BLITZ INTERVIEW: Julian Evans - author, journalist, globetrotter - in love with Ukraine

Writing about Ukraine and volunteering - "until the war is over, it’s impossible to concentrate on anything else" - Julian has a new book out, about Odesa, called "Undefeatable.'

(Julian by the bank of the Dinets river near Kharkiv)

Where are you from? And where are you now? Doing what?

Simple questions are sometimes not simple to answer. I spent the first seven years of my life in Australia, the rest of my childhood in south London. I’m not Australian, I wasn’t born there, but I don’t feel fully British. Growing up those first few years in sub-tropical Brisbane was a much more significant influence on who I became later.

I live in south-west England now. That’s my base and it’s very convenient. But my restless impulse makes me look constantly for interesting alternatives. In the last 3 years Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has added urgency to the travelling: while it’s been going on, I’ve divided my time between England and Ukraine, both writing about the war and volunteering. I’m about to leave again in a couple of weeks’ time with a 4WD car, to donate it to an army unit near Kharkiv.

What kind of studies and work did you do previously? Where?

I studied French and German at Cambridge. I first sampled the pleasures of working life as an ice-cream salesman, a security guard, an English teacher in Paris, and I also ran a wine bar and bought and sold motorcycles before I finally found a job as a very junior editor at a London publishing house.

I quit publishing after ten years to write my first book, Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific, a return to the heat and scents and ocean of my childhood. I then lived in Antibes and Paris, in London and Odesa, and started to write about Ukraine while making radio and TV documentaries about Europe and European literature.

I also wrote a biography of the writer Norman Lewis, Semi-Invisible Man, before becoming increasingly engaged with the fate of Ukraine and the West’s failure to help it defeat Russia – not the only theme, but an important thread in my latest book, Undefeatable, a portrait of the port city of Odesa where I got married and which I’ve known for thirty years.

For more information, see Julian’s website: www.julianevans.com

How has the war in Ukraine changed your life? You personally?

In 2014, when Putin seized Crimea and parts of the Donbas, I had already known something of Ukraine for 20 years – I’d lived in Odesa too. Putin’s first invasion confirmed my distrust of Russia. At the same time, it seeded a deep distrust of Western politicians and media, almost all of whom either followed Russian narratives or sought, behind their speeches and articles, to do nothing to help a sovereign nation that the West had pledged to defend (in the Budapest Memorandum). I went to the front line at Donetsk and Mariupol for the first time in 2015.

The February 2022 invasion made everything – financial and moral help, reporting the truth – a hundred times more urgent. I sent what funds I could afford to my combat medic friends for their medivac vehicles, which needed armour and always need spare parts, new tyres, and directly to the ZSU (Ukraine’s armed forces). I spent a month in Odesa in the winter of 2022 because I wanted to share what life was like in the dark, under missile attack, and I wanted to see if there was anything else I could do. I couldn’t feel at home in peaceful England. As I wrote in my book, “the feeling you’re not where you belong, it bugs you”.

I wrote Undefeatable partly to help keep the conversation about Ukraine alive. I keep on fundraising. I drive cars to Ukraine for medics and troops. Until the war is over, it’s impossible to concentrate on anything else.

(Anyone who wants to contribute to Help for Ukraine - their operation is to deliver medical and non-lethal military aid to Ukraine - can email Julian at julianevans@blueyonder.co.uk)

What has surprised you most about Ukrainians these past couple of years? Good or bad?

Their drop-forged resolve and heroism. Their ability to endure. Their generosity and solidarity and courtesy. Their genius with drones. Their unruliness. Their understanding that the point of resistance is not primarily to win – it’s to outlast the opposition. Their tolerance of different points of view.

What are your future plans?

To keep fundraising, working with Assist Ukraine, the Hospitallers and others.

I plan to start building a house outside Odesa this summer, a gesture of solidarity with the country and the people, a place where I will one day be able to go and write in peace, and invite my children and friends come and stay, to share the peace with me.

How do you see the war ending and Ukraine returning to a ‘normal life’?

The Ukrainians are as much a match for Trump as they are for Putin, and although they know they will probably not physically recover all their territory, they will insist on keeping it legally. The more important question is how to stop Putin restarting his megalomaniac murder project. For that, Europe needs to have a fully operative collective foreign and defence policy for the first time. President Zelensky is fighting a war that Europe’s leaders need to win; Ukraine is the rampart and bastion of Europe’s defences.

As for Ukraine returning to normal life, this is not possible. Trauma is not being talked about much yet, but I have glimpsed the toll it takes. Trauma will stalk Ukrainians for generations.

However, they have a saying in Odesa, from the days when its first theatre was managed by an Italian who also ran the port’s quarantine. When theatre takings ran low, he would declare a new plague at Constantinople and order all new arrivals detained at their own expense. Then he would use the quarantine income to hire a box-office diva to draw the crowds. And so Odesans say, “The worse the plague, the better the opera.”

Tell us one thing you don’t think people abroad know about Ukraine – but they really should?

From its sea coast to its steppelands, from its unfurling wheatfields to its come-hither beaches, from its cloud-wrapped mountains to its lovat-green rivers, it is unbelievably lovely.