Bart Somers, Mayor of Mechelen

Mechelen, the city in the Belgian region of Flanders just around 20 km north of Brussels, was the first one in the country to set up an emergency village for Ukrainians displaced by the full-scale Russian invasion. The Ukrainian flag flies on the city’s central square next to the Belgian one, and the city mayor, Bart Somers, personally travels to Ukraine to accompany humanitarian aid the city hall raises for their twin city of Lviv.

Ukrinform sat down with Bart Somers in his office, decorated with artworks of a Ukrainian artist and memorabilia from the Unbroken project in Lviv, about the city’s effort to support Ukraine and help Ukrainians who arrived after 2022, discuss public moods toward Ukraine as the war rages on, the perception of the urgency of the Russian threat, the wider geopolitical turbulence, the importance of Ukraine’s cultural and historical identity, which Russia has been trying to erase, and much more.

WHEN THE BIG WAR STARTED, I WAS ANGRY AND FRUSTRATED

- Just the other day, Ambassador of Ukraine to Belgium Yaroslav Melnyk said Mechelen is a “true friend” of Ukraine. And I realize that your personal contribution to the effort to help our country and our people is huge. So where is your affiliation with Ukraine’s cause rooted?

- This all goes way back. In fact, when I was a student, I traveled to Berlin along with my friends to celebrate the moment the Berlin Wall fell. It left a very deep impression on me because I saw the joy of millions of people becoming free from the Communist occupation. For me, that was something that determined my political life, to be honest. I became a liberal, somebody very strongly believing in democracy, freedom, and human rights.

When I was a member of parliament many years later, I saw the uprising of the Ukrainian people who stood up against dictators in the Maidan. I had to go there and show my solidarity. I convinced several fellow lawmakers to come along and we arrived in Kyiv where we saw tens of thousands of courageous people protecting each other. After that, I visited Ukraine several times, went to Lviv together with Luc Jacobs, our Ambassador to Ukraine, who was then serving his first term as the head of the Embassy in Kyiv. So I’ve been following the developments in Ukraine very closely.

- How did you react to the full-scale invasion? Do you remember those days?

- In the immediate runup to the full-scale invasion, I felt that something bad might happen, but many just couldn’t believe a big war would start.

And when it did start, I pretty much couldn't function. On day 1 I sat in front of my TV from early morning and until late night. I couldn't even sleep I. I was angry. I was frustrated about not being able to do anything about it. Everybody here thought it would be a great feat for Ukrainians if they are able to keep on fighting back for 48 hours… And I had the same feeling to be honest.

People just couldn’t grasp the fact that Russia unleashed a full-scale war on European soil in the 21st century – all that brutality toward innocent people driven by imperialist ideas.

So I was asking myself what I can do just being a mayor of a Belgian city. First of all, there were some symbolic things, showing a lot of solidarity and sympathy with Ukrainians.

I was so focused on this war, almost obsessed, that at one moment I even thought I would have volunteered to fight, had I been a 30-year-old man…

The first practical things in terms of support started when refugees started arriving from Ukraine and we realized we have to provide shelter for them. Mechelen became the first city in Belgium that set up an emergency village for Ukrainians. In the end, we were able to shelter more than 1,000 Ukrainian citizens, many of whom still live in our city today. And we did it very fast. And this drive also has a historical explanation. We’ve long had a reputation and mentality of a city focused on human rights.

In World War One, 95 percent of our city residents became refugees, fleeing from Germans. 50,000 of the 65,000 of our people moved to the Netherlands or to the UK. My own grandfather, who was 40 years old in the beginning of the first world war, lived in a refugee camp in the Netherlands.

- So it is in your blood…

- Exactly. We know it all. We also did our share in responding to the refugee crisis in the Middle East. We were the only city that said, publicly, that we would take in refugees because we are obliged to, due to our own history.

We have in our city a Holocaust museum because in the Second World War, Jews were brought here before they were put on trains to Auschwitz – 24,000 of them. The museum is former army barracks where the Jews were held before departure. That’s in the city center, and people see it every day.

Also, I strongly believe in the European project.  By the way, Ludwig van Beethoven, whose music was used for the EU anthem, is connected to Mechelen through his grandfather, who lived in our city. So I believe we have responsibility before our European brothers and sisters in Ukraine who put up a fight against Russia, an almost impossible fight against the brutal dictator using a toolkit we saw in the in WW2.

IF WE ALLOW PUTIN TO GO ON, WE WILL BETRAY WHO WE ARE

- Do you draw parallels between Putin and Hitler?

- For me, it was very clear. All things he said about Crimea, about Donbas was exactly the same as Hitler said about Sudeten in Czechoslovakia. The same rhetoric, the same false arguments, the same brutality, the same explanation: “If I get that, I will stop…” Of course, he will not stop.

