: My publisher, who lives in Kharkiv, insisted for more than 30 minutes that something was surely wrong with the data).
The war was effectively over, people said. Mr. Trump would halt all American military aid and Ukraine would be forced to cede large swaths of territory to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. I told myself that Ukrainians have a tendency toward pessimism. That Ukraine is the front line against Mr. Putin’s project to make Russia great again, a project that is certainly incompatible with Mr. Trump’s. Surely Mr. Trump would decide that it is in his interest to thwart Mr. Putin and act decisively. But my mood, too, eventually tumbled to dark places.
In the morning, I went to work in the French bakery around the corner from our apartment. I drank coffee and served customers pancakes with mincemeat and sour cream, and pastries filled with spinach and cottage cheese, while my mind returned over and over to the question: What happens now? I imagined I saw the same question on the faces of the people who came in.
In Ukraine, there is safety in simply trusting that the worst will happen. To dare to hope has always been the risk.
“What good things have I seen in my lifetime?” our 87-year-old neighbor Grandma Anya likes to say, with a solid fatalism that’s built on being born soon after the famine of the early 1930s to parents who had lost three children; on watching her savings, like many others’, become worthless right before the breakup of the U.S.S.R.; and on the steely hand from Moscow that has grasped at the heels of Ukrainians as we’ve strained for democracy, Europe and the rule of law.
English (US)