Fears and hopes of the Dnieper

The Radio Liberty correspondent came to Kyiv and the Dnieper to see with his own eyes how Ukraine is preparing for the second round of the elections, and try to understand: why Ukrainians prefer Showman to Vladimir Zelensky before Peter Poroshenko and what the supporters of the current president are afraid after Zelensky came to power.

In fact, the answer to the last question lies on the surface: Zelensky, according to many Ukrainians with whom I had a chance to communicate, is allegedly ready to make concessions to Putin, agreeing to stop the blockade of the territories of Donbass not controlled by Kyiv until the transfer of the Russian-Ukrainian border under the control of the Ukrainian authorities. This thesis is surprising in combination with the fact that another, Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky , who formed until March 2015, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, clearly visible behind Zelensky’s figure. It was the decisiveness of Kolomoisky and his team after the beginning of the so -called "Russian Spring", and then a full -fledged war in the east of Ukraine, then saved Dnepropetrovsk from the risk of becoming the territory of military operations - although the pro -Russian rallies in March 2014 gathered only a little less people than in Donetsk or Lugansk. With the support of the businessman, the first Ukrainian volunteer battalions were created, the export and treatment of the wounded were organized, attempts by pro -Russian forces were suppressed to conduct a referendum in the federalization of Ukraine in Dnepropetrovsk.

Zelensky in the first round of elections scored 45% of the vote in the Dnieper. Poroshenko - only 8%. Even the former deputy prime miners of the Ukrainian government Alexander Vilkul and Yuri Boyko , who are often associated with pro-Russian forces in the Ukrainian establishment, were ahead of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.

I decided the first thing to go to the Dnieper also because the war in the Donbass continues to this day. The confrontation between the separatists supported by Russia, it seems, was a little into the background to discuss corruption scandals and Black PR, in large quantities of candidates produced by the headquarters. It seems to me no less important to look at these elections in the context of war than, for example, to get to the Olympic stadium on the so -expected debate of Poroshenko and Zelensky.

But first let's go back to Kyiv, where I flew in the evening on Tuesday. As if on purpose, all the color design of the Borispol Airport is designed in the color schemes of the opposing sides. The main corporate color of the airport, used in navigation and decorative elements, is a "Poroshenkovsky" dark border. But it is worth going to the passport control hall, how bright green cabins of border guards are met.

Only an hour and a half for an interview with employees of the border service and the expectation of a decision on the entrance (for all citizens of Russia, such an interview is mandatory), and now my passport is stamped and say with a smile: "Welcome to Ukraine." At the interview, it was enough to show printouts of housing reservation, return tickets and clearly explain the purpose of the trip. On March 5, 2014, when my colleague and I flew to Donetsk, an interview and waiting took about the same amount of time. I sincerely hope that Borispol will never befell the fate of Sergei Prokofiev’s international airport.

Before the trip, for some reason, I wanted to find a family in Ukraine through which the confrontation line of Zelensky-Poroshenko lay down. At one time, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict became a deep wound between husbands and wives, fathers and children, old friends. It seemed to me it was important to find confirmation of the thesis that the situation with the current elections is radically different, and we are talking about as much as possible, the rivalry of programs and the process of democratic transfer of power. I am going from the airport to the city center in order to meet an old friend who has not seen exactly 5 years before a night train to the Dnieper. In the car plays the seemingly paradoxical "Russian Radio Ukraine" , where Meladze and Kirkorov are interspersed with the quoted "ocean of Elsa" and "Skryabin", outside the window - an unusual peaceful baptism without barricades of the Maidan, which I have not seen him since 2013. The first and only election bigboard comes across in Kyiv, this is Zelensky’s agitation: "April 21. The end of the lies of lies." A friend comes to a meeting with a girl, he is for Poroshenko, she is for Zelensky. No tension in their relationship is felt. For her, these are the first elections in Ukraine. "My main claim to Poroshenko is that he did not stop the war." I will then hear this message from the supporters of Zelensky more than once, although I will never hear the answer to the question of how this war could and should have been stopped.

In the compartment with me are two military people traveling from dismissal. Judging by the tattoos, paratroopers. Calm, concentratedly look at the phones. No familiar attributes of such a trip are not the notorious “testicles with testicles”, nor vodka, no intrusive carriage conversations. They politely ask me whether it is possible to turn off the common light. We wake up in the unsightly industrial outskirts of the Dnieper, outside the window fog and rain. Five years ago, getting here from the confrontation of the pro -Russian and pro -Ukrainian forces of Donetsk was a kind of psychological unloading. Now rather the opposite: in the faces of people, it seems, there are more anxiety, the roads are still full of terrible pits, although the construction of the metro, which is engaged in the company from Turkey, has intensified in the center.

Dnieper, city center

Political advertising is not visible at all, but traces of decommunization are noticeable, moreover, “folk”, and not authorized “from above”. On Kozatskaya Square, renamed from the "80th anniversary of the Dnipropetrovsk region", in the fall of 2016, unknown people knocked the bronze boards of honor from the granite stele in honor of the natives of the city of Leonid Brezhnev and the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Vladimir Shcherbitsky. The monument to Lenin in the Dnieper was demolished in the spring of 2014, but in some places, signs with the old names of streets, for example, Karl Marx Avenue instead of “Yavornitsky Avenue”, not to mention the minibuses that are still riding from the Dnepropetrovsk, in the same non-existent Dneprodzerzhinsk (now-now-now-now-now-now-now Kamenskoye).

I am going to the first ATO museum in Ukraine - the "anti -terrorist operation", which has recently been officially called the OOS - "Operation of the United Forces". With one of its creators, the director-documentary Evgeny Titarenko, I have been familiar with the fall of 2017 in absentia. Then the host of Channel One, Petr Tolstoy, compared his film "War for the Peace" with the "propaganda of the" Islamic state ". In fact, the picture tells about the work of the doctors at the front line: Titarenko himself served in the medical volunteer battalion" Hospitallers ". One of the soldiers of this battalion, the 20-year-old paramedic from Mariopol Nikolay Volkov , 4 days ago died from the shot of the sniper of the injury. In the Dnieper Hospital, there is a hall with portraits of all residents of the Dnieper and the Dnipropetrovsk region who died in the war in the East (the region retained the old name, since it is under it that it is mentioned in the Constitution of Ukraine).

Evgeny Titarenko in the hall of the ATO Museum, where portraits of the residents of the Dnieper who died in the war were posted

The creators of the museum are working closely with the current regional administration, Loyal President Poroshenko. Evgeny Titarenko with her helped a panoramic film for the museum telling about the history of the conflict. The regional authorities, in turn, ordered him a film presentation of the Dnieper region. “But we are in good relations with the city authorities,” says Natalya Khazan, who participated in the creation of the museum, who participated in the creation of the museum. “City authorities” are primarily the head of the Dnieper Boris Filatov , the last person remaining in the official position of the legendary team of the Kolomoisky -sample of 2014 “Kolomoisky - Filatov - Korban”. Recently, however, Filatov - at least in words - demonstrates the loyalty of Poroshenko, without a visible irony calling him a "master of political game."

The ATO Museum is well known to foreign journalists and politicians. According to another of its creators, historian Yuri Fanigin , both the deputies of the European Parliament and the heads of foreign states came here - for example, Estonia President Keresty Kaliulayd . Evgeny Titarenko says that the American Senator from New Jersey Kory Buker , having watched his film about the war in the museum, became an ardent supporter of the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine, which, in the end, together with the efforts of other American politicians led to the supply of American anti-tank complexes "Javelin" to the country. At the same time, in the exposition of the ATO museum, there is much more pain from Ukrainian losses and pride in their heroes than hatred of the enemy in the person of Russia or pro -Russian separatists. On April 17, an exhibition of drawings made by artists from different parts of Ukraine for Ukrainian sailors captured by Russia in the Kerch Strait opened here. At the opening of the exhibition came the stepmother of the youngest of them, Andrei Eider. We accidentally face her in the lobby, she agrees to give a small interview. While we are talking with her, a thousand kilometers from here, in the Moscow City Court, the judges stamp decisions to extend her stepson and the rest of the Kerch captives.

