Samuel Hanafin

Towards the end of April, a bus with fifteen foreign journalists headed north from Kyiv to Chornobyl (the transliteration of the Ukrainian place name, Чорнобиль, rather than the Russian Чернобыль, was adopted by the UN General Assembly in a resolution last December). For some reporters, this was their third or fourth trip to the abandoned city of Pripyat, a few kilometres from Reactor No. 4 in the thousand-square-mile exclusion zone. Access has been even more restricted since Ukrainian forces recaptured the area from Russia in April 2022.

The regional psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Odesa serves a population of around 2.5 million. It’s surrounded by a high wall; the way in is through a set of rusty gates. It was purpose-built in 1892. When Frantz Fanon visited psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union in 1960, he remarked that ‘you’re watched everywhere there’ and ‘even the toilets have no doors.’

The Ministry of Veteran Affairs, established in 2018, oversees housing, healthcare and financial support for former soldiers. But the road from the front to these reintegration programmes can be long and winding. 

Odesa is mostly Russian-speaking and sometimes thought to be more pro-Russian than other parts of Ukraine, but there isn’t a straightforward link between language and loyalty. When I raised the question of a potential backlash against Ukrainisation in Odesa, a Belgian diplomat was reminded of the way the French talk about Belgium. ‘There is something about multilingual countries that eludes the imperial mindset,’ he said, ‘French, British or Russian.’

For the last six months I’ve been working for Solidarités International, a French NGO. It’s one of the many organisations that have been hit by Donald Trump’s executive order freezing humanitarian aid for ninety days. In 2023 the US government provided $72 billion of international aid, around 40 per cent of the global total. From the comparatively shabby three-storey building in Paris where I work (L’Oréal’s headquarters are next door), SI employs more than three thousand staff to provide water and sanitation in at least 25 countries. Its annual turnover is almost $200 million but it relies on state-funded, project-by-project allocations, rarely for periods of more than two years, nearly half of which are disbursed by Washington.