What matters to me is making clear why we're now focusing on accompanying Ukrainian people into the middle of society. It's always important to ask ourselves why we do something – and that's what sets us apart from AI: people act out of motives. They have motives, they have intentions, they have goals, something drives them. Whereas AI only does what people set for it. AI first needs guidelines, steering, orientation and values. Those values come from people.
When it comes to this project, which I've called „UNO supports Ukraine“: the name is loosely based on the association „Leipzig helps Ukraine“. Leipzig is in there, but I don't like „helps“ all that much here, because „help“ sounds like being in need. And in fact Ukraine is much stronger than many so-called industrialised countries in the West.
There are a great many reasons why I've started this project now. And those reasons are almost entirely personal – because for me, personal also means social and political. Because I was socialised, raised and grew up to be part of a whole: part of a society, part of a community. Not just on my own, as a single person, but always keeping an eye on: how are the people around me doing? How are other people doing? Because only then am I doing well too.
I have a great deal of experience with people from Ukraine. It all began in my childhood. Back then I wasn't really aware of the differences between the individual Slavic nationalities and ethnicities – of course I knew that Polish is different from Russian and Czech is different from Russian, but with Ukrainian and Russian I wasn't fully aware of everything yet.
It really started to dawn on me in 1999, when I fell in love with a Ukrainian woman, lived with her for a long time and regularly visited her family in Kyiv. From 1999 to 2015 I was in Kyiv every summer, and sometimes over New Year too, but also several times in Koktebel on the Black Sea. All in all I lived with them for about a year and a half, always spread over the summer months.
This family was very large – it still is, although the war has now torn it apart. I didn't just observe the family in every situation of life, I lived it. I was part of the family. They accepted me completely and trusted me. They shared their doubts, their conflicts and their decisions with me. Across three, even four generations they always signalled to me, and said it too: „You're one of us.“ I was never the outsider, never „the German“ – I was always one of them, from the very start and with everyone. It wasn't that one part of the family accepted me and the other had reservations about me.
And that, I believe, is something that doesn't work like this in Germany. We're far more closed on this. When I compare it with the other way round – when a Ukrainian woman comes into a German family – the reservations are usually far greater, and at first you have to reckon with a certain rejection, even if the person speaks German relatively well. My Russian is of course very good compared with many others. Even so, that doesn't mean I'm already socialised like the people in Ukraine. I was something different, more or less a stranger to them – but unlike German society, the people there never let me feel it. On the contrary: I was always something special to them, and they always treated me with great appreciation. All of them – and there were very different views among them when it came to politics.
That always impressed me, and I always loved being there. For me it was always a way to recharge, and for me it was also the family, because my own family is very small. I have a very small family that really consists only of my mother – because in 2021 I very tragically lost my sister, my father has already died, my mother sadly won't live that much longer either, and I unfortunately wasn't able to build a very close relationship with my niece and nephew. That's why this Ukrainian family was and is always very, very important to me. And now I'd like to give back just a part of what they gave me.
Also because this family is made up of very different parts: there are many children, small children, teenage girls, people my age and people who are a bit older, with very different backgrounds, experiences and levels of education. The person whose house I lived in, for example, speaks fluent English, while others don't. And when it came to language, the family was split in two: there were those who mainly spoke Russian – both languages existed side by side – and then there were those who spoke Surzhyk, this mixed language between Russian and Ukrainian. Ukrainians are very creative when it comes to developing language further, and because of their long history with Austrians and with Polish people they've also taken on many elements from German and Polish. They're very multicultural and open to other things. That's why I believe I can judge how at least part of Ukrainian society works, what they think, where they're heading – with all their doubts and their contradictions, because that's exactly what makes us human. German society is of course also full of contradictions, with very different movements and interest groups.
Because I spent most of my time in Germany and then drove to Ukraine every summer, I was able to follow Ukraine's development up close and see what changed for the better from year to year. An incredible amount changed back then.
One example to illustrate it: the first summer, when I drove to Kyiv by car in 1999, was still a wild adventure. The European highway hadn't been built yet, so I had to take the „Varshavka“ – a gravel track through the middle of the forest for many kilometres, with no phone signal. I drove there with a Ukrainian woman back then – it was a real, real adventure. And in 1999 there were very few cars with German number plates crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border.
