Habeck in the Ukraine: Between atrocities of war and reconstruction

During his visit to Ukraine, Economics Minister Habeck also traveled to the village of Jahidne with President Zelenskyy. Witnesses there reported atrocities in a basement. But it was also about help – especially for reconstruction.

It is his first visit after the beginning of the Russian war of aggression in the whole of Ukraine. Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck paid a visit to the country, including the small village of Jahidne north of Kiev. Together with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Vice-Chancellor visited a basement where Russian soldiers had held hundreds of villagers for weeks.

“I was really impressed by the emotional depth – and I want to say this explicitly – of a president who has had his country at war for a year now,” said Habeck. “I would like to sum it up for myself that the humanity with which this entire situation is still being looked at and acted upon, so terrible and so bad some decisions are to be made, really impressed me.”

The traces of the occupation are still visible today. Many houses in Jahidne are destroyed or damaged. At the same time, however, the village is being rebuilt. Many windows have already been replaced, and people have piled up remains of weapons and bullets. But the village cannot forget one thing: the cellar, in which hundreds of inhabitants were crammed together for weeks.

Names of the dead on basement walls

“They gathered all the people on the streets,” Ivan Petrovich recalls. “They gathered the people, surrounded them from behind and on the sides with weapons and said: Go into the school basement, we will protect you! It was not explained what the point of taking us there was.”

About 350 people had to stay in the basement for weeks. Not all survived. In order not to forget the dead, people scribbled their names on the basement walls. They are still there today – also visible to Economics Minister Habeck.

He was particularly impressed by the Ukrainian President’s emotional reaction. “Having seen all this, I can only wish that the President of Russia spends the rest of his days in a basement with a bucket instead of a toilet,” Zelenskyy later told journalists.

Military, financial and economic aid

But Habeck didn’t just travel to the Ukraine to see the consequences of the war and occupation. With him came a delegation of high-ranking business representatives. And the talks that he has had in Ukraine so far have mainly been about further military, financial and economic aid.

According to Habeck, Ukraine already wants to send a strong signal of reconstruction. He expects that the talks, for example with the energy minister and the economy minister of Ukraine, will enable the Ukrainian economy and thus the European economy to “take a step forward”.

A first step is the relaunch of the German-Ukrainian energy partnership. According to Habeck, Ukraine wants to decentralize and broaden its energy system. Germany and Ukraine have had a formal energy partnership since 2020. It is actually about the turn towards more climate-friendly energy production. However, since Russia attacked all of Ukraine, the focus has been on repairing and maintaining the power grid.