Here’s how to understand what life is like now in Kyiv: Imagine yourself living normally, going to work, kids at school, and suddenly the air raid sirens go off and you are rushing into subway stations to avoid being bombed.
Sounds like a scene from a black-and-white war movie set in London under the Blitz, doesn’t it? But this is what I’m hearing by phone and WhatsApp from friends and contacts in Kyiv, whom I was interviewing and dining with just two weeks ago: a total sense of unreality as Russian missiles and planes attack a peaceful European city as if Hitler were bombing London in 1940.
Instead it is Vladimir Putin imitating Adolf Hitler in 2022.
‘Something that happens in movies’
“For most people here, it is the first time we’ve experienced war,” I was told Friday by phone by journalist and literary scholar Tetyana Ogarkova, with whom I sat drinking coffee in the center of Kyiv earlier this month. Although Putin first invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, along the border with Russia, and nearly 14,000 Ukrainians have died in the eight years of subsequent fighting, that war was far from the capital.
“We were all convinced that despite the warnings from President Biden, this was a kind of play and Putin would never get to action,” Ogarkova told me. “We couldn’t imagine that this could happen in the 21st century in a European city. Imagine our shock when it becomes real.”
Americans should share Ogarkova’s shock at seeing Ukrainian tanks rolling down her suburban streets in front of her child’s elementary school, as the vehicles raced to escape the Russian bombing of a nearby military base. “This is something that happens in films,” she marveled. “You can’t believe it.”
Yet, she was awoken at 5 a.m. by the terrifying sound of incoming missiles. When she saw scenes on TV of civilians getting hit by rockets, she crammed her family into the car and managed to get them and her parents to the family summer home in a nearby village. Other escapees have not been so lucky, as the highways have become so jammed that cars are stuck for hours, and supplies of gasoline have run out. We were all convinced that despite the warnings from President Biden, this was a kind of play and Putin would never get to action.Ukrainian journalist Tetyana Ogarkova
My Kyiv translator (whose name I am not using for her safety) now takes her elderly mother to the metro underground several times a day because her building has no shelter. Families with crying children are sleeping there with little food or water.
The new Hitler
The main thing for Americans to grasp is that the Ukrainian people are victims of a war criminal, who believes he can change Europe’s borders by violence. He argues that Russia has a historic right to repossess Ukraine. If he succeeds in Ukraine, there’s no telling what he will try next.
“What we hear from Putin,” says Ogarkova, “is like a man with delirium, who is mentally ill, perhaps because of COVID and isolation.
“This is extremely dangerous not only for Ukraine but for Europe, and the U.S., and the whole world.”
Indeed, Putin’s delusions include the belief that the Ukrainian army will surrender to Russia (he has called on it to do so). But so far that army is fighting back fiercely — even though it is woefully out gunned and has very little capacity to counter Russian planes and missiles. And the Russian leader seems to have misjudged the level of resistance his army will meet from civilian volunteers.
