After Maidan toppled Yanukovych, Nayyem went into politics, and he now runs the State Agency for Restoration of Ukraine, tasked with dealing with the destruction wrought by nearly two years of Russian invasion.

“In the first years, it was a sad anniversary because of all the people killed,” he said, in an interview last week at his office in the hulking ministry of infrastructure building in central Kyiv.

“We gathered all the information we could find from Soviet times, found some older experts who remembered different contingency plans, and on the third day after the explosion, our team was on the ground.

A replacement pipeline to bring water to large parts of the surrounding region is currently the agency’s biggest project – 144km (90 miles) long and with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Still, one repaired bridge can reduce travel time to certain places by several hours, a reality Nayyem appreciated more when his brother Masi, a Ukrainian soldier, was injured at the front last summer.

Nayyem said he would not take part in any official commemorations, but would try to make it to the square late in the evening, where he has a tradition of meeting up with various people who were there at the beginning of the revolution and went on to different careers in politics, business or the army.

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