‘I think in Russian. I speak in Russian...But we are all Ukrainian now’

Back in the USSR Dnipropetrovsk was a closed city, inhabited mainly by officers from the Red Army and defence industry employees.

Leonid Brezhnev, one of the last leaders of the Soviet Union, came from this industrial city on the great Dnipro river. The city’s name was shortened in 2016 under the law on decommunisation. But it remains a Russian-speaking city, struggling to shake off 350 years of Russian domination.

Dnipro manufactured nuclear missiles until Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear force in 1994, in exchange for Russia’s broken promise of non-aggression. The missile factory was adapted to produce commercial satellite launchers.

Dnipro also became known as a breeding ground for the country’s political elite, sometimes referred to as the Dnipro mafia. Former president Leonid Kuchma and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko are from Dnipro.

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Mayor Borys Filatov arrives at the office of his private law firm in a swarm of bodyguards. After the Russians attacked municipal buildings in Kharkiv and Mykolaiv, he asked staff to work remotely. The stockily built 50 year old is a former investigative journalist and TV presenter, a colourful character who last year boasted that he is 146th on Richard Branson’s waiting list for flights on the Virgin Galactic spaceship.

Like most Ukrainian officials, Filatov has adopted casual military chic, a beige khaki shirt-jacket over a T-shirt. He is proud that his city is the rear base for the ground war, the transit point for weapons and provisions sent to the east, and for millions of civilians fleeing westward.

“We face the Russians on three sides,” Filatov says, “on the southern front in Kherson, to the east in Donbas, and Kharkiv in the north. We have five lines of fortifications surrounding the city, stretching all the way to Donetsk. The Russians would lose tens of thousands of soldiers to take Dnipro.”

Filatov says that 10 per cent of all Russian missiles have been fired at Dnipro, though most have been shot down. Walking to the plate glass window, he points at a bridge they narrowly missed in May. “They’ll try again,” he says.

“The alleged accuracy of Russian missiles is a myth,” Filatov says. “They are firing X22 anti-ship missiles from the 1960s at our cities. These missiles were designed to target aircraft carriers. They home in on the biggest structure in their path. That is why they hit the shopping centre in Kremenchuk [killing 18 civilians].”

Higher university degrees are a status symbol for many Ukrainian politicians. Filatov holds diplomas in law, history and, most recently, political science. He wrote a thesis entitled Patriotism as a Tool for Statehood and quotes George Orwell copiously. He talks about blood versus land as the criterion for belonging. “We should identify ourselves by the land we live on, regardless of our blood,” he concludes.

When I ask about Filatov’s heritage, he pulls out a thick, hard-bound volume tracing his family’s genealogy to 1811. “To be honest, I have not a single drop of Ukrainian blood. I think in Russian. I speak in Russian. My mother was a teacher of Russian language and literature. But we are all Ukrainian now. There is a conscious decision to identify ourselves as a political Ukrainian nation.”

In 2014 Filatov was deputy to Ihor Kolomoyskyi, the banking, media, petroleum and metals magnate who headed the regional administration. Kolomoyskyi’s 1+1 television station launched President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s career as a comedian, with the Servant of the People programme about a Ukrainian president.

This week Zelenskiy stripped Kolomoyskyi, who also holds Cypriot and Israeli nationality, of his Ukrainian citizenship.

Kolomoyskyi is wanted on corruption charges in the US and has disappeared since the war started. He and another oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, were co-founders of the Menorah Center, built in the shape of a Jewish candelabra, in downtown Dnipro. The centre houses a synagogue, two hotels, kosher restaurant and grocery store and a black granite Holocaust museum, the largest in Ukraine.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine privatised state-owned industries, which were snapped up by aspiring oligarchs for a pittance. Politicians and oligarchs helped each other to monopolise wealth and power.

Their collaboration became such a problem that Zelenskiy in 2020 passed a law on “de-oligarchisation” which defined an oligarch as someone who is active in political life, with a major influence on media, and who holds a monopoly on at least one sector of the economy. The head of Ukraine’s national security council says 86 people meet that definition. Most are believed to have flown abroad in the first hours of the war, because insurance companies warned that their private jets would not be covered.

The most pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch, Viktor Medvedchuk, tried to flee, disguised in a Ukrainian army uniform. He was caught and thrown in prison. From Moscow his wife, a well-known television host, accuses Ukraine of persecuting Medvedchuk for his political opinions.

At least four of the 10 richest oligarchs listed by the BBC’s Russian service hail from Dnipro. A bronze sculpture of a wealthy-looking man with hand extended for a hand-out appeared mysteriously on a park bench in the city’s most exclusive shopping street. It is known as the monument to the unknown oligarch.

Filatov says reports of corruption and oligarchs have been inflated by Russian propaganda to discredit Ukraine. He is eager to dissociate himself from his former boss, Kolomoyskyi. “In 2014 and 2015, Kolomoyskyi did a great deal to prevent the so-called Russian Spring taking over here,” Filatov recalls.

Kolomoyskyi raised the first volunteer battalion, and offered financial rewards for the capture of weapons, occupied public buildings and “little green men” as Russian soldiers were known then. It was in Kolomoyskyi’s interest to do so, since the Russians would have seized his factories.

“We hoped Kolomoyskyi would change his oligarch mentality, that he would stop thinking just about money, and start thinking about people,” Filatov says. “He remained as he was. When I became mayor, he started calling to ask me favours. We argued and I hung up on him. We have not spoken since.”

Dnipro’s wealthiest may be corrupt, but its citizens have shown amazing generosity in the war. Karen Agadjanyan of the Co-ordinating Headquarters of Dnipro Volunteers, gives me a guided tour of the impeccably organised 10-storey building, staffed by 1,300 volunteers, the biggest humanitarian hub in Ukraine.

Tonnes of food, clothing and medicine are distributed to refugees and frontline troops with assembly line efficiency. Every room is a miniature factory or warehouse. Open a door and you find flak jackets for soldiers, camouflage suits, stacks of boxes from EU countries. The centre has evacuated 3,000 people under bombardment, and rushes emergency medical supplies to cities hit by Russian missiles. It saved horses from the hippodrome in Mariupol, and animals from the Kharkiv zoo. It organises the adoption of refugees’ pets and distributes cat and dog food to their new owners.

The centre is on the riverfront, not far from the bridge that Filatov pointed out to me earlier. Isn’t he afraid the Russians will attack it? I ask Agadjanyan. “For the first few days, I was terrified of that,” Agadjanyan replies. “My fear evaporated. We don’t have time to be afraid.”