Can Ukraine save itself from Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs? | Timothy Garton Ash

In Kiev, I see signs of a nation being forged in bitter conflict. But it’ll require a heroic effort to succeed

‘Welcome to the nation state of Ukraine,” says Mustapha Dzhemilev, a diminutive, soft-spoken 71-year-old leader of the Crimean Tatars, gentle on the outside, hard as steel within. He was deported from Crimea on Stalin’s orders in 1944, when he was just six months old, along with so many fellow Tatars. Persecuted under Soviet rule, he went on hunger strike for 303 days. A year ago, after Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea, this quiet fighter was banned from re-entering the peninsula his forebears had inhabited for centuries, long before the Russians did. And now here he is in Kiev, welcoming us to a new Ukraine.

“Putin can win some battles but Ukraine will win the war – with our passion, with our willingness to die,” says Hanna Hopko. For now “we have the political nation”. Hopko, 33, is the chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, one of a vanguard of young female MPs, self-professed heirs to the Euromaidan demonstrations, who now rattle off the details of political transformation plans faster than a rapper on speed.

Here is a state so corrupted that those who should be its doctors are its poisoners

Related: Europe must not treat Ukraine like another Greece | George Soros

Continue reading...