“We get the middle finger from them sometimes as they come out,” says Dymphna, one of the roughly two dozen protesters gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Dublin on Thursday morning.
As if to illustrate her point, a Garda vehicle blocking the front of the embassy entrances moves aside to let out a diplomatic car.
“Watch this,” she says.
The car’s driver waves to the protesters before putting up the middle finger as he pulls on to the road.
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The protesters, unfazed, respond with shouts of “shame on you” and “disgrace” as the car drives away.
The same scene plays out almost every day, explains one demonstrator.
Dymphna, from Rathmines, says she has been protesting at the embassy on Orwell Road since “day one”, referring to the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022.
The goal, she says, is to show Russia that Irish people still care about Ukraine at a time when war weariness seems to be taking hold in many European countries following two years of bloody conflict
Since then, the protesters have not missed a single day. “Not Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. The numbers might be small but there’s always a presence,” she says.
There is a core group of 50 people who turn up at different points during the day with Ukrainian flags and hand-painted signs decrying Russian human rights abuses. Dymphna suggests it may be the longest running continuous protest in Irish history.
The goal, she says, is to show Russia that Irish people still care about Ukraine at a time when war weariness seems to be taking hold in many European countries following two years of bloody conflict.
“It’s to tell the Kremlin we’re aware of what you’re doing, and we don’t believe your lies,” she adds.
Dympna says she started protesting out of anger but continued because of the bond with her fellow demonstrators, with the group having since evolved into a tight-knit community.
“I was so impressed with their empathy because it wasn’t just people concerned about the erosion of democracy. They were concerned about what the Ukrainian people were going through, and I thought ‘yes, I like that.’”
This month the group published an anthology of poems and essays called We Stand with Ukraine, with all royalties going to a Ukrainian not-for-profit organisation.
While the protesters receive occasional abuse, many people driving by on Thursday beeped their horns in encouragement.
Dymphna says a lot more people have been beeping in the past week, since the suspicious death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony. The protesters’ fire “is burning stronger now” after Navalny’s death, she says.
Another protester, Fidelma, who has just come from having a root canal, is holding up a sign calling for the Russian authorities to return Navalny’s body to his family.
‘There is no trade, there’s no investment, there is no justification for an embassy of this size. The Russians in my view should be told to reduce it to the same size as Ireland’s embassy in Moscow, about three people’
— Mark Canning, protester at the Russian embassy
“It’s shocking because it shows [Russian president Vladimir Putin] will kill people to stay in power. The opposition has no chance,” she says.
Mark Canning has also been protesting since “day one”. Part of his reason for being there is the “brazen attitude shown” by Russian ambassador Yuriy Filatov and his associates as they stick to Moscow’s view.
“The other thing that certainly bothers me a lot is why we tolerate this bloated embassy in the heart of Dublin,” he says.
Canning welcomes the reduction of embassy staff from 30 to about 14 since the start of the war, the result of the Irish Government freezing the issuance of new diplomatic visas. However, he believes the numbers should be reduced further.
“There is no trade, there’s no investment, there is no justification for an embassy of this size,” he says. “The Russians in my view should be told to reduce it to the same size as Ireland’s embassy in Moscow, about three people.”
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