After a long wait in the queue at the border and many bureaucratic hurdles, I'd only driven a few kilometres on Ukrainian territory when I was stopped for the first time: by the DAI, the Ukrainian traffic police of the day. There were checkpoints, armed officers with Kalashnikovs. When they saw a car with German plates, to them it meant: D-Marks, later euros – extra income for their family. Because back then, in 1999, they were paid miserably and could only survive if they found private sources of income on the side. And one of those sources of income on four wheels was me.
It always went like this: they flagged me down with their traffic baton, introduced themselves in Ukrainian and wanted my papers. And then – this was funny – they always called me „Gerhard“, sometimes with a French pronunciation: „Gérard“. Why? Because my parents put Gerhard as the first given name on my birth certificate, even though the name I actually go by is Torsten. Then they let me know I'd been driving too fast. I didn't argue with them at all; I usually had the money ready – in the first years still D-Marks, and from 2002 mostly a 5-euro note, sometimes 10 or 15 euros – and said: „Okay, can we come to an agreement? I broke the traffic rules, can you forgive me? Here are five euros.“ And then, depending, they'd sometimes say five euros was fine, or it had to be ten, whatever. And that's how it went, several times, all the way to Kyiv.
In Kyiv itself, too, I was stopped every day in that first summer of 1999 – every single time I was out with my German plates. I lived in the west of Kyiv, in a suburb called Bilohorodka, from where back then you could only get into the city by car. When I wanted to cross the Dnipro to the other bank, to the big prefab housing estates – about 12 to 14 kilometres – I was stopped by the police two, three, four times on one stretch and had to pay.
On top of that, in that first summer, there was an incident right on Khreshchatyk: a police patrol with Kalashnikovs stopped me because they'd heard I was a foreigner, even though I was speaking Russian with the women I was with. They demanded my stamp from OVIR. In 1999 it was still much like in the Soviet Union: as a foreigner you had to register with the foreigners' office within 24 hours of arrival and collect a stamp. My partner at the time wanted to go there with me, but we hadn't managed it within those first 24 hours. So I had no stamp in my passport.
The patrol said: „You've broken the law, we're taking you to the station.“ My girlfriend – who was incredibly self-confident, very determined and really not one to be intimidated – asked the two officers in Russian to turn a blind eye, and offered that we'd just pay now. She apologised and explained that it was her mistake. But the officers wouldn't budge for a long time. Passers-by were already standing around us watching, and in the end my girlfriend burst into tears, because she was afraid I'd disappear at the police station. At the very end the officers gave in and said: „Okay, then he'll have to pay.“
That's how hard it still was in 1999 to move around freely there as a German. But the very next year it was much easier! In the years that followed, the old DAI checkpoints disappeared, there was no more OVIR, and nobody bothered me on the street any more. Everything was so much easier.
I especially remember the summer when Ukraine had a Georgian deputy interior minister who said: „In Kyiv we have to make sure the population finds trust in its patrol officers again.“ Within a very short time they replaced the officers and decided: from now on the patrols always go as a pair – a female officer with a male officer. And the two of them have to be friendly and take on the role of helpers, supporters and companions, instead of fleecing and harassing the population.
At the same time they replaced the vehicles: in 1999 many officers were still driving around in old wrecks, in old Ladas. At the end of the 90s a detective told me that organised crime was laughing itself silly at the police, because the police had no resources at all and organised crime was much better equipped than the police. And suddenly the new patrols were driving Western cars, above all the Toyota Prius. Back then I talked to the new officers on the street myself: they were very friendly, open and answered all my questions. I also wrote an article about it at the time – maybe I'll still find it. It definitely got better.
Of course this process is far from finished, and of course there's still corruption. And it's no excuse at all to say that there's corruption in the EU and in Germany too, and that many institutions and values in Germany are eroding – I see that. That's why this finger-pointing, which German society does so often, looking down on Ukraine and saying: it's all corruption. I believe we need to put that into perspective.
This is still taking shape and will be expanded, but I want to share it now. People are welcome to read it now. I have nothing to hide, I'm open.
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