"Would you prefer 204 or 1406?" At the foot of the hill overlooking the famous Maidan Nezalezhnosti ("Independence Square"), atop granite steps and planted terraces, only a few windows of a Stalinist skyscraper glow in the Kyiv night. The Hotel Ukraine is far from full in the spring of 2024 but in wartime every detail takes on importance. "Second or fourteenth floor?" asked Iryna Mountianou from behind the counter, with a shy smile and wearing a functional, dated hotel-issued suit.

The lower rooms are closer to the shelter but some customers still prefer the panoramic view from the higher floors. "People from Kharkiv, for example, don't mind staying on the thirteenth and fourteenth floors," explained the head receptionist. "Poor people, they see so much of it these days. What matters to them is a peaceful weekend with a beautiful view over the city."

But for how long? The hotel is for sale, with its 363 rooms, 22,000 square meters and a unique view over Maidan, the political agora where the future of the country is regularly played out. Opened in 1961 by the leaders of the Soviet Union, this piece of national heritage remained state property after independence in 1991, and the decision to part with the capital's most famous hotel was taken on April 23 by the Ukrainian government. The war is to blame, having killed off tourism. The hotel is in debt to the tune of 45 million hryvnias (just over €1 million) and the memorabilia of this landmark of local Sovietism, then post-communism, will be auctioned off.

Ideal war trophy

New York, Berlin, London and Beijing... None of the clock faces in the lobby of the Hotel Ukraine tell Moscow time anymore. In 2022, the staff saw the wind of disaster that blew away the last customer on February 26 – two days after the start of the "great invasion." Everyone understood that this building, that looks like a neo-Gothic bank overlooking Khrechtchatyk, Kyiv's main street, represented an ideal trophy for the Russian columns. "The enemy wanted to take the capital and parade on Khrechtchatyk," recalled hotel manager Bohdan Vasyliv. "Rumor had it that groups of saboteurs in the city were preparing to occupy it, and we took it in turns to protect it."

For weeks on end, sandbags blocked the building's doors. The Maidan sentinel seemed extinguished forever. Then, in June 2022, the blue letters of the sign lit up again. The guards resumed their shifts outside the ground floor's glass doors. Sitting in a velvet armchair, a bit like a lookout at the bottom of a housing estate apartment block, each of them went back to noting down on a spiral notebook the number plates of the cars parked in the hotel parking lot, perhaps an old "Sov" habit or the normal behavior of a night watchman in a besieged country.

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