He came to the museum and Petro Poroshenko. But Vladimir Zelensky refused his visit: as Yuri Fanigin says, during the artist’s visit and his colleagues in the Kvartal-95 studio, he made an appropriate proposal to the city, but the group “preferred to relax in the bath, referring to fatigue from tour”. Speaking about why they will vote in the second round for Petro Poroshenko, the creators of the museum give me the same well -known arguments of the opponents of Zelensky: does not have experience in managing the country, is a "virtual candidate", practically not appearing in public, "cat in a bag." They are unhappy with the low level of jokes in the performances of the "quarter", which consider disrespectful to Ukraine. To my question about how to be with the merits of Igor Kolomoisky, who is allegedly standing behind Zelensky, in defending the Dnipropetrovsk region from separatism, is rested on the fact that these merits should not be unnecessary to personify: in the first, most difficult months of the war, everyone united for the front of the front, and helped not only Kolomoisky and his business, which was created almost from zero. “Kolomoisky’s words that he would not let Russia play a important role then,” says the museum employee Vadim Yakushenko, “but the passionarity of the Ukrainian people as a whole played no less.” Yakushenko worked in the Historical Museum of Dnepropetrovsk before the war, in the summer of 2014 he volunteered for the front, was captured in Ilovaysk and returned home after one of the exchanges of the prisoners. When I ask him why even the military cast more votes to Zelensky than Poroshenko, he replies that it is mainly about the rear units. “If you look at who you voted at the very front end, you will see a completely different picture,” says Yakushenko.

Dnieper, ATO Museum. Signs that stood at the entrances to the city captured by the separatists and exported by the military to Kiev controlled by Kyiv

Natalia Khazan adds: “Those Ukrainians whom I consider moral authorities supported Poroshenko. People who support Zelensky often hear in public transport. Maybe they were“ pumped by the “serial” of the people ” -“ He is honest because he is going on a bicycle. ”For me to enter into a dialogue with a person who considers it like this, innumerable.” To the question of whether she is afraid of what will happen after April 21, Khazan replies: "We are all afraid of one thing - not to become an autonomous federal district in Russia. With corruption, you can live, with occupation - not." Yuri Fanigin adds: "Why doesn’t Kolomoisky himself go to the presidency? Today, Kolomoisky affects Zelensky, and what if someone else affects him tomorrow?" Vladimir Zelensky and Igor Kolomoisky themselves have repeatedly claimed that they were connected exclusively by business relations as part of the production of television shows and series.

We are all afraid of one thing - not to become an autonomous federal district in Russia

At the same time, Khazan and her colleagues unanimously recognize the merit for Zelensky and his team in conducting an effective election campaign, built primarily on new media technologies and the presence in social networks instead of the TV. As they are ready to recognize for Poroshenko his mistakes - connivance to corrupt officials and, in turn, not enough active campaign before the first round of elections. "Now he goes to all the programs, answers all acute questions. The question is: where have you been before?" - says Natalia Khazan. They recall the current president and indecision in the persecution of former supporters of Yanukovych, as well as the absence of tangible results of the investigation of the execution of the "Heavenly Hundred" on the Maidan. “We have an oligarchic system of government,” Vadim Yakushenko comes into conversation. “This is our common mistake and trouble. But most importantly, the country has survived in the 14th year.”

