Go East

Former Kyiv Post editor Greg Bloom returned to Ukraine last year after a four-year hiatus to update Lonely Planet’s Ukraine guide. This is the fifth of several columns documenting his travels. Tourist itineraries in Ukraine are dominated by Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, Crimea and the Carpathians. Remove the central and eastern portions of the country from the map and your average tourist probably wouldn’t notice. My swing through Central Ukraine had borne unexpected fruit. Would the industrial east do likewise? I wasn’t confident. Eastern Ukraine used to possess a gritty Soviet-museum quality, a la Belarus, that used to attract some foreign tourists. But those Soviet stereotypes began to disappear in a blaze of bling as the region got richer in the late 1990s. As I boarded an eastbound marshrutka, I could think of only one reason today... [read full story]