He has this arrogance toward the Ukrainian people, claiming they do not exist, that they are all Russians.

And if we allow him to just go on, we will betray our values, we will betray who we are. We have to do something. Understandably, the support for Ukraine might fluctuate over the years of war but for me it’s always present. You can see it in my office.

I use every platform I have to speak up about Ukraine. When I was I was vice-minister president, I convinced my government to raise money and build in Lviv a hospital where former prisoners of war, who had been tortured by the Russians, could recover and receive psychiatric help. That’s something I'm very proud of. It was some EUR 1.5 million for the project. We also drove to Lviv last summer a convoy of police cars that we donated to the city. And we will go back there in March, with more police cars, fire brigade cars, with other humanitarian assistance we can offer.

I also convinced the mayor of Turnhout to sign off a twinning agreement with a Ukrainian town, and now we are speaking with Bruges to this end. I’m seeking to ensure that a whole network of such sister towns emerges. For the next year, we will draw up for an investment project in Lviv 450,000 euros from the budget of our small city, for the first time in its history, which is also totally unusual for Belgium. And I’m working to convince other mayors to follow suit. We also help Lviv navigate EU offices to get European funding as well.

IN PERCEIVING A THREAT OF WAR, BELGIANS NEED A MENTALITY SWITCH

- How do Belgians perceive major threats, such as a potential war?

You have to understand the mindset of the late 1980s, when many of us genuinely believed we were witnessing what Francis Fukuyama famously described as “the end of history.” With the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a widespread sense that the great ideological struggle had been settled, and that liberal democracy — together with human rights, prosperity and liberal values — would gradually take root everywhere. In that context, many young people reasoned that joining the army no longer made sense. War felt like something that belonged to the past.

For Belgians in particular, the idea of war or major disruption became very distant. That is why today’s reality is such a harsh awakening. Now that the threat is clearly out there again, we need a real mental shift. We have to prepare people, and make them feel resilient and strong in the face of threats — whatever form they may take.

Interestingly, we are now seeing more and more young people voluntarily choosing to join the army, and those numbers are growing.

There is something fundamentally changing in this world, and we have to be prepared. It may take time, but small steps need to be taken. We’re the second city in Belgium that created a platform where people could join a kind of voluntary corpse of first responders in the event of a disaster.

They helped the city three years ago during a huge storm that disrupted power lines. They would inform residents, checking on people to find out what they might need. We also have courses where residents are taught first aid skills, to help the wounded, to properly tie a tourniquet and so on.

These are the small things we have to build on. We are not thinking immediately about war, but those are the things we must do. People need to learn things. We live in a crazy world where we have a brutal dictator Putin and besides that the uncertainty brought by the United States where Donald Trump says different things every day and seems to not embrace the same values as we do. So we start realizing that we are on our own in Europe.

That's something that can give us a push to unify and be stronger.

It might, of course, create a sense of fatalism in some, but fatalism can be overcome, and after it comes better resilience.  There’s a different to five years ago where a sort of pacifism prevailed but now we see the atrocities, we see the weapons Russia employs, and we start to understand that a counterforce is required. This thinking is really present in the political world, and starting to develop in society.

WE CAN NO LONGER RELY ONLY ON SOFT POWER

- Mark Rutte might be helpful as he openly warns Europe about the Russian threat. What about Theo Francken, your defense minister?

- He puts this on the agenda. He creates a climate for building up confidence and assertiveness. Even if he does that for political purposes, that’s something we need today. Also, our prime minister Bart De Wever, I think, is doing the same. We can no longer rely solely on soft power. We need hard power and we have to be prepared and take on responsibility. You see it with GDP expenses for military. Previously, we didn’t invest in our army that was a caricature force. Now the buildup is going really fast.

What’s also important is that even the bigger countries, like Germany and France, now understand that in the world of tomorrow, they are nobody on their own. We need each other, so we have to integrate. Even many of the political forces who used to be isolationist now root for unification. Interesting discussions are now ongoing, such as do we need to buy those F35s or should we produce our own?

Of course, this will all take time but we have to understand that our struggle is only ours.

- Do you think Ukraine is already practically part of Europe’s defense and security architecture that is being reshaped?

- It’s completely against your will, but you now have one of the most experienced and motivated armies in the world. You have the most innovative people in the world. You are holding back a bully who is four times bigger than you.

It doesn’t take to be a military expert to notice that the role of drones and tanks today is completely different from what it was just years ago. Drones are becoming much more important, and it’s from you where we should learn about it all. It’s not you learning from us anymore. The Germans, the French, the Brits, the big ones in Europe, they all learn from you at the moment.

