Come on Boris! Support for the former Prime Minister of Ukraine remains strong | books | entertainment

He may have lost some of his fan base in the UK, but Boris Johnson remains a beloved hero to the people of Ukraine, according to the embattled country’s most famous living author. Andrei Kurkov is in London promoting his new book, Diaries of the Conquest, and unfortunately his short and busy schedule does not include a meeting with the former British Prime Minister.

“He’s probably the number one foreign character of the year,” Kurkov explains. “He’s appreciated, he’s loved.” “When he resigned, there were a lot of jokes on Ukrainian Facebook saying that we should ask Boris to come and be our prime minister.

“Without British and American help, there is no doubt that Ukraine will fall. More should come to Ukraine…Each visit raises morale.”

We’ve learned here to take Johnson’s PR gift with a pinch of salt, but there’s no doubting the author’s honesty. Even critics in the UK admit that the former prime minister acted quickly and effectively in the wake of the Russian invasion on February 24 – sending weapons, ammunition, humanitarian aid, and sharing intelligence.

Eight months later, despite almost universal condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s actions, the fighting is still fierce, and swathes of Ukraine remain without water or electricity.

While many experts believe this shift to offensive infrastructure means the Kremlin is no longer confident of victory, the war’s long-term impact has led to Europe’s soaring energy bills, looming recession and fears of a nuclear exchange.

NATO may have been revitalized and cooperation with the European Union strengthened, but no one knows how Putin’s war will end, which makes Kurkov’s influential book all the more important, telling, as he does, about the devastating impact on ordinary people.

On the evening of February 23, the author was cooking for guests in his apartment in Kyiv. “I hoped Putin wouldn’t disrupt our dinner,” Kurkov wrote quietly. “He didn’t. He decided to hit Ukraine with missiles at five in the morning.” “The war also began in the Donbass.”

Two days later, Kurkov, 61, and his English wife Elizabeth loaded their car to drive west to Uzhhorod on the Slovak border where he was writing, commenting and raising money to defend his country.

Despite the devastation, morale is still good, he said. His 25-year-old daughter recently returned to Kyiv from London to join her brother, and is now looking for a job.

Best known in Britain for his bestselling novel Death And The Penguin, although born in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), Kurkov is a proud Ukrainian, so he’s in a good position to understand how Putin’s war cut the two once-powerful countries apart. Cultural and emotional ties.

“We started talking every day, probably from November or December of last year, about whether or not war was going to come,” Kurkov says. “I was sure that there would be an escalation – that Russia would go to the whole of Donbass – but not an all-out war.

“President Zelensky was asking us to prepare for picnics and barbecues in May, blaming the United States for creating panic.” So why does he think Putin did that? “He got older and had a lot of free time during the pandemic when he was alone somewhere in the basement,” he adds.

It was under the influence of this philosopher, Alexander Dugin, a proponent of a Eurasian policy (which considers Russia closer to Asia than Western Europe) based on anti-Western values.

“I think Putin wanted to be included in the history books as someone who made Russia great again. In the Donbass, people thought he was going to restore the Soviet Union, but he was more interested in restoring the Russian Empire because it was bigger and bigger than not the left wing. I suspect his next victim would be Moldova. And Lithuania, and then perhaps the other Baltic states, Poland, and so on.”

So, if Ukraine fell – as it would have, if Volodymyr Zelensky had not rejected America’s offer to take him to safety with the inspiring words: “I need ammunition, not flight” – will we now talk about the fighting in the Baltic Sea?

“This will happen over time,” Kurkov insists. “We got the accession of Crimea eight years ago and now this new escalation. But he doesn’t have much time left, he can speed up the plans.”

Perhaps surprisingly to the British public, he is not an impeccable supporter of Zelensky, whose leadership has won him universal acclaim, and he has drawn comparisons to Winston Churchill. Although it is believed that the president has proven himself under fire.

“He does what any president should do in a country under attack,” he says. “I didn’t expect him to be good. I didn’t vote for him.”

But then Ukraine is a country of many shades of political opinion – there are about 400 registered parties – and this rampant individualism, says Kurkov, is at the heart of the nation’s entrenched opposition to Russia.

“The Russians have a collective mentality,” he explains. “They had one Caesar and he was a symbol of stability, and for them stability is more important than freedom.

“For Ukrainians, freedom is more important. That is why there was no stability in Ukraine. It was not part of the Russian Empire until 1654. It was a state run by the Cossacks and the army who would elect their leader. And it was the general meeting that would decide who would become the leader. Then after a few Days, some of them were plotting against the newly elected man and trying to overthrow him.”

