Thread by @olgatokariuk

“The atmosphere in Kiev is surreal”. This is the phrase I’m hearing often from international reporters, who have flocked in droves to the Ukrainian capital. It’s something I was thinking about too".
My latest - please, @EveningStandard, it's #KyivNotKiev
standard.co.uk/insider/ukrain…

The atmosphere is surreal because everything looks surprisingly normal in Kiev — as if there were not 140,000 Russian troops stationed at Ukraine’s borders. People go to work, send their children to school and proceed with their daily routine.

In fact, I don’t know any Ukrainians who have fled Kiev so far because of the worrying news — mostly spread by the Western media — that Russia might attack Ukraine ‘any time now’. I know that some Americans, after receiving alerts from the US embassy in Ukraine, left the country

But for others in Kiev, little has changed. Or at least it looks like that on the first glance. Proceeding with business as usual is yet another way for Ukrainians to show their resilience, as if to say “Putin, we will not let you disrupt our lives”.

For many, working days go on as normal; it’s the weekends that have become very different. They are less about having fun and spending time with friends and family, but more about learning survival skills and training to resist a possible Russian attack.

Kseniya Kharchenko, an editor in a publishing house and a single mother, has spent the last two weekends learning how to survive in a city at war and provide first aid. “I learned how to use tourniquets and bandages, to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and to use a defibrillator”

Checking the closest bomb shelter — and making sure it is open and can actually host people (and wasn’t transformed into a strip club or a pub) — is yet another weekend task for many Kievites now.

I attended territorial defence drills not long ago. Men and women, young people in their early twenties, those over 50. IT specialists, clinical researchers, translators and football trainers from Monday to Friday, on Saturday they train with mock weapons to defend their city.

While the determination to resist is definitely there, so is the anxiety. The state of perpetual uncertainty — will Putin invade or not? — is exhausting and drains mental and psychological resources.

A solution I found for myself is to limit my news consumption on the weekends and do more physical activity, such as ice skating with my child. To survive in a war one needs to be fit, right?

Bitter jokes aside, it’s the children we are worried about the most. We, the middle-aged Ukrainians, came of age in a peaceful Ukraine and were shocked when Russia attacked in 2014. Our children, and those who were kids in 2014, have grown up in a country at war.

And while my six-year-old child knows that Ukraine is at war with Russia, I am wary of discussing with them that our still peaceful life in Kyiv could soon be overturned in a blink of an eye.
standard.co.uk/insider/ukrain…