In the hipster Podil district of Kiev, there is a sandwich board that advertises mulled wine, coffee and tea. The sale of alcohol is prohibited under martial law, but a man still sells coffee and tea from a window in the basement. We are surprised to see that it is open.
“How nice that you are still here!” we say. “Of course I am,” he replies indifferently. But this is anything but natural. Although the Ukrainian capital was full of such places before the war, most of them are now closed. Behind his window, man is like a relic of the past.
One thing that characterizes this war is the unusual convergence of things that do not fit together: silence and violence, daily life and fear. When the first Russian bombs fell in the last week of February, I happened to be in the east of the country, in Donbass, where the fighting has been going on for eight years. The violence had already escalated before the invasion planned by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Villages that remained calm for years despite the conflict were suddenly bombed. Many locals felt a sense of impending doom.
“The front went through our village twice, but we never experienced that,” said Olena Makarenko, a social worker in the village of Vrubivka. Two shells fell just far from her house. An ungrateful man in the central square of Kramatorsk prophesied that there would soon be a real war, as if there had been no constant fighting for years. Others avoided the danger: “What could happen? We have long been accustomed to war,” said a local politician.
‘Started’
The day Russia invaded, my colleague Nick Conolly was on the night train from Kyiv and was coming to replace me. I had a ticket for the afternoon return train to the capital. “Nick called me in the middle of the night, ‘It’s started,'” he said.
Concerned that the train stations could become targets, we decided to get off the train as soon as possible. He got off in the small town of Sakhnovshchyna, while our cameraman Zhenya Shylko and I got in the car and started picking him up.
When we arrived, people did not seem to be bothered by the news. They calmly prepared for what might come, waited patiently in long queues in front of ATMs, buying supplies from local stores. There were queues of cars at gas stations.
“Take some food, you do not know when you will get it again,” the saleswoman told us at the bakery. She had just returned from a visit to her daughter in Vienna. We started for the Ukrainian capital with three bags of pies.
Rarely have I experienced such an idyllic cross-country route. People were chatting in the villages. there were fluffy clouds in the sky, which had cleared after days of gray weather.
But from time to time, we could see gusts of smoke on the horizon.
Business as usual, but for how long?
Now, the impact of the war is visible everywhere and Kyiv looks like a ghost town. Like cafes and kiosks, almost all stores have closed except those that sell basic necessities. There are concrete barriers on the roads and intersections and anti-tank barriers, made of steel crossbars and nicknamed hedgehogs, have been set up in front of checkpoints where IDs are requested. According to the government, about half of the residents are believed to have left. Those who stay do not go outside, they usually only go out to shop or walk the dog.
However, in many places it is almost business as usual. Supermarkets are still full, with only alcohol in short supply. In a luxury delicatessen that was popular among affluent Kievans before the war, you can still buy Spanish ham per slice and live lobsters swimming in an aquarium. These, too, are probably pre-war relics whose lives the conflict has temporarily saved and has not yet destroyed.
Running for life
Twenty kilometers (about 12 miles) away is Irpin, a suburb where people have been hiding underground for days, many of them trying to figure out if they should try to get it when no bombing is heard. A woman and her two children were killed there a few days ago. They had almost succeeded when they were hit by a Russian shell. The image with their bodies between their suitcases went viral. We arrived a few days later with several other journalists, easily recognizable by the crowd of people leaving their bulletproof vests and helmets.
Irpin was popular in the bourgeois middle class for whom traffic and real estate prices in Kyiv had become excessive. They moved to new apartment buildings with bright colors, which were not cheap but cheaper than in the center. One square meter cost over 1,000 euros (about $ 1,100). Now, smoke rises from behind the buildings, and shots are heard from afar as dozens of people climb wooden planks to cross the river. The bridge was destroyed far back to slow down the Russian advance. This is one of the “green corridors” for the safe passage of the citizens that the news is talking about.
Today there is a ceasefire. A woman in her 30s, named Daria, who started early in the morning with her father from a village tens of kilometers away, tells us about the damaged military equipment she saw and the corpses that passed. He says they were able to board one of the yellow city buses that pick up people as soon as they reach Ukrainian-controlled territory. “The roads have been destroyed. It was difficult to get here. It is terrible.”
He says he spent two weeks in the basement before he dared to leave. She tells us that Russian soldiers were holding a gun to her head. And that they confiscated people’s phones and looted apartments. Now that she’s here, she’s a little less scared, she can dry her eyes and pet her cat, which she brought with her in a shopping bag. She is going to continue her journey by the yellow bus for her daughter who lives in another part of the city. In one of the neighborhoods where people can still shop in supermarkets, while wondering if the war will come soon.
This article was originally written in German.
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