The British brain surgeon who joined the fight against corruption in Ukraine

Doctor and acclaimed author Henry Marsh had worked in Kiev for more than 20 years – then found himself in the middle of a revolution

I went to Kiev in December last year. The hospital where I work is in the centre of Kiev and only a few hundred yards away from Independence Square where Maidan – the demonstration against Yanukovych and his government – was in full swing. I helped operate on a young woman with a large brain tumour and saw the usual long queue of patients with awful problems in the dark and windowless corridor outside my colleague’s cramped little office.

All this has changed. Russia has invaded eastern Ukraine and the problem now is about Russia’s place in the modern world. Putin has replaced the dubious altruism of communism with the mystical pan-Slavism that has been the traditional response of some Russians to the existential threat they felt Russia faced from the west (which now takes the form of Nato). In this perspective, Ukraine is seen as part of Russia’s ancient heritage, while Ukraine’s move towards the west is a betrayal of this heritage and needs to be punished. The Russian equivalent of English jokes about the stupid Irish are told about Ukrainians. I suspect the closest analogy with many Russians’ view of Ukraine is with the patronising, colonial attitudes many people in England had toward Ireland in the past. The Soviet Union was, after all, the last of the great Empires and Putin has said that its demise was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Putin wants Russia to be a Great Power once again.

Equally important – perhaps more important – is the fact that Putin runs Russia on the same extractive, corrupt principles as Yanukovych ran Ukraine, and the success of Maidan at his back door has been a real threat to his own system of rule. It seems that Ukraine will pay a terrible price – it already has in terms of lives lost or ruined – for Russia’s failure to escape its past. I will be back in Kiev in December. I do not know what I will find, apart from a list of patients with difficult brain tumours and other neurosurgical problems waiting patiently outside Igor’s office.