Returning home after six months of absence turned into not a cultural but a driver's shock: the ride from the Boryspil international airport reminded me of an old journalist memory and an even older Soviet anecdote about the advantages of traveling by tanks. "Well, girl, you're something, we're driving on one of the best roads in Ukraine!" - the driver of our car reacted in surprise to my "tank" passage. But it was precisely then that I firmly became convinced that with such quality of roads - or rather the lack of it - drivers should choose tanks or APCs for driving...
Several years have passed since then, but the number of potholes, cracks, and "waves" on urban and intercity roads of Ukraine has hardly decreased. And this despite the fact that international transport corridors pass through Ukraine, connecting Portugal with Russia, Italy with the Baltic countries, modern Varangians with today's Greeks. The states participating in the grandiose construction of trans-European transport corridors attract enormous funds, significant technical innovations, and so on to the implementation of these plans. Ukraine has repeatedly declared its participation in international transport projects, even won a tender for the construction of high-speed highways in Italy - but for its own roads there is somehow not enough time. True, in recent years the quality of intercity and international roads has been improving, but you just have to turn off the Zhytomyr or, say, Odesa highway... Immediately the body gets into an extreme situation, not to mention the car. If you are traveling in a Jeep or a UAZ - it's still nothing, you will survive, and the car will not be left without wheels. But it is better not to drive a passenger car on rural roads: they say that risk is a noble cause, but is it worth risking?
A similar question has repeatedly arisen among many foreigners who have had to travel through Ukraine. Hungarian and Italian diplomats are generally convinced that poor Ukrainian roads hinder the inflow of investments into the state and scare away potential investors. Frankly, I can very easily imagine what feelings Western businessmen have when crossing the state border of Ukraine, for example, at the Tysa checkpoint: on the Hungarian and Slovak sides - a smooth highway, on the Ukrainian side - a broken, potholed road. "Ukrainians should not hang national flags on their borders - the terrible roads will immediately show which country's territory you are on," foreigners assert. And they recall their native German autobahns, high-speed highways of Hungary, Slovenia, Italy.
And I would advise Ukrainian drivers to find an opportunity - and one fine day go abroad, using their four-wheeled friend, and simply drive on European highways, enjoying the roads themselves and the surrounding landscape.