Fatih Şahin Фатіх Шахін Ukraine, business and international experience — since 2004
National Days & Anniversaries

New Year 2016

A New Year greeting from the middle of a difficult decade, written by someone who had by then been here long enough to have opinions about which years were hard and why.

A joyful woman spins a hand made star above her head
Photo: Halyna Kuchmanych · CC BY-SA 4.0

Happy New Year.

Twelve years in, and I had reached the stage where I could compare. I knew what a good year here looked like and what a bad one felt like from inside a company, which is a different vantage point from reading about it.

What I would say about that particular New Year is that people were tired and the celebrating happened anyway. Same fireworks in the courtyards, same strangers in the street at two in the morning, same insistence.

I have come to regard that insistence as the most reliable thing about this place. Not optimism exactly — Ukrainians are not naive and do not appreciate being described as though they were. Something more stubborn than optimism.

A good year to your household.

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