We are driving from Kharkiv to Izyum, the historic gateway to the Donbas. It’s -18°C outside the car. The fields that pass by the window are as flat and smooth and white as an ice rink. Small crews of depressed-looking, potato-faced men are putting up plastic nets all along the road. They erect metal poles, a little taller than a double-decker bus, at intervals of around ten metres. Then they tie high-strength, translucent plastic nets, often donated from European fishermen and farmers, around and across and above the poles. When these “anti-drone corridors” catch the high, hard winter sun they glint. For several miles it looks as if we are driving below a pulsing, ethereally silver river.
I find the nets unsettling and strange. This is how the war has changed, I venture to my colleagues. First dragons’ teeth and mines and tanks; now fishing nets in the sky and drones buzzing around. Maybe due to drone threats in the future we will all have to put up these nets. Or live underground. Maybe one day a huge net will be stretched over Ukraine itself, opening only for the occasional train from Poland to Kyiv. Maybe the nets represent… But my colleagues in the car have seen it all before. They would not be surprised if tomorrow they find out that the Russian cruise missiles that smashed into Kharkiv last night were piloted by live bears. They shrug at my net chat. “Don’t think about the net too much.” Am I overthinking the net, I ask? “Yes,” comes the reply. “The net is not Freudian.”
The roar of power
In Izyum, more nets and the constant roaring sound of generators. These are everywhere you go in Ukraine. It’s hard to speak outside without having to shout over them. A friend says that generators have produced more power over the course of this winter than Ukraine’s four operational nuclear power plants. I’m not sure that’s right, but it feels true.
We enter a café. While we wait to meet a man who was tortured when the town was occupied by the Russians in 2022, we talk to a tall, bearded soldier. He has a rescue cat on a lead. It doesn’t like the lead at all, so the soldier scoops her up and stuffs her in his jacket. As he leaves, the cat’s head pokes out and it opens its mouth. It has no bottom teeth.
Peter Mandelson for beginners
The shadow of the Epstein files is impossible to escape – even here, 30km away from a live war. One day I tried explaining who Peter Mandelson is to my colleagues. This is trickier than it sounds. “So, yeah, basically there was this guy who called himself the ‘Prince of Darkness’ and sort of jokingly told everyone who would listen for three decades that he was evil, but we mostly ignored this and gave him cool jobs, but he turned out to be advising a man who was convicted of soliciting underage prostitutes.”
My colleagues struggled to understand Mandelson, as they generally picture Britain as a powerful, incorruptible force for good in the world. One of them asked if Mandelson could have worked for Viktor Yanukovych, the absurdly corrupt former president of Ukraine who fled during the high tide of the Euromaidan protests in 2014. It sounded right to me.
A general mistake made about Ukraine is to think of it as an aberration, an outlier from the European mainstream. Before the war, escalating crises – political, economic, environmental – built up here, resulting in a roulette of short-lived governments, staffed by hard-to-distinguish politicians and parties, themselves puppeteered more or less openly by oligarchic networks. In the end, no personality was trusted by the public, no state institutions were seen as legitimate, and the result was revolution. It would be an exaggeration to say that this is Britain’s future. Or would it?
An international freeze-off
Back in Kharkiv, we bumped into the unbelievably well-travelled Times staff photographer Jack Hill in a hotel bar. Along with Anthony Loyd, Jack was going over the fallout from a pitiless Russian drone strike on a married couple, Valentyna and Valerii Klochkov, outside Hrabovske.
Jack was recently back from Greenland. There was only one question to ask: surely it was colder there? Nope, he said. Kharkiv was colder than Greenland by some distance.
The next day we began the long drive back west to Kyiv. Ukraine looks more like Greenland than Greenland does. What does it look like in the summer, I ask? “In winters, it’s white,” comes the reply. “In summer, it will be green.” I’m overthinking things again.
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 11 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Labour in free fall
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment