Ukraine's new struggle - our Delegate reports from Kiev

The struggle for power in Ukraine is not the only mass campaign being waged in Ukraine. Far from the snowy streets of the capital Kiev, in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, HIV rates are among the highest in Europe, and young Red Cross volunteers have taken to the streets to warn their peers of the dangers of risky sex and injecting drugs.

It's an odd place to visit, defying the mental image sparked by a Soviet town closed for 70 years. Long the secretive home of the Soviet (now Russian) Black Sea fleet, it's now open for business. Located on the west of the achingly beautiful Crimean peninsula, this jewel of a town's glistening architecture is only a fraction of its attraction. There's the Greek ruins at Chernsonesus, which seem to crawl out of the azure sea (I know, it's a cliché, but the sea really IS azure). There's the wine - no bland offie special - robust and tasty, like the brandy. There's the boulevards, the cafes, the balmy climate. And of course, the special thrill for us Bond-reared babes, snapping pics of Soviet subs, (yes, pretending all the while that it's 1975, and a Ukrainian beauty called Svetlana Spankachenko is about to kung-fu kick first our camera, then our skulls, into a worse oblivion than that induced by the local vodka.)

"Sevastopol, Sevastopol, beloved of Russian sailors", goes the old song, and there are plenty here, even though this is modern-day Ukraine. As a port town, it's not just sailors that visit - sex and drugs have taken up residence, and in Ukraine that means HIV infections are rising and rising. Andriy Klepikpov of the International AIDS Alliance recently noted that Ukraine is facing its biggest threat since World War Two - by the end of the decade, 1.5 million of them could be HIV positive. The rate of new infection is the highest in the world.

It's a good analogy; one designed by a Ukrainian to make his compatriots sit up and listen. A call to arms. And Sevastopol has always been good at that. The city was laid waste in 1854 during the Crimean war, and even before Florence Nightingale took up her lamp a bunch of sisters led by the great Dr Nikolai Pirogov helped the wounded. Before the Red Cross was founded, humanitarians were defending Sevastopol's wounded while its fighting force (including one Leo Tolstoy) held off the British, French, Turks and Sardinians for almost a year.

In WW2 (always called "the Great Patriotic War" in the ex-USSR) Sevastopol was again leveled, and its massively outnumbered defenders held out against the German and Romanian attackers for eight months. This effort is commemorated wherever you go. Every school has a museum or a diaporama dedicated to those awful days, right down to replica tanks with "For Stalin" scrawled on them, and helmets punctured by bullets.

Sevastopol's defenders are celebrated in song and story. And now a new breed of young defenders is emerging, defending their town from the spread of HIV. Their weapons are words and brochures; they prefer condoms to Kalashnikovs. Sevastopol's youth Red Cross see their mission as in some way continuing the legacy of their forebears.

Now on the edge of the expanded EU, today's young Ukrainians realise the Virus recognises neither borders nor ethnicities. A good example is fourteen-year-old Eldar Emiruseimov, whose Tatar forebears were kicked out of their Crimean homeland by Stalin in the 40s. Fifty years on, the Crimean Tatars are back in their ancestral homeland, and Eldar has found a niche as a Red Cross peer-to-peer instructor, helping dispel the stigma that condemns many HIV positive people to a life in the shadows. He looks slightly gawky in a t-shirt several sizes too big, but when he talks, people listen. Tensions are high between Tatars and the Ukrainians and Russians they have come to live amongst, but Eldar says "we're all in this together. My friends are Russian and Ukrainians, and I just want to warn people about this disease. It threatens all of us."

(Eldar's story so caught the imagination of the suits in the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies' headquarters in Geneva that he was chosen to personify the organisation's annual appeal, launched on November 23).

The official rate for HIV infection in Ukraine is between one and 1.5 per cent of the population, but local Red Cross workers say in Sevastopol it could be double that. Among the young, "recreational" drug use doesn't mean puffing on a spliff. The first drug young Ukrainians are confronted with is something called "shirka" (slang for "shot"), an opiate milked directly from poppies and sometimes mixed with anti-depressants. It cheap, it's quick, and if you share a needle, it's a potential killer.

Much like Ireland in the '80s, Ukraine is fast discovering a whole new host of realities that have to be confronted. As the AIDS epidemic spreads, people are learning that it's not just "dirty people" - sex workers, drug users, men who have sex with men - that get AIDS. The population at large is having to ask if it makes sense to supply needles to injecting drug users when elderly diabetics have to pay for theirs. And aid agencies are struggling to find non-pejorative ways of saying "AIDS victim" or "contaminated", and seeing how more neutral terms sound in Ukrainian.

On World AIDS Day; whether or not protests continue - I will walk from Kiev's main treatment centre to the Red Ribbon monument nearby. I'll be part of a group of few hundred Ukrainian Red Cross volunteers and HIV positive people who will gather for a in a candlelit vigil, accompanied by a band of drummers. We'll stop at the monument and observe a minute's silence for all those who have died from AIDS related illnesses, and then we'll go to O'Brien's Irish pub and have a few beers. There's a time to make a noise, a time to stay silent, and a time to celebrate the life we have.

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