Another of the main attractions of the Dnieper is the Jewish cultural and business center "Menora", actually created by Kolomoisky. The oligarch himself now lives in Israel, but is going to return to Ukraine after the second round of elections. The director of the Holocaust Museum of the History of the Holocaust, the historian Igor Tchupak, has repeatedly organized exhibitions that are not related to the tragedy of the Jewish people: for example, exhibitions of ancient watches or paintings from the colomo collection, also transferred to the businessman to the museum. The probe answers the question of why Vladimir Zelensky won at the first stage of voting and leads with a fantastic margin before the second: “The reasons why most citizens of Ukraine do not want to elect for the second term of Poroshenko’s presidency - in the mistakes of Poroshenko himself. And the success of Zelensky, first of all, is the choice of young people who want to change the existing corruption system in Ukraine. The illustration of this system is a scandal in the scandal in Ukraine. "Ukroboronprom", and not only it.

Igor Kolomoisky, March 2015

With another supporter of Vladimir Zelensky, Grigory Mikhailov , the HR manager of one of the largest Ukrainian banks, we meet in the center of the Dnieper. He asks not to call his place of work, but allows him to clarify that this is not a nationalized Privatbank, for the sake of the return of which, as many believe, Kolomoisky and went to these elections with the candidate Zelensky. During our conversation, the news comes that the court in Kiev recognized the nationalization of Privatbank illegal. Mikhailov is almost the same age as Zelensky, and for him this is one of the many reasons why he is going to vote for him again on April 21:

“In Ukrainian politics, people are all the time, but we see the same people all the time. Zelensky is not from this party. They came to his concerts, he mixed them, and now he suddenly tries himself as their political competitor. We are peers, it allows us to feel that some kind of change of generation is happening. I believe that the current government has failed to cope with its work on a whole number of indicators, With the obligations, first of all, this is the struggle with corruption, the cleansing of the judiciary, the same lustration The previous rulers were conveniently and, say, on loud affairs of the bribes, the society was loudly declared, and then people were quietly released, the people took place and said: “Yeah, well, it’s clear.” Zelensky was given an absolute carte blanche, and now we see a catastrophic fall in the confidence rating.

Zelensky is a chance in which everyone believed

To the question of whether he is afraid that the old -timers of Ukrainian politicians are standing for Zelensky, Grigory Mikhailov answers as follows:

“This is not scary, for several reasons. Firstly, the role of Kolomoisky, a person who probably has a certain influence on Zelensky’s candidate, was great after the Maidan: for example, he inspired the creation of volunteer battalions. Sorry, but not all Ukrainian oligarchs behaved in this way, or rather, no one behaved. Secondly, if Zelensky would be at least a long-sighted politician, coming to the president’s post. он от Коломойского дистанцируется, он будет вынужден это сделать".

При этом мой собеседник отвергает возможность того, что Владимир Зеленский "сдаст Украину Путину":

"Никакой президент Украины, если он в здравом уме и хочет продолжать свое президентство, этого не сделает. Это будет его моментальное падение и коллапс. России нужна только капитуляция Украины. Если президент попытается капитулировать, он перестанет быть президентом в очень короткие сроки, и в этом отдает себе отчет любой кандидат. Невозможно будет заключить Путина в объятия, открыть границы и сказать "давайте все забудем". На этих опасениях можно играть, но исходя из тех заявлений, которые сделал Зеленский, – что Путин должен будет принести извинения, должен будет вернуть территории, – я в это не верю. Можно, конечно, что-то выхватывать из его слов либо ковыряться в его прошлом творчестве, но друзья, давайте посмотрим на то, что происходит при текущей власти! Риторика – да, она у Петра Алексеевича очень воинственная. Но если оценивать действия, мы видим вполне терпимые торговые отношения с Россией, война идет, а торговля почему-то растет. Медведчук почему-то свободно летает в Москву. Мне кажется, говорить, что "Зеленский сейчас все сдаст", это какая-то манипуляция. Для того чтобы этого не произошло, есть сдерживающие факторы".

