The world fixates its attention on Ukraine as Putin draws its troops near, but do people in Kyiv really live in fear of an invasion? LRT.lt reports from the Ukrainian capital.
“You drink coffee and suddenly remember – what if there’s a war,” says Yuliya, a 21-year-old standing outside a restaurant in a trendy area of Kyiv. “This talk of war has been going on for already a month.”
“My family said if the war happens, they will send me away, and they will fight,” says Katya, her friend. She adds that a friend has already left Ukraine because of the fear.
In the past weeks, Russia has drawn over 100,000 troops to Ukraine’s borders, grabbing headlines across the world. In the flurry of political statements, the voice of the Ukrainians themselves have often been sidelined.
“It’s all about the newspapers and TV [and] the constant hysteria,” says Oleg Ulanov, a university student and a junior lieutenant in the military. “As you can see, nobody in Kyiv panics.”
“But people are talking all the time,” adds his friend Olga Polishchuk. “There are a lot of rumours, about people who know someone who works somewhere and knows something. And this spreads.”
Meanwhile, the city itself drowns in daily mundanity. Former industrial buildings transformed into flashy burger restaurants intertwine with remnants of unchecked construction booms, often surrounded by glaring poverty. Occasionally, a uniform flashes in the crowd, reminding of the still ongoing war in Donbass hundreds of kilometres away.
It is exactly there that the residents had to experience what shellings and gun battles do to a city. There, they really had to hide in shelters, with 21st century combat being an all-too-recent memory amid an ongoing, eight-year war of attrition.
“People who have left [Donbass] say we have already lived through it, we will live through it again,” says Ela, a 20-year-old who fled to Kyiv from Luhansk when she was just 12. “It’s still in my head, like where all the documents are,” she says. “I think even the youngest kid [from Donbass] will know where the family keeps the papers.”
Kyiv bunkering down?
Last April, during the last bout of Russian escalation, Kyiv authorities published a map of bomb shelters in the city.
One such place is Laska, a charity shop and cafe in central Kyiv, offering Club Mattes and craft coffee, once you climb down multiple reinforced archways and meandering stairs.
“In a civilised world, no one would think that we would have to use a bomb shelter,” says Valya Polishuk, barista at the cafe, palpably surprised to hear that her workplace is designated as a bomb shelter.
Numbering in the hundreds, many such shelters are found in private properties, with the owners often ignorant of their property’s significance.
Other shelters are located in what has become strip clubs during the rush of the post-independence privatisation. One of which, in central Kyiv, is marked as a ‘restaurant’ on the bomb shelter map. Outside, the owners have placed a sign, informing where to find the key in case the place is closed at the time of need.
Crucially, it is Kyiv's deep metro network that has been reactivated to serve its other purpose envisioned at the time of the Cold War – to shelter thousands of residents.
“All metro underground stations in Kyiv, 46 of them, are designated as bomb shelters,” says Oksana Nikiforuk from the Kyiv Metro company.
Arsenalna, located 105 metres underground, is the world’s deepest metro station.
Thick metal gates are positioned at the entrance. At the height of the nuclear scare during the Cold War, residents were given 20 minutes to enter before the doors would be sealed.
WIth no food or water supplies, people would be accommodated for up to 48 hours.
Panic as a pressure tool
False statements in the media alleging that Ukraine is living in constant fear are usually clickbait or outright Kremlin’s psychological pressure, according to InformNapalm.
“We are now the cyber proving grounds of Russia,” says Mykhail Mararuk, the spokesperson for the organisation, which gathers open-source data to expose Russian military fighting in the Donbass as well as other tools of Kremlin’s aggression against the country. Many of their members are from occupied Crimea.
The very panic in the society “is our enemy”, he says, adding that the media play a large part in the game.
“We don’t think the West can help us. We saw it,” he says. “Society has seen that the only friends we have are Great Britain, little Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland.”
London has sent hundreds of modern anti-tank weapons, while the Baltic states chimed in by getting authorisation from Washington to hand over Stinger and Javelin missiles.
Western officials have also warned of covert Russian forces being pre-positioned in Ukraine to sow unrest. In January, Ukrainian law enforcement detained a group of people suspected of planning to cause riots in Kyiv and other cities, with Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskiy saying some 5,000 people were supposed to take part.
“Russian activists can [...] make a pro-Russian revolution, but we are not sleeping,” says Makaruk. “We collect information about them, because [unrest] can happen and we must destroy this [possibility].”
“Maidan included only 5 percent of Ukraine’s population, so this active opposition can make a big impact over the country,” he adds.
Preventing collapse
Aiming to mitigate the rising anxiety, voices of Ukraine’s top politicians have also grown louder in recent days. On January 25, President Voldymyr Zelensky called on Ukrainians to protect “your brain from lies, your heart from panic”.
According to a Ukrainian expert Victor Andrusiv, the government is aiming to shield the Ukrainian economy from the effects of fear. If the economy implodes, the need for a “Russian invasion” would become redundant amid riots on the streets, he told Radio Free Europe.
However, Zelensky’s words have also caused backlash in the country, while NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg also defended the previous statements: “There is no sign this military buildup is slowing down. It continues. That's a fact; that's reality.”
Later, however, Washington backtracked somewhat, saying it would no longer use the word “imminent” to describe the potential for a Russian invasion of Ukraine, as it sends an unintended message.
“The Russian side [aims] to sow panic,” says Artem Khorunzhyi, spokesperson for the Veteran Hub organisation helping those who fought in the Donbass. To some extent it is working, he says, adding that some 500,000 people have fought in the war and are now joining up the reserves and other defence structures.
“We are making all possible preparations to face a full-scale aggression, but then you have to stop worrying about it,” says Khorunzhyi. “You should stop thinking about it, refreshing news websites constantly.”
“What preparations were possible have already been made,” he adds. “I am 40 years old, I still remember Chernobyl. We have never lived peacefully here.”
The fear wears you down
The constant talk of war carries its own risks.
“Sometimes when people speak, they add, ‘but anyway, maybe a war will happen tomorrow’,” says Myroslava Vasylkova, a psychologist who previously worked with the military before moving to a civilian practice.
Now, people are split between those who have succumbed to fear, those who chose to ignore what is happening on the other side of the border, and “those who look at things realistically”, according to Vasylkova.
“You need to have an answer to the question ‘what if’,” says Vasylkova. “When you know the answer, you can continue living your life.”
“This back and forth between ‘will there be a war’ and ‘will there be no war’ gives people stress,” she says. “This then leads to fear, which can be used against us.”
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