Kurkov is known for writing fantasy novels. His novels have been translated into 42 languages. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, he felt unable to continue.

“From day one I stopped writing novels. I couldn’t focus on anything but reality. So, when I was asked to comment on events, I started talking on radio and TV and then writing about what was happening.”

The first volume of his memoirs of the invasion begins on December 29, 2021 with “Goodbye Delta! Hello Omicron!” – If Covid is all Ukraine should worry about – and it ended in early July, before the recent successes of the Ukrainian army, to which Kurkov dedicated the book to his soldiers.

“The army is now the most trusted institution in Ukraine,” he says. “85 percent of Ukrainians believe in the army and only 60 percent believe in Zelensky. The army is more important than the presidency.”

In addition to examining the invasion from a civilian perspective, as you might expect from a novelist, Korkoff’s book is filled with vivid and impossibly poignant descriptions of life during the conflict.

In early March, the bakery that makes his favorite bread – a “soft loaf in the form of bricks” – was hit by Russian fire. He writes: “I’ve been cutting the writing thinking about this makarev bread for several days – I remember its taste.” “Only now, as I remember, I feel the taste of blood on my lips, as if I were a child and someone had slashed my lips in a fight.

Russian forces bombed Makarev bakery on Monday. The bakers were at work. I can imagine the fragrant smell that surrounded them the moment before the attack. In an instant, 13 bakery workers were killed and nine were injured. And the bakery no longer exists – makarev bread is a thing of the past. ”

His poignant entry on March 24 read: “More and more children are traveling alone towards Poland, Slovakia and Hungary – with small backpacks and notes sewn into jackets, on which are their parents’ phone numbers, children’s names and addresses of people children should reach.

“Many families also travel with other children, trying to make sure all the seats in their cars are occupied. Every vacant seat in a car bound for western Ukraine is a life that isn’t saved.”

Today he says: “From the beginning of March until June, I regularly crossed the border by car to organize fundraising events in London, Vienna and Norway. I often saw groups of children without parents being taken across the border by Ukrainian officers and passed to Slovak authorities.

Equally disturbing, he recalls: “The Russians took Ukrainian children to summer camps and they were not returned. And in the Russian media, I read that a group of Ukrainian children were taken to a Russian town and were telling jokes about Putin, so the Russians began to “re-educate” them. Pause : “I wouldn’t believe it if it didn’t happen.”

Later, he described the futility of the routine: people receive reminders about gas meter readings and payments for homes destroyed by missiles.

Kurkov – who knows 10 writers fighting on the front lines – can remember the Soviet Union but says that for the last generation of young Ukrainians looking to the West, Russia is as far away as Poland or the Czech Republic.

“I spent half my life in the Soviet Union, but for many years I did not find anything interesting in Russian culture,” he says. “Russia is a huge country without a single moral authority. There is only one authority, Putin, and everyone is in line.”

He believes that it is possible to force the Russians back to the border, but not by stopping their shells. “If the war is not over by next summer, it will continue for several years until Putin dies. Although this does not necessarily mean that it will end, those who fight for power are just like him,” he warns.

As for a possible coup, he adds: “Putin is from the KGB, he is very well protected. He made two Russian intelligence services – the FSB and the GRU, the army intelligence service – fight each other, which is the usual behavior of a dictator. The truth is that no one is happy. There. In fact they have already lost the war. They can still destroy Ukraine, but the war is lost. “

Despite everything, Kurkov remains optimistic. People may not read books, he says, but they buy them to support publishing. Likewise, they buy tickets to zoos they can’t visit, so the animals can be fed, and crowdfunding campaigns pay for everything from armored cars to flak jackets. He says it will take at least two generations – 40 years or more – to rebuild Ukraine, but the hatred for Russia may never subside.

“Ukraine has already lost nearly 50,000 people – 30,000 in Mariupol alone – so now in every village there are widows and orphans. This hatred will not go away.”

Korkov remains grateful for British support from under No. 10. “I was in Banbury (Oxon), speaking to a British-Polish lady and her English partner who had set up a humanitarian center in the now-defunct Debenhams to collect aid and run trucks to Ukraine,” he adds.

“My wife is English and that makes me proud.”

Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov (Mountain Leopard Press, £16.99) is now out. To get a free P&P in the UK, visit Expressbookshop.com Or call 020 3176 3832.