When the war stops, whenever it might happen, the ties between Ukraine and the European Union are so strong that it’s unthinkable for you not to become part of our family, also in the military way.

- What do people in Belgium think about Ukraine’s accession to the EU? Do they share your opinion?

- First of all, in a democracy, different people will always have different opinions. Across Europe, there is an open and ongoing debate about Ukraine’s path towards EU membership. In Western Europe, that debate is maybe framed more openly, partly because the immediate economic implications are perceived as more limited than in countries that are geographically and economically closer to Ukraine.

Still, on the moral part, you simply deserve it. We are obliged to open the door of the European Union for Ukrainian people after all the suffering you have undergone. It has to be seen as an honor for Europe that you become part of it.

There’s overall support for the Ukraine cause – everyone in the political spectrum from the moderate left and even to the extreme right in Belgium are on your side.

UKRAINE’S ACCESSION TO THE EU WILL BENEFIT ALL

- Do you believe Ukraine could also make the EU economically stronger, being such a big country with vast resources?

- Both the EU will make Ukraine stronger and Ukraine will make the EU stronger. It’s a win-win. Actually, it was the same with Poland. Indeed, initially, a lot of Polish workers came to Belgium, those were really handy people, and they drew criticism as right-wing parties claimed they had taken their jobs. But there are no longer that many Polish people here. They returned to their home country after building up some capital, they invested in Poland, and at the moment, the economy in Poland is growing so fast that we become richer. Now we can export some products there which they can afford buying. And that's the way the European Union functions. I remember the same discussion about Spain and Italy when I was much younger…

We will also invest in a rebuilding program for Ukraine, of course, as the US did with their Marshall plan back in the day. Trump may be complaining about the European Union, but the Americans after WW2 very much promoted the idea of the EU because Europe was a ruin. The US wanted Europeans to work together and create a supranational entity in order to then create a market of consumers that could buy American products. At a certain moment, that market also started producing things, and we started selling those to the Americans, and we both win. That's the logic of how economics works.

- So we need to do our homework to implement reforms.

- Of course, there must be high standards of transparency of the country’s functioning and so on, but if I look at Hungary, that’s not a very high standard. And your ambition has to be to do better.

I see corruption in Hungary, I see problems with how democracy functions there, and I hope it will end in a few months, in April, when someone else will take over from this Putin collaborator. He has destroyed this country. The youths are running from there, and it’s now like an elderly home.

Every country has to contribute and to work toward the European values, and we can only become better from it.

- What could you tell us about the life of war-displaced Ukrainians here?

- With the total population in Mechelen of 90,000, at least 1,500 are Ukrainians who are registered here. Most of those who came after 2022 were women, many with children. And in their mind, they wanted to go back as soon as possible, hoping they would stay for a few weeks or months.

Now their kids have to attend school and learn Dutch, and after that many attended online classes in Ukrainian schools. But that’s really difficult. Now most Ukrainian kids – and their parents – already speak Dutch. The young ones make new friends, their mothers have found jobs, they rent apartments, develop a social network here, so going back at the end of the war will not be evident for everybody.

So that will be one of the challenges Ukraine might face after the war ends.

Even though the demands to Ukrainians under temporary protection are lower than to other immigrants, because even political refugees are obliged to learn our language, find a job, Ukrainians still do this all.

YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE PROUD OF YOUR HERITAGE

- It is good that you help the Ukrainian community work toward ensuring that their children do not forget about their roots. In the Ukrainian House you opened for Ukrainians in Mechelen, activists are doing just that.

- Indeed, you always have to be proud of your roots and heritage wherever you are. But hope a lot of those people go back and help rebuild up the country when the moment comes.

And, speaking of the roots, I know how important for Ukrainians is their national identity. Putin has been consistently trying to destroy it, but with the war, he actually unified Ukrainians. Your identity is now stronger than ever. And the shift toward using Ukrainian language by many of those who had previously spoken Russian is also evident.

By the way, if you speak with Flemish people about identity, the importance of it, and how it can grow out of conflict, they will totally understand.

In our history, of course, in a completely different setting, we experienced cultural emancipation by the French, and our language was also pushed out. When Belgium was founded in 1830, the ambition was to be a French-speaking country, and the bourgeoisie spoke French. If you wanted to study at University, it had to be in French, so my grandfather couldn't study as he was a Dutch speaker.

So we do understand what the Ukrainian people have been going through.

But now the ultimate goal is to help Ukraine win this war and join the EU – and NATO – as soon as possible. For me it’s clear as it can be. Ukraine is part of European reality. And more than that, you’re the shield of Europe at the moment. You’re protecting us against a brutal dictator. For us this is important. You are Europe. We are the same.

Ievgen Matiushenko, Mechelen

Photos provided by Mechelen City Hall