War by Train: Week 1 in Ukraine
Today marks one week since I crossed the border into Ukraine. A journey that before the war would have taken 10 hours on a direct flight from DC took over 30 hours via two plane rides and two train rides. (I’ll make a separate post on the journey itself and the Ukrainians I met along the way later.)
I spent the first few days in the capital Kyiv getting my bearings and exploring the city. I had never been to Ukraine before this trip and had very little idea of what to expect, let alone during a conflict.
View of Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square, and the victory column marking Ukraine's independence in 1991
While the country may be at war, Kyiv itself is not. At least not as it was in the first weeks of the war. It’s been almost a year since Ukrainian forces pushed back Russian forces in the battle of Kyiv. Since then, the city has not seen major fighting. It has, however, been continuously plagued by air raid sirens which frequently send residents into shelters, mostly at night and sometimes for hours at a time.
That being said, walking around Kyiv it was easy to forget that this is a nation at war: shops and restaurants are open and the streets are full of people. Kyiv is a beautiful city with a rich, palpable cultural history with ornate architecture dotting paved and cobblestoned streets.
That being said, a year after the Russian invasion, the country is very much still at war and every few blocks you will find a reminder. There are destroyed Russian and Ukrainian tanks and shelled-out civilian cars placed prominently on display in the city center. There are frequent army recruitment billboards, posters, signs and enlistment tables. There are memorials to those fallen: small pictures of dead Ukrainian soldiers on a street mural it took me two entire minutes to walk the length of. There are Ukrainian flags speared into the grass of Independence Square commemorating the over 8,000 civilians killed by Russian forces.
There is very little evidence of the Battle of Kyiv, during which residents spent three continuous weeks underground in missile shelters.
Windows blown out by Russian tanks and snipers, or in the course of fighting with Ukrainian soldiers, have been patched or replaced. The damage to buildings has been swiftly and effectively replaced. I’m told by a foreign volunteer fighting for Ukraine that he has watched the remarkable speed with which they have fixed damage from the war, suggesting it comes from a particularly Ukrainian ethos that is loathe to display weakness.
Throughout the course of this war, the Ukrainian people have demonstrated their resilience and their refusal to take a punch lying down. They have such pride for their country and the rebuilding of Kyiv provided me with the first testimony of that fact.
As I type this, an air raid alert just rang throughout the country as a Russian fighter jet crossed into Ukrainian territory. I am currently riding back to Kyiv after two days in the Donbas where the war rages. I witnessed a tank battle and spoke with volunteer medics on the front line: superhumans who gave up the comforts of home to save lives while shelling rings out around them. More on that later.
