Eli McCann: With Ukraine’s president in SLC, I recall my visit to his country and the brave souls who elected him

In 2014, I took a trip to Ukraine to visit friends.

I had served a Latter-day Saint mission there and have returned for work or to visit many times since, but this trip proved perhaps the most memorable. It came only a few months after the heart of Kyiv was nearly burned to the ground due to political strife — the trigger that quickly launched the illegal annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine’s eastern border.

The conflict happened when Ukraine’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected an economic deal with the European Union at the urging of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Many Ukrainians had seen Yanukovych as a puppet of Putin and Moscow for many years. This latest move confirmed those sentiments and sent a crowd of protesters into central Kyiv.

These sorts of peaceful protests happen in Russia from time to time. The Kremlin is quite good at stomping them out through force and arrests. It was probably for this reason Yanukovych thought it would be a good idea to send riot police after this group, who may not have made much news if he had simply ignored them.

Within a matter of two days, scores of people were killed and hundreds injured. The move ignited a fire under the demonstrators, who then spent the next several days barricading the city center with tires and furniture and pulling the cobblestones from their own ancient streets to launch at the government forces. The fighting during that bitter cold Ukrainian February led to more deaths and a substantial amount of destruction. In the end, Yanukovych fled to Russia. An emergency election was scheduled and a new government formed. (This event was well documented in the 2015 Oscar-nominated film “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom.”)

I had watched the events unfold with great sadness. Each day my go-to news sources flooded their pages with images of the streets in this city I love burned black, protesters launching Molotov cocktails in the darkness, agony all around.

The heart of the city

When I arrived in Kyiv that May, I told the friends I was visiting I wanted to go see the city center in person. Although the fighting had ended nearly three months earlier, my Ukrainian friends discouraged me from going there.

“Too depressing,” one told me.

I went anyway. To my surprise, the streets still were barricaded with tires and furniture. I was able to enter the area through an underground Metro station. It was a pleasant spring day, and as I entered the center square, I noticed how quiet it was. The absence of vehicle traffic and commercial activity had put this vibrant city to sleep.

Protesters were still camping on the streets. I don’t know why they remained there, but I wondered if they had chosen to stay until the elections were held later that month. They cooked food over open fires and walked among the piles of cobblestones. Some sat watching a news broadcast on a large screen that had recently been erected on the square.

After a few minutes, I heard music. A Ukrainian women’s folk group, dressed in bright traditional garb, had begun singing, and the protesters quickly gathered around to join in. Their voices and accompanying accordion echoed off the charred buildings surrounding us — the same ones that had witnessed centuries of strife. Wars. Famines. Hitler’s destructive invasion in the Battle of Kyiv in 1941. Dancing in the streets when Ukraine gained its independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. And now, in 2014, singing.

It will forever be one of the most surreal experiences of my life. There I stood, on the cusp of my 30th birthday, among the rubble that had monopolized international news weeks earlier, in a country that felt like it was coming apart at the beginning of what would be a long, devastating war. The people there looked haggard and tired and hungry. Death had stained these streets so recently. The future seemed so precarious.

And yet, there they were, dancing and smiling and singing — together. It’s always amazing to see hope spring among people who seem like they should have the least of it.

People’s president

A few years later, Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the presidency — a much different man and politician than the one who sent riot police after peaceful protesters before fleeing his own country when things became hard. After the war escalated, when Russian troops attempted to take Kyiv in early 2022, the world witnessed a leader pushed to greatness. He was eloquent, thoughtful and fearless in the face of what many thought to be insurmountable odds.

The thing is, he’s special, but I don’t believe he’s an anomaly. Zelenskyy is a reflection of the people who chose him. The ones who stood their ground against violent oppressors and then sang together in their sacred yet scarred streets. The ones who didn’t bat an eye when I, a foreigner, approached and sang with them.

I don’t believe in hero worship. I only worship my dogs. And they’ve earned that by being dogs.

But I’ll never pass up an opportunity to be inspired by people who, amid great struggles, manage to keep being people despite it all.

Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City. You can find him on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com.