Среди людей, отдавших свой голос за Владимира Зеленского в первом туре выборов и собирающихся сделать это во втором, изрядная доля тех, кто делает это от противного – лишь бы сменить Петра Порошенко на кого-то другого во главе государства. Об этом мне рассказывает Елена, переселенка из Луганска. Елена (мы изменили имя по ее просьбе: родители Елены остались в Луганске, и она опасается за их безопасность, если так называемое "МГБ ЛНР" узнает о ее интервью Радио Свобода) не успела зарегистрироваться для голосования в первом туре, но во втором твердо намерена отдать свой голос за Петра Порошенко.

Граффити в виде украинского флага на стене жилого дома в центре Днепра

"Таким людям я говорю: ребята, а вы не хотите съездить в Луганск, посмотреть вообще, как там? – говорит Елена. – Они мне отвечают: да, мы тоже этого боимся, но ты же видишь, за 5 лет не сделано то, не сделано это".

Как и других моих собеседников, Елену страшит приход "русского мира" в подконтрольную украинским властям часть страны и невнятная, по ее мнению, риторика Владимира Зеленского на этот счет – многие из тех, с кем я говорил, отмечают, что всю предвыборную кампанию Зеленский высказывался за "прекращение войны", и лишь в последнюю неделю перед вторым туром его штаб "тезисно" и, как они опасаются, "для галочки" проговорил позицию кандидата по поводу российско-украинского конфликта: "Крым – Украина", "никаких переговоров с сепаратистами" и т. д. Елена, уехавшая из Луганска "на пару дней" перед "референдумом" об отделении "ЛНР" от Украины, но оставшаяся в Днепре на долгих 5 лет, рассказывает мне леденящие душу истории о своих поездках на родину под минометными обстрелами через блокпосты сепаратистов и украинских военных, о презрительном отношении арендодателей к съемщикам жилья из Луганска и Донецка, о беспросветной жизни друзей и знакомых, оставшихся "там".

Люди так устроены, что они готовы мстить

​Если ценой прекращения войны, о котором говорит Зеленский, станет прекращение нашего пути в Европу… Я так поняла, что он хочет помириться с Путиным. Я не уверена, что так можно прекратить войну. Люди так устроены, что они готовы мстить. Я вспоминаю, как я первый раз вернулась в Луганск на несколько дней уже после отъезда. Я не могла попасть в квартиру, мне нужно было найти ключ, который был у моих дальних родственников. И вот уже ночь, комендантский час, я приезжаю, стучу в ворота, они выходят оба пьяные – и если честно, я потом там тоже бухала, там просто невозможно не пить, столько жести я видела, что это просто было невозможно. Они говорят: "Ну что, приперлась?" Даже не позвали меня на порог, не предложили воды, не спросили, как я доехала. Они, дескать, под обстрелами лежат, а я там где-то прохлаждаюсь. Но когда я спросила, надо ли передать какие-то вещи их детям, которых они почему-то отправили именно в Украину, тут же стали миленькими и добренькими. Как вот это все можно прекратить? Я им задала этот вопрос. Они ответили: "Ты не видела, ты не понимаешь, что здесь происходит, что-то в духе "око за око, зуб за зуб", что если будет возможность мстить – они будут мстить. Я не думаю, что так думают все. Конечно, есть там и здравомыслящие люди. Но мне, например, хочется задать такой же вопрос семьям погибших там украинских солдат".

Пассажирский автомобиль, попавший под обстрел. Музей АТО в Днепре

Елена признается, что для нее выбор между Зеленским и Порошенко – это выбор меньшего из зол. Вообще, из многочисленных разговоров со сторонниками действующего президента складывается ощущение, что у них попросту нет своего кандидата. Постарается ли Зеленский развеять их страхи не словами, а делами? Елена говорит: "Если есть хоть малейшая вероятность того, что сюда придет Россия, то лучше ее избежать. Пускай лучше конфликт будет в заморозке. Если откроется граница между "ЛНР" и Украиной и при этом не закроется граница между Россией и "ЛНР", где гарантия, что мы не окажемся в большой консервной банке?"