These served as a stark reminder of what’s at stake: the lives of the Ukrainian people, the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state, and the right to exist in relative peace. “Being captured means being dead.” And reports of atrocities flowed in from the east: the bombing of a school that had served as a shelter in Luhansk, a 12-year old boy in Dnipro who was allegedly killed after he picked up a piece of ordnance that exploded when he brought it home. “Surrender for us is unacceptable,” Azov lieutenant Illia Samoilenko said. Even in Mariupol, one of the cities hardest hit by the Russian invasion, there emerged some semblance of hope, as the last civilians sheltering at the embattled Azovstal steel plant were finally evacuated.īut the Ukrainian soldiers who remained at the plant held a press conference via Zoom, expressing desperation and a fear of imminent death, unless there is some sort of drastic military intervention soon. While it would be a mistake to characterize these scenes as a return to some sort of pre-war normalcy, taken together, they have shown that life can go on amid so much death and destruction. The Ukraine Conflict Is Not About American Freedom Just below ground, at the Khreshchatyk Metro Station, which has doubled as a bomb shelter since the recent invasion, Bono and The Edge of U2 performed an impromptu concert.
Short lines formed at Khreshchatyk’s ubiquitous coffee kiosks. On one bench, a father and mother sat with a small child, each eating ice cream cones. People were out strolling on Khreshchatyk, shopping, and sitting on benches in the shade.
Still, the mood in Kyiv seemed defiantly optimistic, even as intense fighting raged in the east and Russian rockets bombarded the seaside city of Odessa in the south.
Men in camouflage gear holding rifles and carrying hard ballistic helmets were rarely out of eyesight along Khreshchatyk Street, the city’s main drag. In Kyiv, there was a strict 10 pm curfew in place, and mayor Vitaly Klitschko had banned mass gatherings in the days leading up to the holiday, while increasing the amount of military and police patrols. There had been concern for weeks that Russian President Vladimir Putin would use the holiday to announce an escalation of the war.
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