KIEV — A sense of normalcy in Ukraine’s capital masks deep and growing anxiety about the war with Russia. The dreadful weather, cold and rainy, doesn’t help.
The war has made it difficult for people to unwind. At night in the city center, attractive young people smoke slim cigarettes and drink pale lagers outside stylish bars—until the midnight curfew forces a premature last call.
Russian drone-and-missile attacks across the country have escalated in recent weeks, including in Kiev, where the calm of a rainy night cannot be taken for granted. Air-raid sirens routinely send residents to bomb shelters, while stragglers stay put in their apartments or workplaces, taking their chances, though not necessarily liking them. One bartender tells me on Wednesday, not long after I arrive, that most people don’t bother heading for shelter. “It’s too disruptive of your work and studies,” she says. “You need to have a life.”
At dinner the next night I talk about the air raid sirens with Denys, a thirtysomething man who works for a humanitarian organization. Whenever the sirens activate, Denys says, he checks Ukrainian military monitoring channels on the social media app Telegram to find out what kind and quantity of weapons are heading to Ukraine. He’s also developed some personal techniques to figure out whether sheltering is worth it. “I know that if there are many Shaheds [Iranian-made drones that Russia uses to attack Ukraine], but no missiles, then ballistic missiles will come later,” he says, explaining that the Shaheds distract and deplete air defense systems, clearing the way. “They sound like a motorcycle in the sky.”
Gesturing toward the waitress and chef, I ask, “Are workers required to take shelter?” Mostly not, he says. “If every company enforced that rule,” Denys says, “the economy would collapse.”
Considering the frequency of the sirens, Denys may be right. I’ve lost count of the number of times the sirens sounded and I went down to my hotel’s bomb shelter, where I slept Thursday night (or rather, tried to sleep, amid the snores and pre-recorded updates from a mounted wall speaker). “We heard there’s going to be a massive attack tonight,” two staffers from the International Energy Agency tell me in the stairwell around 11:30PM, as we headed underground. They were right. “Russia is carrying out a ‘massive attack’ on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, top Ukraine officials said Friday, with parts of the capital Kyiv left without power,” reported CNN overnight.
The shelter is in a parking garage two floors below ground level and is furnished with bean bags, desks and chairs, and even decently comfortable beds. Last year, this very hotel, the Radisson Blu in the city center, drew controversy for refusing non-guests entry into the shelter. “If I am their guest today, I can use the shelter and survive,” complained one Kateryna Smachylo on Instagram stories. “But if not tomorrow, I have to stand under the ballistics.”
I can see her point, but before my trip, it seemed a mark in Radisson Blu’s favor that Kievans were clamoring to use its bomb shelter. In the days leading up to my departure, I needed something to tell my wife.
The journey from America was grueling, with flights from DC to Istanbul to Chisinau, Moldova—and that was the easy part. You cannot get to Kiev by air, only by ground, either road or rail, in my case, the former.
A Ukrainian driver, a tough-looking man of around 40 who somehow understood my badly broken Russian, picked me up from the airport and we embarked on a road trip that wound up taking around 10 hours. It began in the post-Soviet concrete environs of Moldova, a setting so soul-crushing that two-and-a-half hours later the sight of war-torn Ukraine—or rather, a long line of cars leading to its tightly controlled border—raised my spirits. Since my driver is a father of three children, a large family by Ukrainian standards, he’s exempt from laws restricting travel of military-aged males out of the country. After a thorough check by both Moldovan and Ukrainian border guards of our passports and vehicle, we enter Ukraine.
Outside the rain-spattered windows, the Ukrainian landscape schematized on the yellow-and-blue national flag blurred by. The famous golden wheat was harvested months ago, but the ripening corn has taken on a gold-ish hue, a decent visual substitute for the country’s most photogenic crop. The sky, however, is gray and foreboding, without a hint of blue.
After arriving at the Radisson, I meet a young man from the Odessa province in the lobby and make small talk. As often happens in Kiev, casual questions quickly bring to the surface the kind of deep emotions that many Ukrainians, after a show of nonchalance, eagerly share when prompted. Though demure and physically slight, he swells with pride—deep and genuine pride, it seems to me—in the success that Ukrainian forces had early in the war repelling the Russian invaders, but he acknowledges that the current phase of fighting is very different.
“If Kiev had fallen, the whole country would have fallen,” the young man says, as though I, as a stranger of war, might not understand this fundamental point. “Now the fighting is mostly in the east, and our soldiers are doing well, but there’s not enough manpower.” Seeming embarrassed, he clarifies that unspecified “health issues” and general frailty prevent him from enlisting. And indeed, it’s hard to imagine him holding an AK-74, much less using one to shoot a Russian soldier. “A long war like this one is very hard for a country,” he adds, grimacing.
Ordinary Ukrainians, no less than officials and experts in Kiev, seem generally aware that the manpower shortage is acute, especially among infantry units. The Ukrainians are bold and innovative and fighting with desperation for their nation’s very survival, but they are outmatched and need the war to end. According to a Gallup survey published in August, a strong majority of Ukrainians—69 percent—say their government should seek to end the war as soon as possible through negotiations, while 24 percent prefer fighting until Russia is defeated. On my trip I meet one emphatic member of the 24 percent, a sunshiny barista named Valeria.
On Thursday morning, she pulls my double shot of espresso, which turns out to be excellent (as I learned on this trip, Ukrainians are very good at coffee), and we talk about architecture, about the war, and about daily life in Kiev. She is from Zaporizhzhia, one of the four provinces that Putin claimed to annex in 2022. Today Russia controls around 70 percent of the province, though not its capital city. During my stay in Ukraine, the province came under heavy ballistic missile attacks.
Thinking of the Gallup survey, I ask her how she thinks the war will end, in negotiations or in victory. “Putin won’t do negotiations, so it will end in victory,” she says, smiling. Ukraine, she adds, will take back all of Zaporizhzia, and she will live there again. As she turns to help another customer, I look at her blonde hair and remember the golden fields of corn and the storms on the horizon.
The post Dispatch from Beleaguered Kiev appeared first on The American Conservative.
Google Search
